Dance with God.

Listening is the foundation to spirituality: listening to myself, to God, and to others. Paul Tillich said the first duty of love is to listen.

"Listening is spirituality" has become my mantra for the past four years as I worked toward completing my Master of Divinity. It seems that the great spiritual masters are less inclined to pontificate about what they know and are more interested in listening to the current that flows beneath the rhetoric of life. Jesus often retreated to the mountain so that he could be alone in the quiet and stillness of the night where he could breathe the cool air and listen to his soul and for the voice of God.

Have you ever wondered why we are inclined to chatter so much? Sometimes we treat God and others like we treat our popcorn; we microwave our communication to get immediate, instantaneous results.

M. Scott Peck said that an essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes. Bracketing is one of the first disciplines we learn in training to become spiritual directors. Bracketing is not easy and requires much practice; it is an ongoing process.

I wonder how often we are willing to set aside our prejudices, frames of references and desires so that we can be present, like Jesus, to the Speaker in the crisp mountain air and the stillness of the night? God is more that a bag of popcorn that we casually toss in the microwave, and so are our friends.

Peck goes on to say that this unification of speaker and listener is actually and extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Think about that, when we set aside our own prejudices and desires and step into the shoes of the speaker or THE Speaker we are unified with the other and God.

Peck continues, "Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other." Acceptance of the other. I question if my chatter and microwaved-Jesus-solutions is a lack of acceptance of what God may want to do. Is my reluctance to listen to God or to you a lack of acceptance? What about the times I will not listen to myself and bracket the noise from the world’s frame of reference so that I can listen to my soul? Peck goes on to say, "Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will fell less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again."

Hmmm. Listening is like dancing with God and one another? I guess grace is like saying, "May I have the next dance?"