Seeds of Listening
5-7-04
Jesus tells a parable (Matthew 13: 1-9) about seeds cast on different kinds of ground. Some grew, some didn’t, some that grew did well, and others did not, depending on the ground upon which they fell. Jesus then says, listen -- if you have ears to hear.
His story is about seeds. And the story is a seed. Because Jesus is casting the story on his listeners, to see if it takes. Some will hear the words, but the words won’t take root. Their ears work, but they really aren’t listening. Others have ears, too, and hear the words, but not only do they hear, they also listen. The story goes down deep and takes root in their souls.
When I’m writing at my computer at home, and my wife tells me something while I’m typing, I say, “Yes, honey, sure.” And an hour later, when she asks me why I didn’t do what I agreed to do, I have no idea what she is talking about. My ears worked, I went through the motions, I gave her feedback, but I wasn’t really listening. She cast the seed on me, but it didn’t take root, because I was preoccupied. I was writing, paying attention to my own inner world, hearing her but not listening. She cast her seed on me, it sprouted, but its roots were shallow and it dried up quickly and blew away.
Seeds are mysterious, no matter how much you know about biology. Open up a seed and inside, at its center, is yet another “seed” – a little dot called the apical meristem, which consists of stem cells. How do all the different structures of a plant emerge from the identical cells of the apical meristem? Which part of the apical meristem corresponds to which part of the mature flower or grain stalk or tree? Answer: it doesn’t work that way. Each of the stem cells has the potential to multiply into all sorts of different kinds of cells in the mature plant, and the kind into which one particular cell multiplies depends on timing and triggers outside of itself. All this can be explained by biologists, at least up to a point. But it is still a true miracle that a tiny mustard seed, looking nothing like a mustard plant, can expand into all its mature shapes and structures.
Likewise there is a mystery about listening. You listen to somebody’s story with your full attention, you let it go deep, you let it take root. You remember what you were told. But the result of your listening is often a surprise. It has one shape as it goes into you, it has quite another when it sprouts. You listen, but your interpretation of what you heard may amaze you both. You might find something in the other person’s story that they didn’t hear when they heard themselves telling it. You share what sprouts out of you, and the person may find insight in it. Or the person may find no ring of truth in what you feed back to them. If you really are listening, you take this seriously and ask the person to plant more of seeds in your soul, until they sprout and bear fruit for you both.
Sometimes we plant seeds we don’t recognize. I’ve done that before – found a sack of seeds in my garage and didn’t know what they were. Are those seeds of purple hollyhocks, or white ones, or carmine ones? Let’s just put ‘em in the ground and find out. So it is with people who truly listen to each other. They help each other find out what is going on inside of them. They plant seeds in each other and see what sprouts and help each other identify what is growing within them. Often, we need the listening ears of others in order to understand ourselves.
I was serving as co-director of a high school-age church camp for a week last summer, and I found myself with a group of kids at the waterfall one hot afternoon. One of them, a girl, started telling me about how the scene reminded her of a camping trip with her family. She went into great detail about the trip, on and on, and for a moment I was getting bored, but then I gave it a little more effort and realized, this is some kind of moment, and if I listen longer and better, something really interesting might happen. I started to enjoy her story more and she kept going, but after a while the nature of her story began to change. I realized she was telling this story because it helped her understand herself. She said that the incidents in her camping trip with her family had revealed to her what kind of person she was, and what kind of person she was not. That she was a sort of tomboy, not interested in typical girly stuff. That she was a gregarious person – somebody who found it easy to get along with others. That she wasn’t competitive. That she loved reading novels, loved writing stories and poems. That she had no interest in being rich or famous or otherwise notorious, but really just wanted to grow up and have a family and go on wilderness camping trips with her husband and kids. All this self-discovery happened with hardly any of my intervention or direction. All I did was listen.
As the apical meristem of the seed has no agenda but growth itself – its cells can take any form in the mature plant – so we are called to abandon our agendas when we serve others by listening. Somebody is sick, and you go to visit them. You want to give them advice about how to handle the problem – what cures to seek, what strategies they can use to keep up their spirits, what words you think they ought to hear from you in order to feel comforted. But it’s very likely that they need none of this from you. It’s much more likely that they need your willingness to listen, without a scripted reply, to what they say.
Listening is what happens when the words of others go deep enough into our souls to take root. Like soil must be broken and tilled to be ready for seeds, our souls must be broken open in order to make way for what others need to tell us.
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