"Speak, your servant is listening."

Paying attention to what is going on under the hood

A fellow priest, Jungian analyst, and acquaintance of mine whom I have admired for years, Pittman McGehee, tells a wonderful story about his conversion experience.  On his 30^th birthday, when he was a parish priest in Kansas City, parishioners and friends generously gifted him with a twenty-volume set of C.G. Jung’s The Collected Works. He had been fascinated by Jung’s psychology since seminary, where he read The Undiscovered Self.

Later that afternoon, Pittman had one of those synchronistic, seemingly mystical moments, when he opened a volume at random and was drawn to a passage that irrevocably changed the direction of his life.  It was from volume 11:

Are we to understand “the imitation of Christ” in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in its individual uniqueness? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his.^[1]

There is something sacred, mysterious, and wonder-full going on in every human being, and it is up to each of us to pay attention and respond to the unique promptings of the Divine in our lives.  

When you have a strange dream; or a work of art or music moves you in unexpected ways; or someone in your life, even a perfect stranger, says or does something that feels like a nudge from beyond; or a news story or event in nature brings everything else in your life to a grinding halt, because you simply must turn aside to notice and ponder in your heart – these are sacred phenomena that are entrusted to you; they’re not meant to be farmed out to others for an interpretation.

One way of thinking about Jesus’ life and teaching is that he was saying something like this. The Kingdom of God is within you, and the Holy Spirit will lead you into all truth.

Pittman says he understands our impulse to rely on religious authorities to tell us what we should believe about our souls, spiritual phenomena, and the meaning of our lives. Especially in our overly busy and time-crunched culture, there are many occasions when we need to rely on an authority to guide us. Some of us know very little about the working of cars, for example, so we seek reliable mechanics who will tell us what is going on under the hood. And in our ignorance, it’s easy to be exploited.

But in the spiritual life, we need to be careful about entrusting “what is going on under the hood” of our spiritual lives to self-appointed religious authorities.

One of the biblical readings appointed for today is the beloved story of the boy Samuel ministering under the temple priest, Eli. In words that might reflect our experience of some religious authorities today, the scripture says that “Eli’s eyesight had begun to grow dim, so that he could not see.”  And “The word of the Lord was rare in those days, visions were not widespread.”

By contrast, the boy Samuel lay down to sleep and experienced the Divine calling him by name, so he ran to the priest, Eli, who repeatedly sent the boy back to bed.  But the divine prompting was so persistent with Samuel, that Eli was not getting any sleep – time and again the boy was waking him. So, Eli finally told Samuel (with exasperation?), “Go lie down again, and if you hear the voice again, just say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’.”

“Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

Sometimes that’s all we need to do.  Welcome and pay attention to your own dreams and divine promptings. Cherish those “messages from beyond” that come in the form of experiences in nature, conversations with friends and strangers, encounters with art and music. And then, learn to live with the mystery and wonder of what you have experienced, rather than running to an authority to try to “figure out what it really means” prematurely. 

Jesus’ mother, Mary, is a good model. After experiencing angels and shepherds and tales of a fabulous star, Mary simply “cherished all these things and pondered them in her heart.” 

Maybe our mysterious experiences of holiness and the divine are not meant to be “figured out” or reduced to a concept or belief; maybe they arrive so that we will “cherish them and ponder them in our heart.” Our hearts will know what to do with these experiences, even if our minds are short-circuited by them. Maybe what these things “mean” will be revealed much later in life.

Or maybe not. Maybe these mysterious experiences will never be understood. But as we live with them – the perplexing dream, the touching conversation with a loved one or stranger, the evocative experience in nature, the moving work of art or music – these will continue to inform and guide us in ways beyond our understanding. If we let them.

There are many wonderful spiritual guides and theologians out there, people who honor the mystery of the divine and its promptings in ways that defy their theological training.  But ultimately, we are servants not to religious “authorities” but to our own deeper Self, and the most reliable spiritual authorities will not try to explain, as much as they will urge us to probe the mystery for ourselves. We are the ones who say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

How freeing it is to pay attention to our own dreams and other mysteries in our lives, allowing them to speak to us on their own mysterious terms, without our pressuring them to explain themselves. The former poet laureate, Billy Collins offers a wonderful image in his poem, “Introduction to Poetry”.  After urging others to approach a poem with a sense of openness, adventure, and imagination, allowing themselves to be changed by the experience, the poet laments, “But all they want to do / is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means.”

Our experiences of poignant promptings from loved ones and strangers, arresting works of art and music, awe-inspiring phenomena in nature, and even supposedly ordinary events that seem to reach out to us at odd times – all of these can be enlivening experiences from beyond that “lead us into all truth” as Jesus said. And what a mysterious and wonder-filled truth it is, re-enchanting our time-worn, meaning-obsessed, and over-busy lives with the same awareness that Jacob had upon waking from his dream, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

---

^[1] C.G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953-1979); p. 245.