Listen! – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
Some of my friends will talk about their favorite stories or even verses from the Bible. I never really have a favorite, the Song of Songs often comes to mind for the lyrical beauty of the verse, or there’s the Exodus story that captured my imagination as a child, aided by the powerful 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt. At one point I joked it was the final line in the Book of Revelation merely for it just being the very end of the Scripture. A decade ago, in my New Testament Greek class at Rockhurst I wrote an essay on the original Koine Greek text from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus tells the people that the greatest commandment is to “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” (quoting here from the English translation that I grew up with the New American Bible approved by the US Council of Catholic Bishops).
These days my own vision of my faith tends to reflect that same line from Luke’s Gospel, yet just as often I keep returning to a story of the Prophet Elijah waiting on the slopes of Mount Horeb to hear a message of Divine inspiration. In succession he feels a “strong, rushing wind” followed by an earthquake, and then a roaring fire. After all of these Elijah heard “a tiny whispering sound,” which he recognized as God’s presence. In all the cacophony of our world and the proclamations of truth with such a clamor that the voice grows hoarse, and the ears ache we often forget the simple beauty of just sitting and listening to nature, to ourselves, and to each other.
In my own experiences, one of the great messages I’ve felt has been “Listen!” uttered in an exclamatory yet soft voice. Nothing more than that, just “Listen!” It’s something that I try to do better today than I have in the past, and going into this new job teaching 10-14 year olds history and geography at one of the local Catholic schools, I am reminded more and more of the need to not only impart what I know about my subjects to my students but to cherish them, and demonstrate my care for them and their needs by listening to them and paying attention to what they need to succeed in my classroom. They will not grow as people if they aren’t given that attention and care by the people responsible for helping them along their way to adulthood.
I don’t remember as much as I’d like from my own middle school years, I’ve been trying to dredge up more of those memories as my work shifts from my home office to my classroom, to better judge my own actions and decisions based on what I loved that my middle school teachers did and on those things that I wish they’d have done better. In my university teaching I’ve endeavored to speak to each student in their own way, to reach them personally and ensure that they are thriving in my classes. My own university memories are far fresher, and continue to be written in fact, which makes that adaptation of the lessons that I was taught far easier. Here though, it’s been nearly 20 years since I started middle school, and so these students who I am now meeting have far less in common with me than I do with my 18 to 22 year old university students.
In my life to date I have often had to adjust my speech and style to be understood by the people around me. These have gone from more drastic shifts like speaking an entirely different language when I’m traveling to more subtle changes in adopting the words being used for one thing or another by the people I’m speaking with. I’m quite conscious of my own speech thanks in large part to my fascination with language and all its intricacies.
One thing that still troubles me in English, my first language, is reading strings of letters aloud using the letter names rather than just pronouncing words. This is especially troublesome when I have to read my email address to someone over the phone. 99% of the time the person on the other end of the line misses half of the letters in my email address, leading me to prefer to use the NATO phonetic alphabet in this instance, yet for some people that doesn’t help in the slightest. Using the same vowel sound in the names of most of our letters the “ee” as I’d write it phonetically in English just doesn’t help. For one thing, we use that letter “e” yet when that letter is spoken in a regular word it rarely is pronounced “e.” So, as much as I try to ease communication with the people around me, I feel let down by the very language I speak.
In a more general fashion though we tend to not fully listen to each other for all the things each of us have to think and worry about on a given day. I get it too; I’ve got three jobs right now and a dissertation near finished. Yet I know how wonderful it feels when the people around me listen to me, so why would I not extend that same joy to the people who I’m with on a daily basis? One of my favorite aspects of that film The Prince of Egypt is that when Moses hears God’s voice in the burning bush the voice he hears is a variation on his own voice played by the actor Val Kilmer. We ought to listen to one another because that’ll give us enough pause to listen in general. There is so much there for us to hear.
And I dearly hope that we can grow out of what Carl Sagan called “our adolescence as a species,” as humans. Deep down, I do believe a lot of the problems and cataclysms we seem to be marching lock-step towards would be avoided if we just stopped and listened to each other.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 