In a world stuffed with options, opinions, and recommendation, the listening ear is likely one of the most necessary items we will supply each other. It’s an act of therapeutic and imaginative and prescient. For individuals of religion and their communities, the present of listening each to 1 one other and God presents people a path to non secular renewal and grants congregations a imaginative and prescient of their id. In a time when congregations are in steep decline and dealing with important uncertainty, studying to hear to 1 one other to discern God’s path for a religion group’s future simply may be one of the necessary acts a church can interact. It is because of this Rev. Chad Abbott and I wrote the ebook Incline Your Ear: Cultivating Spiritual Awakening in Congregations.
God is Nonetheless Talking
Rev. Abbott and I minister in a denomination (UCC) that believes “God continues to be talking.” The phrase is greater than a slogan or a denominational marketing campaign. It expresses the fact that God is rather more mysterious and far-reaching than we will perceive. Whereas the Bible continues to function the first supply of revelation for Christians, God continues to be being revealed to us on this world, in a tradition the traditional world couldn’t have imagined. As our good good friend Rev. Mike Mather is fond of claiming, “God didn’t cease talking simply because the ebook went to press.”
Pay attention with the Ear of the Coronary heart
If God continues to be talking, we have to discover a technique to hear deeply, to “hear with the ears of our coronary heart,” as Saint Benedict of Nursia has mentioned.
Benedict’s notion of listening with greater than our ears is vital. Whereas fashionable drugs views the center primarily as a significant organ within the physique, the center as metaphor carries even better weight. Phrases similar to “take coronary heart” and “communicate from the center,” studying one thing “by coronary heart,” and having a “heart-to-heart” dialog all level to the understanding that the center is the seat of the feelings. In historical Egypt, individuals believed that the human soul was made up of many various components of the physique, however the important thing to the soul and to the afterlife was the center, for it was the seat of emotion, will, and intention.
The guts is a metaphor for our deepest passions, our eager for group and belonging, notably with the Divine. With the center as such a robust metaphor in our understanding of group and belonging, Benedict was proper to induce us to hear with the ears of our coronary heart.
In upcoming weblog posts, we might be sharing extra excerpts from our ebook Incline Your Ear: Cultivating Spiritual Awakening in Congregations from Fortress Press about how congregations can take heed to God .
