(Originally published March 3, 2016)

Have you ever been in a meeting or even a conversation, and you are watching someone speak, and then you suddenly realize you are not hearing a word that is coming out of their mouth?  Perhaps you’re tuned in to something else, another place another time, anywhere else but where you physically happen to be in that moment.  How many times have you been engaged in something…tv watching, reading, texting, facebooking, etc.…and someone asks you a question, and then later when your attention may be a little bit more directed to the person speaking, the conversation that the two of you had comes up and you are told that you replied to something that you can’t even remember?  Well, it’s happened to me!  Both the daydreaming and the distracting circumstances that in effect prevent me from sometimes simply hearing, and many times really listening.  Sometimes it gets laughed off as early onset senility, but I’m not convinced that this is the only possible thing going on.

At a deeper level, there are situations wherein we are hearing what is being said to us, through words or actions, but we are not listening to what is really being said.  Within the framework of our cultural and personal structure of taking in information, we cast what is being said in a familiar ‘voice’ that sometimes can prevent the possibility of hearing something novel or new – something that could actually challenge us toward what may have initially been perceived as a threat, but if engaged and processed could actually enhance our lives and grant us a fuller experience of the world, others, ourselves, and relationships.  This inability to hear could be seen as a type of muteness, in that when we aren’t listening, we can’t really respond in a way that could make a difference. Unfortunately for everyone, we allow our egos to safeguard these voices of familiarity and in the way we take in information and even dialogue with each other.  We end up responding with sometimes rote indifference that portrays itself benignly, but in fact can have stubbornly destructive consequences.  Sometimes the response itself is muteness, i.e., giving a response that carries little dynamism and perhaps even less real meaning.  Not being able to listen ultimately means not being able to respond!

In the prophet Jeremiah today (JER 7: 23-28), we hear a bit of this in terms of God speaking to the Hebrew people: “Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people…Yet they have not obeyed me nor paid heed; they have stiffened their necks…”  They don’t want to hear the words, much less listen, which entails some type of engaging response.  In the Gospel (LK 11: 14-23), Luke points up the situation with even more intensity as he addresses the people’s response to his healing a mute person, within the context of ‘demons.’  In the story, we are told that the person healed was ‘mute’ on account of a demon.  Once healed, the bystanders accuse Jesus of healing the mute person by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons.  Jesus first lays out the inconsistency of a house divided against itself and how this will always result in collapse, and then asks the question, “If I, then, drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own people drive them out?”

I wonder who is mute in this story and who is possessed by demons?  Put another way, what is muteness and who or what are demons?   In one sense, I think demons could be the voices that prevent us from hearing and listening.  We do not have to look farther than right in front of us many times to see and hear the societal and cultural voices that speak to us and attempt to direct our lives in ways that could be described as ‘demonic.’  They are demonic in that we are, so to speak, possessed by the sway they hold over us.  And we sometimes protect these voices instead of listening for something else, something more, something new, something that can really connect us to each other in a way that will reveal the emptiness and lifelessness of the demonic voices that “stiffen our necks,” and then open up the possibility to “drive them out” of us!

The closing words of the gospel are:

“Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

I don’t look at these as words of condemnation, so much as really a statement of fact.  Anything demonic is seeking to divide, and can come at us in very convincing voices.  Some of these voices are all of the “-isms” that we hear about – consumerism, racism, elitism, etc.  This list is long.  How do we learn to listen to the voice of Love, the voice of Sharing, the voice of Inclusion, the voice of God?  When we learn how to do this, we are freed from being mute, i.e., we are then set free to listen and respond authentically and wholly to God and each other without feeling we have something to protect.  We will be able to rejoice at the healing that is offered to all of us when the demons are driven out!  There will not have to be finger-pointing and blame, because we will know it is a shared responsibility to cooperate with God and each other in driving out the demons, which, rather than a negative reaction, is in fact the opening up to God’s voice that is always speaking in the wonderful mystery of Creation.

Ephphatha, that is, “Be Opened!”

Peace,

Thomas