Listening

This post was not written using AI.

I could subtitle this reflection, “how to make an ecumenical gesture with integrity,” or, “how to help a friend hear what God is saying to him in his experience.”

I recently had my birth chart read by an OG astrologer whom I will not name, as he is really retired and doesn’t want word to get out that he is still occasionally doing readings. Many of my friends here may be hostile to the very idea of astrology; I would ask these readers to hold a certain epoché around the topic, and play experimentally with the notion that astrology is something other than fatalism or fortune-telling (and indeed, I would ask readers who believe in astrology to hold it this way as well). Frame it, perhaps, as a conviction that when the Scriptures say that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living,” that does not apply only to human souls; it applies also to the very cosmic elements themselves. (This, of course, touches on the sphere of a “Christian animism.”)

From this non-fatalist perspective, we might see the map of the heavens at the moment of our birth as a revelation of:

the introductory and essential theme
of the symphony of our earthly life
in which the cosmic elements
serve the purposes of divine Providence
in describing the condition of our soul,
and granting us a vision
of the task with which Providence has gifted us
so that we might be participants
in accompishing God’s loving and salvific purposes
for the entire created order.

In discussing my Libra moon, he said:

Picture two people falling in love, newly in love, and it’s the real deal. There’s a conversation that they’re guaranteed to have as they’re falling in love: You and I are so alike! You know, this compulsion to catalog all the points of agreement and similarity and harmony between people; and it’s natural. I don’t make fun of it, but that’s them falling in love… And we go forward in time five years, and they’re married and committed to each other, and in the process, the very Libran process of being married, being in love, and there’s another conversation they’re guaranteed to have with each other. You and I are so different! It would be easy to get cynical about this. I am not cynical about it. If we ever had the misfortune of meeting anybody who agreed with us in every way and fell in love with them — talk about a static, going-nowhere situation!

I fall in love with many things. My Libra moon is in my ninth house, the house (among other things) of religion, and in traditional lore, of “long journeys over water.” Those long journeys and that water have been both physical and metaphysical. If you are a journeyer in either of these senses, whether in life or in longing, you know the glory and terror of journeying. Religiously, I have always had an inborn ease in placing myself in any context and asking with complete sincerity, What do you believe? Why should I believe it too? How do you live? Why should I also live that way, and what will I become if I do?

In short, I am, by my joy, an instinctive and radical ecumenist, radical in the sense that I accept Raimundo Panikkar’s dictum that for a dialogue to be genuine, the participants must each be genuinely open to conversion.

Of course, that openness to conversion implies a still deeper commitment, a non-negotiable commitment, a ground on which I stand, without which no dialogue could occur: a lodestar. So implicit to any dialogue is the invitation to my partner to stand there with me. As it happens, that lodestar is Jesus Christ, Whom I know as the incarnate “wisdom, peace, and power of God.”

Is this a contradiction? I do not think so, because I do not presume to delineate or restrict the presence and movement of the One Who is the primordial exemplar of those “born of the Spirit.” And He is the One Who, in turn, sends the Spirit on Creation. Every scrap and glede of beauty and inspiration that has ever existed in Creation carries His light and fire in its very heart. That is Who He is. I could go deeper, and enter into the mystery through which He joins Himself to Creation not just in its glory, but in its brokenness and its unconsolable loss: but that is perhaps for another time. Now, I want to look and see Him present as the light that shines in all things, that sets them free, that draws them further on the paths of love.

This is Who and What I mean when I say “Jesus Christ.”

It is the conviction of my heart that the world has a Heart. I know this in the same way that I know I love my children. And that Heart has given light and fire to Creation since the beginning. It is the light and fire I know in my own heart and with my own heart, whenever the awen comes upon me, as it came upon the poet, when, with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.

This is Who and What I mean when I say “Jesus Christ.”

The deep commitment that undergirds my radical ecumenism is thus far more than a doctrinaire assertion of a set of rational propositions and “truth claims.” It is essentially nothing but the growth in my heart of the truth proclaimed in the Prologue of the Gospel of St John.

Given that this Jesus Christ is the non-negotiable foundation, “than which no other may be laid,” I now approach any ecumenical encounter asking: how can I perceive where Jesus Christ is present and at work in the soul and life of the person whom I encounter, and to whose heart I am seeking to listen? To say this another way: whatever the tradition, whatever the teaching, whatever its truth, whatever indeed its error — its very presence, the very fact that it is held, is a revelation of a relationship with Jesus Christ.

How, concretely, do I approach this in ecumenical encounter?

First, I am open to conversion in this sense: I am open to a radical expansion of my knowledge of the reality of Jesus Christ as He is present.

Second, I care less about engagement with doctrinal content, with disputation. I want to know not merely what you believe, but why you believe it — to what hungers or hurts or raptures of your soul is that belief or practice a human attempt to respond? Or perhaps, as it might be, a divinely inspired response?

I want to know your spiritual world, because it helps me to see and feel how your soul stands with God. I want to know it before I judge it, evaluate it, praise it, condemn it. My concern is with your soul, and with discerning with what task the Lord has entrusted me in relationship to you, and with what gifts the Lord has enriched you for my edification.

In the context of my Libra moon, I see that the path of relationship is so often sterile if it is comprised all of easy agreement. It is precisely in the areas where we disagree that we manifest and reveal the deepest movements, experiences, and revelations of the soul. This is where relationship becomes the most fruitful, because it can bring us, if we practice listening to the hearts beneath the words, to a deeper unity than we could have reached with a merely superficial agreement.

Listen to the heart: to your heart, to your neighbor’s heart, and to the Heart of the world Who compasses us all.