LISTENING

I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't listen very well. I have this ability to turn off the sound. Not all the time, mind you, but often enough I am deaf to what others are saying, especially what my wife is saying. It's not that I've heard it all before or I think my wife has nothing to say. (I may be dense, but I am not that foolish!) It's not that I think what another has to say is not worth listening to. It is simply that sometimes I shut off the sound and retreat into my own little world.

Then there are the times when I am listening with only one ear as it were. I hear what is being said, hear the words, the sounds, but I am not really listening. The words seem to go in one ear and out the other. My thoughts at that moment are, for some reason, somewhere else. I also do this with my wife. As you might suspect, I am often in deep trouble with my wife.

Listening is an art. It does not come naturally, at least not to me. I think we have to learn how to listen. That is not to say that there is some trick to it. Rather, we must be prepared to listen. There are those who say they can listen to someone while doing something else. I'm not sure I believe that because I know I cannot. I've tried it often enough - with my wife, of course – to know that I am an abject failure. When it comes to listening, I can’t multi-task.

There are a couple of reasons why we need to listen to others. The first reason is common courtesy. When others speak to us, we need to give them our full attention. Even if we think the other person has nothing to tell us, we need to listen. The truth is, as we have all discovered, is that we have learned more from some of the unlikeliest people than we have from those we considered founts of wisdom.

Another reason to listen is that the person talking to us has a need to talk to us. Why they have that need is sometimes not obvious. We may simply be the closest ear. But they have that need and we need to be open to them. There are many times when I have simply been the ear. Complaints were being aired because they needed to be aired. The one complaining did not expect me to resolve the issue. He or she simply needed a sounding board.

Another reason we need to listen (or learn how to listen better) and that is that a universal truth holds for all of us: we do not have all the answers. No one does. We do not know all that we need to know. And because experience is a universal teacher, the lessons others learn can be helpful to us, if we would only listen. We can always learn something, often, again, from those we least expect.  I wonder how much knowledge I have missed obtaining because I was not listening.

Maybe I am an exception. Maybe most people are good listeners. Maybe I simply needed to remind myself that if I am to truly live out my faith, if I want to be the person God wants me to be and who I want to be, I have to be able to listen to others who may be speaking God's word to me.

THE PROBLEM OF GOOD

The problem of good? What problem, you ask? We're all familiar with the Problem of Evil and we all have a problem with it, from the greatest atheist to the greatest theist. Even if we can explain evil, understand evil, know evil's insides and out, we still have to live with it and, thus, deal with it. It is in this dealing with, coping with, enduring and trying to overcome evil that causes every human being difficulties no matter what we believe or do not believe.

The truth is that the problem we have with evil is the same problem we have with good. It truly is the same problem, but we often to fail to see it that way. It is easy to see the problem we have with evil, especially we believers. It is that age-old question that has no satisfactory answer, at least not for believers: If God is all-good, where does evil come from? To put it another way: Why does God permit evil when God the all-powerful can prevent it?

The answer we give is always the same: free will. Because God created us with free will - and only God knows why God did - we are now free to do good or to do bad. And we often do bad, deliberately, with malice aforethought. Now that may be a satisfactory response to the "why" of the problem of human evil. It does nothing, or very little, to give a satisfactory answer to the "why" of natural evil like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods or to that fact-of-life of simply being in the wrong place and the wrong time. The truth is we will never understand evil fully, not in this life, no matter how hard we try, especially when we try to explain the evil we ourselves do.

Yet, what evil always seems to boil down to is that it is a God-problem. God must ultimately be held responsible for natural evils because that is the way God created this universe and God must also be at least be held as an accomplice to deliberate human evil because God created we human beings with the ability and the freedom to do evil, to be selfish and bad.

That being said (and probably also being debated: is he, meaning me, right about that or is he a heretic?), what goes unsaid is that we humans, while trying to foist at least a little of the responsibility and the guilt for human evil upon God's shoulders, so often give God little or no credit for the good we do. That is the Problem of Good. We are so often tempted to take all the credit for the good we do and take as little blame as we can for the bad we do.

We can't have it both ways. Either we give God the credit for creating us good with the ability to do bad or we take all the responsibilities for all the good and all the bad that we cause or do. I will grant that I may be making a mountain out of a molehill here. We usually do give God some of the credit and thanks for the good we do and the good done to and for us. My point is that we need to become a little more aware that doing good may come naturally simply because of the way God created us; but because we are prone to also be selfish, doing good is the result, and only the result, of the grace of God. And thanks be to God for that.

JUST BECAUSE IT'S FREE DOESN'T MEAN IT'S FRIVOLOUS

I remember that old Smith Barney (I think it was) commercial where John Houseman (I think he was the actor) used to opine that whatever Smith Barney did they did it the old fashioned way: they earned it. Nothing frivolous about Smith Barney. No freebees with them. If it is free, it really is not worth anything. We get what we pay for -- and all the rest of those sage bits of wisdom we were raised on.

For the most part those words of wisdom are true perhaps because we make them true and have learned from experience that, in fact, there is much wisdom and truth in them. The old saw among clergy is that a parish in debt is a parish alive. If there are no real money worries, the people tend to become lax. That is not always or even for the most part true, but we tend to believe it anyway, maybe because most churches always seem to have money problems. Or, if for instance, we are given a free ticket to some event, even an event with a hard-to-get ticket, we are prone to not take that event as seriously as the one we paid full price for and had to scratch and claw just to get in line to be able to purchase that ticket.

The real truth, of course, is that the most important possessions we have as far as our faith is concerned are free gifts. We did nothing, absolutely nothing, to earn them -- like life itself, like the grace of God, like forgiveness of sins, like eternal life-in-death. Yet because they are free, we often deem them frivolous in that we truly do not appreciate them for what they are nor make use of them as we should nor believe them to be as real as they are.

It is not that we take them for granted. Would that we would. We would be better off if we did. We would be more content with life and be better able to deal with the trials and tribulations that come our way.

Rather, instead of assuming that God always forgives us and living a life of The Forgiven, we sometimes cannot understand how God or anyone else could ever forgive us for something we just said or did. Instead of assuming that God's grace will always be enough, we sometimes act as if the situation is hopeless and we are helpless. Instead of believing that the bad can be redeemed, we give up hope., and so on and on and on.

The free gifts of God are simply that: free. But that is not what is important. What is important is not that we did anything to deserve or earn them. What is important is that they are gifts of God. Because of that, they can never be frivolous, or undervalued. In fact, we cannot put a price on any of them. They should be so valuable that we treasure them as we would treasure the most priceless material possession we might wish to possess.

From a human point of view, which is the only view we have, perhaps because these God-given gifts cannot be grasped like we can grab hold of the world's most valuable diamond or cannot be earned by the sweat of our brow, we often fail to realize just how valuable they are. We do so at our own loss.

A FALSE, SILLY OR SUPERFICIAL FAITH IS BETTER THAN NO FAITH AT ALL

Believers believe. Believers don't know. Believers would like to know but can live with not knowing. That is not to say that believers are stupid or foolish or are prime candidates to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. It is simply to say that believing is better than not believing; having faith, even a weak faith, is better than having no faith at all.

People of faith, for example, believe that there is life in death, that resurrection to eternal life takes place when we die in this life. Believers have absolutely no idea what heaven is like, none whatsoever and are okay with that. If any believer says that she or he does, offer to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge and check her off your list of people to talk to when having doubts.

However, all believers, we, you and I, have some vision of what heaven, eternal life, is like. We try to imagine what it means to be raised up in death, to live forever, to be able to see God "face to face." We know, know, we will be totally surprised by what we will indeed experience in death, that our present vision will pale with what we will experience.

But we can live with both not knowing what eternal life is all about and knowing that we are in for the surprise of our lives. For in the final analysis having a false, silly or superficial vision of heaven is better than having no vision at all.

Some would object, of course, especially those who do not believe. But that's all right. That is their problem, their problem. But, in a very real way, it is also our problem. We believers have an obligation to share our belief with unbelievers. But the essence of our faith is resurrection in death to eternal life. How do we convey what we believe to another when we have no way of describing what we believe except to echo Paul and say that our minds can neither imagine it nor explain it?

What we do is try even as we fail; and fail we will. We will never be able to give more than a silly or superficial vision of heaven and the one or ones we do give will, of course, always be false. But it is not our inability to explain the unexplainable that is the issue. What is is that we have enough faith to defend the unexplainable and do it not by words but by deeds. We explain our faith in eternal life by living out our faith as fully as we can in this life.

What keeps us going is our willingness to accept that our vision of life in death, no matter how silly, superficial or false, is better than no vision at all. That vision encourages us when we doubt and fills us to overflowing when we are at the top of our faith. That vision is also what encourages those who do not believe whether we believe it or not.

If we have any doubts, consider Paul who taught his faith by living his faith and not by explaining it. Yes, he tried. But in the end he knew that the only proof of what he taught and believed was the life he lived. That was enough for him and that, in the end, is enough for us.

RIDING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT

It is probably safe to say that 99% of the time that I am in a car I am doing the driving. It is not that I do not trust anyone else to do the driving for me. My wife is a better driver than I am. It is not a macho thing either. I do not have a need to be in control. It is simply the fact that most of the time when I am in a car, I am driving. Now that we are down to one car because we now have found no need to have two, we share the driving; but I still do most of it.

On those rare occasions when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I rediscover the truth that I miss most of what I would have seen had I not been driving. I see things that I never saw before even though I have passed them hundreds of times. That is as it should be. If I were to look around while driving to see all those sights I see when I am sitting in the passenger seat, I would not have a driver's license. I might not even be alive to ponder such thoughts. 

The truth of the matter, however, is that I need to leave the driving to someone else more often than I do, literally and figuratively. I suspect we all do. It is so easy, all too easy, to get tunnel vision, to see everything from one perspective. When we become so myopic, we also so easily insist that what we see is really the truth, the whole of reality. But the truth is that we don't know the half of it because we have seen or experienced even less than that.

But the only way that we can see from another perspective is to deliberately take another seat. It is truthfully said that we cannot know how another sees life until we walk in that other person's shoes and walk in them for quite a few miles. So, too, the only way we can get another view of the reality that is our life is to be willing to deliberately take a look from another perspective. Doing so may not make us change our mind, nor does it have to because our view may be the correct one; but at least we have something to which we can compare our original beliefs.

That is not to say that what we believe is wrong. It is simply to say that, as someone else has observed, the unexamined life is really not a life worth living. The examined life presumes that we change seats every once in a while and that we change them intentionally and willingly. Those are the operative words intentionally and willingly.  It must be our choice to change seats, if you will. When we are forced to do anything, our first reaction is to resist and resist mightily. If someone forces us to examine our faith by pushing his beliefs on us, we tend to instantly close our minds to what we hear and defend our beliefs with all that we have.

But examine our life and our faith we must if only to allow ourselves to grow in that faith. Faith, like life, is never static. It either grows or it dies. It does not remain the same because faith, like life, is a living reality. Growing in our faith is akin to intentionally asking my spouse to take the wheel so that I can see some of what I have been missing when I have been in the driver's seat. We need to take a ride in the passenger seat of faith -- often.  Move over and see what you’ve been missing!