Ears to Hear (Mystagogy, Part 2)

One of the most frequent refrains in the New Testament are the words: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” On the surface, this may sound to us like an unnecessary and obvious command. What else do ears do but hear, after all? We take for granted that our ears hear, but take a moment and listen. Now listen for the sounds that you had previously filtered out, perhaps the sound of an air conditioner or fan, the sound of people or birds outside, the sound of the refrigerator condenser or dishwasher. Did those sounds begin to exist when you heard them, or did you begin to attend to them with your ears? If you had not done so, would your life have been different?

With something like the sound of an oscillating fan a room away, the answer is probably ‘not very much.’ There are sounds that, by habit, we filter out because somewhere else within us we designate them as unimportant. Other sounds capture our attention immediately, of course. I can detect the sound of my daughter calling for me in a crowd of noisy kids on a playground. I am biologically ordered and practiced in caring about her wellbeing, and I have a lot of experience responding to her voice. There are times our filtering out of sound serves us well, helping us focus on what is near, what is our duty to respond to. It matters very much that my ears hear what is mine to hear, and that I respond immediately.

There is such a thing, too, as something that is important to hear, but to which we either cannot or will not listen. When I was a classroom teacher, this was a common occurrence. A light example of this would be when I had just concluded explaining a homework assignment due the next day, only to have a student raise a hand and ask whether they had homework. A heavier example might be a time when we are sitting with a friend who is telling us about difficult recent events in their life, say the loss of a parent and an unexpected fender bender driving home from work. Perhaps we express our condolences, but then spend most of our breath talking about a great collision repair shop we’ve used in the past. In this case we would have heard them, but not heard them. We got the words, but missed the meaning, evidenced by our misaligned response to a grieving friend.

It is a spiritual discipline to hear what is essential in the midst of many sounds. Our faculty of hearing is not an end in itself. We are given ears to hear, but hearing must give way to listening, discerning, and knowing. When our Lord admonishes His listeners with the words, he who has ears to hear let him hear, it is to signal that it is very possible not to hear with even functioning ears. He draws attention to something we might otherwise take for granted in order to reorient the end of our hearing beyond the mere intake of sound. This had been a long-term problem for His people. As the Lord said to the prophet Ezekiel: “Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see, but do not see, who have ears to hear, but hear not, for they are a rebellious house.” Or, as the prophet Jeremiah wrote: “Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not.” Or again: “Behold, their ears are uncircumcised, they cannot listen; behold, the word of the Lord is to them an object of scorn; they take no pleasure in it.”

There is a significant shift, though, when Christ begins to call people to hear again. In several healing miracles, He opens the ears of the deaf to restore their hearing. Even so, after many of His teachings, He continues to admonish those with ears to hear as though they do not. Why? Our Lord reveals the reason in explaining the Parable of the Sower to His disciples: “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” There is a capacity beyond the faculty of mere hearing that must be restored before one can hear in the way Christ calls them to hear.

That capacity is bestowed by the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. It is why our Lord’s phrasing changes the next time we hear Him, this time in the letters to the seven churches at the outset of Revelation. There, He now says, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” It is the Holy Spirit who mediates between our ability to hear and the capacity to hear and receive, discern, and know the voice of God. It is God the Son, the Word with God in the beginning, we are made able to hear. It is in the church, the fellowship of Christ’s Body, that the Word speaks and by the Spirit we hear. Our participation in the church is, among other things, a formation in this spiritual work of hearing, of knowing God’s voice that speaks peace among the many voices and their noise. In the Liturgy, our hearing is educated and employed in the service of worship. I’d like to focus on a couple of those liturgical moments here.

Even after a brief season of participation in the Liturgy, we can observe the smallest child responding to what they hear. The Mass forges the link between hearing and doing. Recently, I have been spending time with the children of our parish who are preparing for Confirmation. Part of their catechesis is a deeper instruction in the Liturgy and experiencing the worship as more active participants. It has been illuminating to watch as they have acclimated to the movements of the Liturgy, mainly by watching me and the other adults. When the first notes of the processional hymn sound out, and many in the room rise, the children recognize the connection between what they are hearing and what they are to do. When the Lord’s song is sung, they move to stand and join it. They may not understand every word in the hymn (like many of the adults!). In time, they will come to understand why the occasion of worship is met by the action of rising up, but in this formative stage, they are learning a much deeper truth that there is such a thing as a song that ought to move us to our feet, that when our people move in the direction of worship, it should move us as well, that when the banner of Christ’s Cross approaches, we should expect triumphant song.

Or consider later in the Liturgy, during the movement called the anaphora or ‘the carrying up.’ We begin with the call-and-response called the sursum corda, during which we “lift up our hearts unto the Lord” in the great work of thanksgiving. This motion of the anaphora crescendos in the singing of the sanctus, during which we hear the angelic hymn: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God of Hosts! Heaven and Earth are full of Thy Glory!” As the prophet Isaiah recorded his own vision of the heavenly temple before the throne of God, so we become participants in the worship of heaven, invited to sing the song of the angels. The music, however, is not just an homage to a moment of Sacred Scripture. Rather, it is the audible, sacramental sign of where we are. As the congregation of Christ’s Church, having lifted our hearts unto the Lord, we have ascended with and in Christ through the Spirit to the heavenly places where He is enthroned. With our ears, we hear the voices of our congregation singing the song. In the Spirit, we are made to hear the voice of the saints and angels praising God. If we only hear the one, it is because our hearing is still being made whole. As there is light we cannot see, there is often music we cannot hear, but that does not make it a whit less real or beautiful. The Liturgy unveils reality and trains our response to it. But the lesson of the Liturgy is that even when we are not kneeling in our parish, heaven and earth are still full of the glory of God and the music of His praise still resounds.

Our formation in the spiritual life teaches us that there are more and more important things to hear than we are inclined to settle for, left to ourselves. “Where will the Word abound, and where will the Word resound?” asks T.S. Eliot’s speaker in Ash Wednesday. “Not here,” comes the answer, “there is not enough silence.” We are given to noise and are surprised when we cannot hear what is most important. The Liturgy leads us away from the noise to reintroduce us to the appreciable presence of sound when it arises. Yet sound is transfigured into formal, beautiful speech and finally beatified in music. The Liturgy is an ascension for our hearing; by it we are led to hear with our ears what is real and true, and so returned more apt and capable to listen for those real things as we sojourn in the world and its noise. This transformation keeps us confidently in the knowledge that the Kingdom in our midst does not participate in the din of the chaotic world, but rather declares the Gospel with a peaceful music. As even the pagan Cicero noted in his Dream of Scipio, when we move beyond the busyness of the world even for a minute, we can hear the music of the spheres, the harmony of a world made orderly and reasonably. Yet, as the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy came to know, that music is the song of the choir of the highest heaven resounding through all of its outer courts, God Himself being the composer and conductor.