Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote incredible oral histories from the biggest events of the 20th century, was a dedicated listener. He excelled at sitting down in front of someone who’d lived through unimaginable times and just listening. He knew just how to get them to recount their experience. Just at moment most of the rest of us would disrupt the conversation or shut things down – he’d pose a real “whopper”, a “doozy” – and then they’d be off. It was like he’d used all of his interviewees’ previous responses to zero in on a simply dead-on question that had been hanging around – just outside of the spoken. His conversation partner, often wouldn’t even realize how deeply they’d just been heard. But they would respond to being heard. And like a newly tapped underground spring, just start gushing one memory after another in a torrent of a flow. In the river of words, we’d hear a crucial moment being deeply humanized and BAM – we feel connected to the people going through that time.

This past fall I started two programs, spiritual direction in September and clinical pastoral education (that’s “chaplain training” to the uninitiated) in October. The center of the Venn diagram between the best of these two programs is listening.

When among the all relationships in your life, have things not turned out as you’d hope – despite everyone actually being fully heard – or fully hearing the other?

There is in both spiritual direction and in clinical pastoral education (CPE for short) the idea that sitting in front of someone who’s listening to you – really, deeply listening to what you’re saying is so rare – that just being deeply listened to and deeply heard has healing power. They’re right.

Getting ready to head into Lent this year into what feels like a very different world than the one we were living in not so long ago. I’m listening to myself and realizing that I feel like I’m running to just keep up. Just the other day I caught myself feeling uncomfortable and vaguely irritated and realized that I worked straight through my last couple of days off. Why’d I do that? Because instead of listening to me – to my soul – I let myself get harried by a whole bunch of externals.

Isn’t it funny how easy it is to kinda listen to just the pervasive din of disorganized media chatter shouting millions of voices at once and yet tune out the actual important stuff?

Yet in the space of a breath, we can pause and tune into the conversation within – the one between us and God.

I’ve usually begun Lent with a firm plan, plopped into place well before Ash Wednesday. This year though, I am beginning with a different plan. The plan is simply to listen to ourselves, one another, and of course, God. Who knows what could happen? What if it changes us? What if we heal?