Listening as a Spiritual Discipline

James Joyce with his grandchild,
Stephen James

The writer James Joyce would have been a good Benedictine. I know this not because of his writings but because of the following observation by Sylvia Beach, who said that Joyce "[T]reated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore. ... If he arrived in a taxi, he wouldn't get out until the driver had finished what he was saying.”

It appears that Joyce had the gift of “listening with the ear of his heart,” as St. Benedict counseled. This type of listening is an important spiritual discipline, because it prepares us to be aware of God’s presence in every person we meet. When we listen to everyone, as Joyce did, we are not surprised to encounter God in a waiter, a child, or a taxi driver.

Today is the Feast of the Presentation, when aged Simeon and Anna recognized that the infant Jesus was the Lord’s Messiah. After years of prayer and fasting, watching and listening, they were prepared to recognize this unlikely manifestation of God’s presence. In Give Us This Day, Harry P. Nasuti asks, “Are we … prepared enough to be surprised by the unexpected ways in which God becomes present among us?” The discipline of nonjudgmental listening is an important tool in our preparation.