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Archbishop Anthony Fisher homily: To listen is to love

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Moses with the Tablets of the law. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

This is the edited text for the homily for Mass for the Thirty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 3 November 2024.

In 2015, tech-giant Microsoft set out to build the world’s quietest room for testing headphones, microphones and the like. After more than two years they had constructed a room of six layers of concrete and steel, sitting on vibration-damping springs. The floor is a grid of suspended cables, and the walls and ceilings lined with fibreglass wedges that absorb the faintest sound waves. Known technically as an ‘anechoic’ or echo-free chamber, the room registers a noise level of minus-20 decibels, as close as one can get to absolute zero of sound.

Occupants of the chamber hear sounds normally drowned out by the background hum of everyday life: the flapping of an eye lid, the deep bass of a heartbeat, even the blood coursing through their veins. As soon as people enter the room, they feel strange: their senses are disoriented, and anxiety or claustrophobia follows. Few can bear the deafening silence for more than a few minutes, for we are made for hearing…

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But as the great Christian apologist GK Chesterton observed that “there’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.” When it comes to hearing, soundwaves enter the ear canal, the eardrum vibrates, electrical signals course through the auditory nerve, and the brain registers sound. Hearing is something passive, mechanical, involuntary. Listening, on the other hand, is active, attentive, chosen. It requires effort. And it’s relational, engaging the messenger and discerning the message.

That can be challenging. Our world is a cacophony of noises and space for listening is hard to find. Competing voices vie for a hearing. We live in echo chambers of “my truth” and yours, of “truthish” messages and fake. There are too many words, and many are whims or weapons, impassioned but unenlightening. Truth can be as hard to find as sounds in an anechoic chamber.

In recent times, the Church has conducted a vast consultation of the People of God, in local, national and continental stages, in various syntheses and working documents, and in two month-long synodal assemblies of 350 bishops and lay leaders from around the world. “We began by listening,” the Synod members report in their Final Document, “careful to grasp in the many voices ‘what the Spirit is saying to the Churches’”, confessing past failures to listen, and ready to hear afresh the Gospel call to holiness. The word “listening” appears 58 times in the text, as it explores the who and to whom of ecclesial listening, the how and why and what. Discernment is not supposed to be a technique for pushing one’s agenda, nor picking from a smorgasbord of opinions, but a spiritual practice seeking divine wisdom and grounded in faith and freedom, prayer and trust, humility and surrender.

In today’s first reading (Dt 6:2-6), the people of Israel are on the cusp of entering the Promised Land. Moses won’t be joining them. Before they part, he reminds them of a few things. He recites the יִשְׂרָאֵל שְׁמַע (Shema Israel) which is often translated “Hear, O Israel”. It’s a lame translation, for to “shema” is to be seriously, indeed religiously attentive to what is being said, and ready to respond because of Who is talking.

Listening is demanding. But as Moses reminds the people, theirs is the only God, the only one deserving all devotion. Forget the gods of Egypt, of Canaan, the golden calves of culture and economy. That One God has made a rewarding covenant with them. Keeping the commandments is their end of the deal, so to speak. “Listen up, O Israel,” Moses says, “our God is the one and only, so love Him with all your heart and soul and strength… Listen up, O Israel, keeping the commandments will make you prosper and increase.”

In our Gospel (Mk 12:28-34), Jesus meets a teacher of that Mosaic Law. But as the ‘Gospel’ proverb goes, there’s None so deaf as those who will not hear. So instead of His usual preaching, storytelling or sign-language miracles, He uses legalese. The number one constitutional law is loving God with all you are. Its flipside or number two is loving neighbour and self for God’s sake. Three Ls—and the listening and law-abiding are for the loving.

But love has many counterfeits: abstractions, raw emotions, warm and fuzzies, banal, manipulative or unworthy loves. How are we to love truly and better? By listening with “the ear of our hearts”. In his just published encyclical, Dilexit Noson the human and divine love of the Sacred Heart—Pope Francis tells us we must pause in silence if we are to attend to the presence of Christ, the heart of the world. When we hear the heartbeat of Jesus resounding in the chambers of our heart and experience His love heard in ours, we are liberated, enlivened, delighted. We become what we love.

For more than 800 years members of the Order of Malta have sought to listen to the voice of God and follow that voice in witnessing to the faith and serving their lords the poor and sick. Today they nourish the spiritual lives of their members, run hospitaller projects for the needy in 120 countries, and defend the faith where they can. It is a good example of listening and loving with all our heart.

And so, as we celebrate the sacrament of divine love, we commit to “Listen up, O New Israel, for the Lord our God is one and three, and you shall love Him singularly, as worthy of all your love; yet love Him threely, with heart and soul and strength, just as He loves you with all He is, His sacred heart and holy soul, His broken body and precious blood, His humanity and divinity, all for you!

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