Actually, Christmas is a time for listening. The Judeo-Christian tradition lays great emphasis on God being the One who speaks. The Book of Genesis speaks of the creative silence that existed in the beginning; a nothingness and a void in which God spoke and Creation came into being in a succession of stages. At each stage, the Creator retreats into silence, only to speak again and allow a new form to appear. Each one is an ‘improvement’ on the preceding one, a deepening in the quality of life at each stage. Creation fills in the space between divine silences. When he was almost done, he breathed a sigh of relief, and in that breath he infused into his last and most cherished artifact the fullness of his Spirit. It was an outpouring that marked a qualitative change in the emergence of Creation.
Human beings have the option to move out of that silence. If the first chapters of Genesis tell of God speaking, they also recount our failure to listen. This, much to our surprise, does not cause God to stop speaking. He keeps to the pattern of speech in enriching Creation with a newness at every stage. Each successive divine revelation through the prophets of the Old Testament is a deepening of God’s relationship with humankind. It reaches its fullness when, on that first Christmas night, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
If at the first Creation, humankind chose to move out of that silence, Christmas commemorates a return to that silence from which it emerged. In the first Creation, the disobedience, choosing not to listen — obedience derives from the Latin ob-audiere to listen — resulted in a loss of a sense of identity. It can only be recovered by ‘obedience’, a state of constant listening and paying attention.
There is a difference between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’. We hear another when we allow the sounds that are emitted from the speaker to be decoded by our brain and so help us understand. This is purely a left-brain activity but it brings with it the tendency to analyse and fit into a pattern familiar to us, what we hear. We then unwittingly superimpose our preconceived notions of the person on what we hear. We end up having heard them but totally oblivious of what may have been said beyond their words. We may have ‘heard’ but not ‘listened’. Hearing may often leave us insensitive to the other.
Listening on the other hand involves the use of the right brain, which allows us to experience holistically, what the other is saying. It allows us to be sensitive to what the other is saying beyond words. If the left brain generates images, it is the right brain that allows us to transcend them. Listening is transformative, because it demands that we ‘leave self behind’ in order to listen to the other. If we do not do so, relationships only become two egos jostling with each other for attention, opening the door to manipulation and control. In the Judeo-Christian context, Jesus was born at a time when, though familiar with the words of their scriptures and what their prophets had spoken, the people had, by and large only ‘heard’ and not ‘listened’. The call by prophets to have the law written in their hearts had been largely ignored. At Christmas, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
God was inviting us to once again learn to listen from within. It is an invitation to allow ourselves to be transformed from within and in so doing, transform everything around us.
When we truly ‘listen’ to the Word, we discover our identity in God; when we truly listen to another, we allow the other to find his own identity in God. The Sanskrit word, Namaste best sums up what it means to listen. ‘The God within me bows to the God within you.’ This is a recognition and resonance which takes place in silence. Listening as self-giving, thus becomes an act of love. Christmas is a time for giving. But while the tradition of giving is still the hallmark of our celebrations, it is often the veneer that masks the dense fibreboard of the self that supports it. We truly celebrate Christmas when we are able to share the gift of self with another. Listening in obedience to the Word frees us from our own pain, transforming not only our pain but also the pain of the other, whose pain we share.
The presents we gift each other at Christmas become a ‘sacrament’, a sign of the Reality that binds us in relationship with another. Having discarded the images we have of ourselves, we are more easily able to do the same to the other.
Discarding the prejudices and expectations we have of them, we see that differences need not be a source of division. The world will be a better place only if today, we hear the voice in the wilderness, beckoning us to listen, to eschew tinsel and be transformed by a renewed awareness of the silent presence of the Spirit of his Son, God-with-us and within-us.
-Christopher Mendonca
