Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Listening in silence

Thursday, March 14, 2013

John 5:44
Jesus said to the church leaders, "How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?"

In his novel The Chosen, Chaim Potok writes of a rabbi who raises his son in silence. His son's brilliant, photographic mind threatens his capacity for compassion. In his own attempt to reverse this, his father speaks no praise, nor anything else, to his son for fifteen years, except within discussions of the sacred text of Talmud. The rabbi says, "A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks. It must learn to dominate the shell."

The shell, the body, the ego, the false self (call it any of several synonymous names), takes on deceptively attractive forms: "Even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark."

The rabbi remembers, "When my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. He did not read the story, he swallowed it, as one swallows food or water. There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind."

Like Jesus, this Brooklyn rabbi insisted that his son learn to hear the voice of God. He refused to drown it out with his own. The results of this seemingly cruel and unusual child-rearing method? His father says, "He suffered and learned to listen to the suffering of others. In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying."

Danny himself tells his friend, "You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it."

We have not listened enough in silence. We have listened too much to the faint praise of those around us. We speak that praise ourselves. God must weep at times, to hear our crackling and our static, when all we need to do is listen.

Unlike the rabbi, Lord, you do not control us, not our thoughts and not our actions. Not our words. We think and do and say what we will. I believe you are with us on all our rickety escape routes. When we settle on the far side of the sea, still you are there. At any instant in our lives, Lord, we can quiet down and listen. Put our ears to the ground and hear the thunder. Put our ears to the conch and hear the roaring waves. Put our ears to our heart, and hear the beating refrain: I love you, I love you, I love you.

Devotions Archive

Listening in silence

Thursday, March 14, 2013