Hearkening is an old-fashioned English word that doesn’t get
much use these days. Those of us old
enough to remember the King James Version or the Coverdale Psalms being used in
churches will know the word well enough.
Adam, it tells us, hearkened to the voice of his wife… Hearken means listen, but it is a richer word
than merely listen. I am reminded of
this on reading further in the diary of Etty Hillesum. She is in Auschwitz. She says her body aches, but that her spirit
can continue – it can still love, she realises, and (what she calls in German) hineinhorchen… she says there is no
equivalent word in Dutch… neither is there, so far as I know, in English. Hineinhorchen
is to listen deeply, exclusively, to shut down other voices, to attend totally
and seek to understand. Etty Hillesum
writes in Auschwitz: My life is one long hearkening to myself, to
others, to God. Indeed, she writes, If I say that I hearken, it is really God
who hearkens inside me.[1]
The first word in the Rule of St Benedict is Listen!
Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to
them with the ear of your heart. St
Paul writes about the eyes of your heart
being open, that you may know…[2] Hearkening is attending, we might say, with
the eyes and ears of the heart. So it will
mean being open to discovering pain and despair. It means welcoming truth however
inconvenient… and it means accepting mystery or confusion or unresolved issues,
even muddle, if they appear. Some people
seem to have developed mechanisms which filter out anything they don’t want to
hear or think they won’t like, an efficient inner censor – they simply don’t
hear, let alone attend to whatever is being said or shown, in case it might
apply to them[3]. Hearkening on the other hand opens the
gateway to sometimes costly understanding and perhaps changing our minds.
If we read Etty Hillesum we meet a person who, in Auschwitz,
removed now from civilised behaviour, among people who have nothing left of
possessions, of dignity, of freedom, of health or hope… finds herself
listening. It is all she can do -- hearkening,
as she puts it, hineinhorchen… to myself, to others, to God. It is what Benedict calls the ear of the
heart. The ear is opened as the
self-protective shields of the ego get laid aside, and our fears of the world,
of the future, of mortality, begin to be quietened.
Some people, who don’t know, assume that contemplative
prayer is self-indulgence. They can find
plenty to do in daily life without all that “introspection, navel-gazing”. But contemplative life and prayer, far from
self-indulgent, is setting self aside, attending, hearkening to God, to the
world, as well as self. It is a process
that the gentle Spirit, the Paraclete Jesus promised, can initiate and develop as
we are still and silent, attentive and consenting, relinquishing control of
life and people, opening the ear of the heart... and being deeply glad.
[1]
Etty: A Diary (Jonathan Cape 1983), p.173.
[2]
Ephesians 1:18
[3] I first
became aware of this phenomenon long ago, with church announcements.
