Cats have very acute hearing. Along with his nose, Baxter makes his way through life with his ears. Familiar sounds bring familiar behaviors — the rattle of the food container, the sound of the garage door, the alarm clock going off. Strange sounds produce a different reaction. He is on high alert. His ears are up; he is sitting or standing at attention; nothing distracts him from the code red monitoring he assumes when a strange sound sets him off. Baxter listens to the world around him well, and it sets up his response to it.
At the liturgy we are asked to listen to God’s Word. It comes to us through music, the proclamation of the Scriptures and prayers said for all to find a voice. But do we listen and respond? Unlike cats, we are not wired to be good listeners. We live in a visual culture where spectacular sights and “special effects” get our attention and wonder. There is often so much noise around us — cell phones ringing, videos blaring, traffic growling and honking, talk shows rattling — that we become accustomed to tuning it all out. We look at the many pictures created for us in this modern technological world, and we use them to enter our private, imaginary worlds inside ourselves.
God’s Word calls us into the public world that we share with all other people. It calls us to take account of the good things in that world and see how we can multiply their goodness by sharing it more broadly. It calls us to take seriously the evil in this world of ours and to work together to identify its source and the solutions to eliminate it. God’s Word calls us, but we must first listen. The Sunday Eucharist is our weekly training camp to learn how and to condition us to be alert to this message.
The first step is to pay attention. The opening prayer of the liturgy is meant to gather together our scattered thoughts and feelings from the week around the God who has walked with us those days, but often perhaps unnoticed or unheeded. Let go of the problems at work still unsolved, the worries about your teenage daughter’s boyfriend, the shortfall in the household budget or the schedule conflict between soccer practice and piano lessons, and listen. This opening prayer is known as the “Collect,” and it is collecting all those aspects of our lives that we bring to the Eucharist and focusing them in faith.
From this opening prayer, we move to the Liturgy of the Word, where the Scriptures, proclaimed through the millennia, now speak to us, personally and collectively at the same time. But we must hear this word, take it to heart, find the references for its message in our own lives, and look for what we can do about it. It all starts with listening seriously, carefully, and prayerfully. This means that we listen wanting to make a connection between what we hear and how we live. We focus on the moment when the Word is proclaimed, and not on moments before we came to church or those to follow after we leave. We are present to the Word of God to find in it God’s Word for us.
Baxter figures out what is going on by a keen sense of hearing. He identifies friend or foe, food or frightening threat by the sound associated with these things. The sound of God’s Word can help us do the same from the vision of our faith. So listen well and learn how to live faithfully.
