Learning to Listen

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

This poem, written by Mary Oliver, embodies for me the genesis of The Path Discipleship Process; a response to an observation that we as Christian people have become so comfortable in the absence of God’s unexpected noise rising in our midst that we have simply stopped seeking its direction in our lives. In the corporate life of most mainline congregations, listening for the voice of God has become little more than an annoyance on a list of agenda items at a committee meeting. It’s as if we took a vote with the majority ruling to excuse Gods presence on account of its necessity, “Surely after all these years together, God, we know how you’d vote.”

If the Disciple Bible Study curriculum is like an Ansel Adams photograph, then it’s probably accurate to place The Path Discipleship Process in the realm of a Rothko abstract art piece. It’s weird. Another hippie-dippy, lovey-dovey thing that weird Associate cooked up.

I was going to add in here that The Path is so unusual and out of the box that I really couldn’t believe we had 32 participants involved in the Winter session but after months of listening to the crazy Associate go on and on about a how we need to start a church in a field with cows my guess is signing up for a three month discipleship process didn’t feel like such a risk. Note to self.

Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, said that “every human being comes to earth with sealed orders.” I believe this must apply to communities as well; a sealed order buried in the origins or our organization.  We can make assumptions about this purpose or go along with the purpose given to us by the voices around us but when we get it wrong on our own, which is a guarantee, a spiritual restlessness ensues and internal conflict arises.

Originally, my expectation was for The Path to function as a transformative process to aid in the discovery of these hidden orders. After the fall session concluded I realized the function of The Path was much simpler and more profound than I had anticipated. Participants that had begun The Path with motivations to be better, become more disciplined, or generally become less of anything they currently were, had been distracted by a clear, surprising whistle rising strong from the dusty guest rooms of our souls. The long listening facilitated in the Path process ended up clarifying less issues around vocation and more around issues of identity.

Issues of identity are nothing new. The intention of Isaiah’s message was to communicate an alternative and true identity of pervasive grace to a community, described in Isaiah 49:7 as “deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, a slave of the rulers.” Scripted in a storyline characterizing them as unworthy, Isaiah claims unequivocally that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, they are not the despised slaves of Babylon. They belong to no one but God. Isa 41-44 actually exists as a closely bound group of poems in which the prophet attempts to reshape the people’s self-understanding.

Then and now, the stories we are told define how we identify our role in it. For Isaiah’s audience the story written by a people defining them as ‘deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, slave of the rulers,’ had slowly become their own. Isaiah’s words are represent a new arrival in Oprah’s monthly book club; a new narrative clearing the pathway to listen for the stories unseen and to audition for characters yet cast. If listening is our access to understanding, then the stories we have access to hear create our understanding of who we are and who we aren’t.  The stories surrounding of our own casting today may be more in number but are nevertheless as damaging. We are how much we weigh, the size of our clothes, the numbers on our paycheck, the location of our address, the achievements of our children, the misfortunes of our parents. We are anything but are own and so experience a self-imposed inaccessibility to the Path of belonging to God.

In this world, in the overarching story we find ourselves asleep underneath, we are slaves to the “should’s.” Whether our “should’s” are socially imposed of self-inflicted they dominate the claim to our identity. Slowly we become the culmination of the things we ought to be but are not and those that we are but shouldn’t be. In this configuration, we cancel out all that we are and experience ourselves as being worth nothing.

 If Isaiah’s words contain the message of our true identity in Christ, the process of the Path seeks to overcome a cultural deafness to our spiritual reality and role in God’s salvific story contained in that message. I think we often overlook the voice of God because we expect the voice to feed the empty identity the world has placed upon us with an endless supply of “should’s”. Not only have we made the worlds story our own but we have made our story Gods. The challenge of our present liberation is not to find the message but to learn to listen for it with all of our lives.

At the end of the day it seems our greatest fear is not that God’s voice would scold the nature of our very beings but that in place of this expectation we would experience a grace that pushes us out into the world just as we are with no suggestion for improvement. Brene Brown writes that “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen….Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” If our identity belongs to the story of this world, the most fearful proposition is found in a God who expects nothing less from us than to show up just as we are.

The world has positioned us to value the sound of every language expect the only language God speaks; the language of grace. The purpose of the Path is to re-position us to not only listen but to expect nothing but grace. This may very well be the biggest clue in discerning between the story of the world and the story of Creation; the presence of grace.

In The Path, we only use pencil. To write down our spiritual practices. To list our commitment to service. This is one small way we exhibit our expectation of grace. In the presence of an eraser and the possibility to start anew. Experience is teaching us that once we find ourselves as characters in Gods story the words of the paper change.

One Path story that touched my heart deeply this Fall was of a woman whose service commitment had been to care for an elderly family member. When this family member passed away in the middle of our Fall Path Session she wrote this to her Path counterparts:

I'm so sad that I won't be able to be with all of you Sunday evening. I was really looking forward to hearing and sharing with you. I feel like I haven't done what I signed for in my covenant.

My path sure is different than I expected it would be when we started.  I'm thankful for your friendship and support and feel closer to each of you...You are in my thoughts and prayers.

I responded with these words;

Part of the purpose of the Path is noticing how God uses us regardless of the circumstances of our lives. I am so grateful to witness your care and compassion for loved ones transitioning into New Life. You are such a passionate advocate and a gifted caretaker. I would say you are living out exactly the call God has placed on your heart. With all my love, Pastor Stephanie

Parker Palmer suggests that, “Before we tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

We reside in a God whose presence we anxiously grasp for while simultaneously growing deaf to any Truth of whose we are because of the false identities we claim and the fictional stories we listen to. We need these stories of spiritual pilgrimage, the stories of the Path, to witness to God's presence in the world. These will be the stories in which we find the courage to overcome the fear of not being who the world tells us to be so that we can claim who we are and realize that which we have always been; God's beloved children, called to be a faithful servant in order to witness to God's grace and mercy.

Diana Butler Bass predicts that "as a new vision unfolds, small groups of people who understand the necessity of change begin to follow a new path; they experiment, create, and innovate with religious, economic, and family structures in a search for a new way of life. They develop new practices to give life meaning and make the world different. They embody the new vision and invite other to do the same as well." 

The Path is our invitation to begin to once again take notice of this God which resides in, around, and beyond us. To take note of the silence that surrounds us. And to prepare for the sounds will awaken our sleeping souls to this God who wails and whispers and whistles to the rhythm of our wandering.