Mass Readings Audio
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Second Sunday of Lent – February 28, 2021

Welcome to the one hundred and fifty-third episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

Listen to Him

In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the Second Sunday of Lent. (Year B) In episode 51 and episode 102 of By Your Life, we pondered the Transfiguration of Jesus and the importance of the words of God we heard again in this Sunday’s gospel, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” (Mk 9:7) Listen to him!

Listen by definition is “to give one’s attention to a sound,” but in this context, it figuratively means “to hear God’s voice which prompts God to birth faith within.” The Hebrew word means to “listen and to obey.” So, the command from on high to listen to him was not just to hear him, but to effect a change in us as a result of listening to him.

Listening Requires Silence

The one place I fail to be an effective listener more than any other is in prayer. It is easy to talk to God and lay out my petitions and supplications, but I struggle to listen. It is practically impossible for me to silence the voices in my head. It is no coincidence that an anagram of the word “listen” is “silent.” You must be silent to listen and that means not just silencing your mouth, but the voices in your head. This is a skill that begins with desire and is honed with practice. It is a process of focus, failure, and refocus. When these voices speak up, quiet them by bringing your attention back to the speaker.

St. Mother Teresa said, “I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks.” I guess the trick is to be able to recognize when the voice I hear is God in my heart instead of my own voice in my head. Perhaps the key to discerning the difference is love. I’m not sure who said it, but there is truth in the statement, “You don’t know how to love if you don’t know how to listen.”

Surrender to Silence

In Chapter 5 of Matthew Kelly’s book, “Rediscover the Saints.”, he shares how St. Teresa of Ávila taught him to pray. St. Teresa was a Carmelite nun, reformer, author, and mystic. In describing a mystic, Matthew Kelly wrote, “Mystics are people who have become totally united with God through prayer and self-surrender. He or she could often have mystical experiences that include visions or hearing the voice of God.” That sounds an awful lot like what Peter, James, and John experienced in the Transfiguration of Jesus.

But how do people become mystics and why are only a select few offered this gift? The answer is that maybe it’s not only offered to a select few. Maybe only a  few have offered themselves to God through prayer and self-surrender. Then it struck me: self-surrender is not only the key to more effective prayer, but self-surrender is also the key to more effective listening.

Listening Generously

In the book The Collaborative Way by Lloyd Fickett and Jason Fickett, the authors share a simple model to help people work together more effectively. One of the five core practices of The Collaborative Way® is “Listening Generously.” When we are listening generously we are:

• Giving our full attention to the speaker
• Curious and willing to be influenced
• Setting aside our prejudices, preconceived conclusions, and judgments
• Not waiting for an opening to argue our point or thinking of our rebuttal

How can you give your full attention to the speaker without self-surrender? How can you be willing to be influenced without self-surrender? How can you set aside prejudices, preconceived conclusions, and judgments without self-surrender? And how can you avoid waiting for an opening to argue or thinking of your rebuttal without self-surrender? You can’t! Without surrendering your distractions, your convictions, your prejudices, judgments, and pride, you cannot listen generously.

The Doorway to Learning

Listening is the doorway to learning. It may be a fact, or more often, another person’s perspective of the facts. Regardless, there is always something that can be learned by listening. The award-winning TV and radio show host, Larry King said, “I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So, if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.”

As a culture, we’re collectively failing when it comes to listening, except when it comes to those with whom we agree, then we’re all ears. We’ve created echo chambers where beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal and shielded from the possibility to learn. But, as Thomas Merton said, “Those who love their own noise, are impatient of everything else.”, we’ve become a culture that is intolerant of opposing views and impatient with the people who hold those views.

How do we battle the inclination to reinforce our preconceived notions and feed our egos through confirmation of our biases? By following how great leaders operate. Unlike insecure leaders who surround themselves with “yes men” who only tell them what they want to hear, great leaders will surround themselves with people who will challenge their thinking, who’ll bring different perspectives, and who aren’t afraid to speak because they know they’ll be listened to. When they face difficult challenges, they seek out alternative perspectives and listen generously to opposing views. Great leaders aren’t afraid to learn from others.

You can start by being curious. You will not be harmed by hearing another point of view. You don’t have to agree with another point of view. You don’t even have to come up with a response or rebuttal to another point of view. You just need to be curious and listen to understand it. When you do, you’ll have learned something.

Seeking a Higher Perspective

But always remember, whatever challenges you face at work, you shouldn’t only listen to those around you without also listening to the voice of God. “Listen to him.” (Mk 9:7)

I want to step back a minute to the first reading, where Abraham obediently listened to the voice of God to the point of willingness to sacrifice his only son, the one he loved (Gen 22:2), the one he was promised and waited with hope beyond hope for. If placed in Abraham’s shoes, most of us would not have listened to the voice of God and willingly gone along. Instead, most of us read this and think that Abraham’s actions were that of a criminal or madman. But we know that is not the point of the first reading. So, what is the point?

Bishop Barron said, “Whatever we love here below must be placed within the context of a higher love.” Nothing here below, no matter how good or how much we love it is equal to the highest good. Whatever we love here below must be loved for the sake of God. Contemplate this story and look long and hard at the ordering of your love. What is it that you love and that all your other loves are in relation to? Unless and until it is God, your loves are not properly ordered.

So, when we face our daily challenges and we seek input from others, we must always weigh their perspectives in the proper order and in the context of the highest good. Will this decision take me closer to or further away from the will God? The answer to that question can only be found by listening to him.

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us.

Come Holy Spirit, enter into our prayer. Help us to surrender ourselves, tune out our voices and tune into the voice of God. Help us to be still and allow our hearts and our minds to be open to you. Guide us in understanding your words as we listen to your voice. And help us to be more generous when we listen to others for we know that you also speak to us through them.

May God bless you abundantly this week as listen to him so that in all that you do, you glorify the Lord by your life.

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