Hearing with ears of the heart!

Homily for 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (vigil)
5 September 2009 Year for Priests
St. Frances Cabrini Parish
Hoxie, Kansas

What is Jesus Christ asking you to do with your life? If I've asked this question once in our Archdiocese as vocation director, I've asked it a thousand times. What is Jesus Christ asking you to do with your life? I'm out in Hoxie this weekend hunting with my brothers and celebrating my dad's 60th birthday. I posted on my facebook late last night that I'm not much of a hunter, but that my brothers have not given up on me yet. Someone madea comment on my facebook that at least I was a good 'hunter of men.' The job I have been given in the Archdiocese is to 'hunt' so to speak for men to whom the Lord is speaking, for men whom the Lord is inviting from deep within to be his priests. So I use this question - what is Jesus Christ asking you to do with your life, as a way of trying to see which men have the ability to listen with the ears of their heart to the voice of Jesus. The answer I get to the question tells me a lot about the men of the Archdiocese whom I go out to meet for my job. 99.9% of guys tell me the same thing. I don't know. I don't know what Jesus Christ is asking me to do with my life. He has not appeared to me, or sent an angel. How am I supposed to know? God is too remote and mysterious for me to answer that question. And although they won't admit it openly, most guys like it that way. It gives us the illusion that we should do whatever we want, if God is not speaking to us.

Today's Gospel about the deaf and mute man provides another great opportunity for us to investigate how we are deaf and mute in our communications with the Lord. My first spiritual director told me once that in all of Jesus' healing stories, it has been the tradition of the Church to consider how we are more like the person being healed that we are unlike him or her. Through this Gospel story today, we have a chance to pray to God that through the celebration of these sacred mysteries tonight, we too might leave Church having been touched personally by Christ, and having been healed of our deafness to the voice of God.

Once a young man has told me that he has no idea what Jesus Christ is asking him to do with his life, my next question is to ask him if he has a way, short of demanding that Jesus Christ make a special cameo appearance or send an angel immediately, for finding out what Jesus Christ is asking him to do. If Jesus is not going to tell us in the ordinary way, in a way that makes sound waves that our ears can recognize, what He is asking us to do, then he is either a really poor communicator, or he just likes to see us have to guess at what he really wants. I wouldn't accuse Jesus of either of these things. Jesus may very well appear himself anytime he wants or send an angel to deliver his will to a person; that is his prerogative. But in the drama of human freedom, God loves our freedom so much so as to oftentimes put very good options, parallel options, if you will, in front of us, and then he loves to let us decide. It is making decisions between these seemingly equally good options in front of us that makes life exciting. Still, we know that somewhere in the mix of all these good options is the correct will of God for us, our destiny or our vocation, if you speak, that one thing that surpasses all the other things we are supposed to do with our lives. In order to find this one thing, this vocation, this way of completely emptying all the gifts we have been given by God to share, this pearl of great price for which we are to sell everything, God oftentimes requires that we learn to listen with the ears of our heart.

Listening with the ears of the heart is not like make-believe. In our culture today, when we can listen to so many things at once, the voice we hear from within, our conscience, or the tendencies we have from within toward truth and goodness and beauty and unity, sometimes can get drowned out. This inner voice that must be listened to with the heart can sometimes seem like the least real and the least important voice. When I can facebook, and blog, and twitter, and watch a youtube video and listen to itunes all at the same time on my laptop, it is impossible for me to listen to my interior voice as well, at least with any attention. That is why the great spiritual masters of our Church always advocate a space of silence if a person is going to have any interior or spiritual life at all. Nowhere is this more dramatic than if you have a chance to make a silent retreat. The longest I have gone is 8 days. And the first three days were like a living hell as I detached from all the noise. My spiritual dirctor even suggested we divest ourselves of books, let alone music and conversation. Nothing. Total silence. It is easy to hate at first. You feel worthless without your daily dose of input. But after the third day I realized something - there was still plenty of input, even though I had no books, no music and no conversation. There was still plenty of input, perhaps even more, not only in nature which seemed to speak more clearly each passing hour I was silent, but also the ears of the heart, the ears of contemplation, were activated. It was almost as if I was hearing more, not less, and not in a make-believe way, but in the way of being able to hear God speak to me, not from the outside, but from within.

We have largely failed as a Church to find a way to be silent, and to find ways to pray in our busy and noisy culture. It is hard for us to 'put out into the deep' spiritually if we fail to find a way to be silent, for we miss a different way of hearing. When there is too much noise, always noise, the voice of God, that distinct voice that desires precisely and personally what is truly good for us, gets lost. Even if Christ were to appear to us or send an angel, most of us would admit that it would be quite possible for us to miss him because of everything else we are listening to. It can even hard to pray while we are at Church, to activate the ears of the heart for one hour a week. To even have a chance to hear something from God Himself, many people today, including many priests, have tried to revive the idea of a weekly or daily holy hour, an hour when they completely get away from everything, and to simply be with Christ and with him alone, adoring him before the Blessed Sacrament. Oftentimes this holy hour is accompanied by spiritual reading or a rosary, but in its purest sense, a holy hour is meant for us to be still, and to listen with the ears of our heart. If you've ever tried it, you know how incredibly hard it is to just sit there for an hour. It is so hard to turn off the running list of things we have to do. It is so hard just to listen. The time goes by so much more slowly. It can be agonizing. But those who learn to pray in this most simple way find that rather than losing an hour, they have gained many hours by listening more precisely to that voice of God speaking within us, saving us from illusions, and asking us to bear fruit with our lives in a very specific way.

I'm not saying that if you try a holy hour, you will have an immediate answer to the question - what is Jesus Christ asking you to do with your life. God's will is mysterious, and always beyond us, as it should be, for in the end, we are people whose stories are so much more exciting and interesting when we walk by faith, and not by sight. As soon as we think we can capture God's will, we have settled for something less than God's will. We may never have a precise answer to the question - what is Jesus Christ asking me to do with my life. But as Pope Benedict XVI said during his visit to the United States in 2008, if we learn to be silent, and really learn how to pray, nobody will have to convince us from the outside that we must do what God is asking of us. If we really learn how to listen with the ears of our heart, no one will be able to talk us out of doing what God has put us on earth to do. +m