OBSERVATIONS & OTHER ACCIDENTS

And by God, I also mean the God within us.

This morning, with a text already written and ready to be published (which I set aside when this video appeared), I was interrupted — almost pulled away from my own train of thought — by a video. A homily by a Brazilian priest I follow, Father Reginaldo Manzotti. He was speaking about listening. Or rather, about the subtle yet essential difference between hearing and truly listening. It is not a new subject to me. How many times have I had this conversation with myself. Or with others.

I remember once having to draw my partner’s attention to it: I was speaking to him while he was looking at his phone. We were having lunch and he was dealing with a work issue. It was not intentional, I know. But those few seconds — or minutes — of conversation would not have delayed any task. It never happened again.

I often wonder how many times this repeats itself every day, everywhere. Heads down, eyes fixed on screens, absorbing images and sounds, without truly listening to the world — or to the person in front of us. As Father Manzotti says, “listening is not easy”. It isn’t. There is too much noise. The world is noisy, our homes are noisy, and we have learnt to turn on devices — televisions, phones — as a way of avoiding empty space, remaining in an almost automatic, anaesthetised state.

Heads down, eyes fixed on screens, absorbing images and sounds, without truly listening to the world — or to the person in front of us.

Perhaps that is where this habit comes from. This constant urge to hold the phone in our hands. Perhaps it is fear — fear of listening to ourselves. Silence unsettles us. Silence weighs on us. And so we fill it in every possible way — visually, audibly, relentlessly — anything that prevents us from hearing our own thoughts. That intimate place where, for those who believe, God also speaks. In silence. In conscience.

In one of my earliest texts here, I wrote about a period — perhaps longer than it should have been — during which I almost completely withdrew from the world, keeping only a very small number of people close. I spoke of solitude as something potentially addictive. Yet that time proved essential. The deafening silence became the catalyst for listening — to myself — however painful it was to hear what needed to be heard. And, at the same time, to God. For a long time, I did not allow myself to listen to Him; which is, ultimately, another way of saying that I did not want to listen to myself. I simply did not want to hear.

Distractions are escapes. We flee from silence because it confronts us. Because it is there that questions take shape. Because it is there that something — or Someone — speaks.

Father Manzotti reminds us that we struggle deeply to listen to others. We interrupt, we anticipate, we cross over people’s words. We even interrupt silence — that brief pause before an answer, when someone gathers their thoughts, their feelings. “If we already have the answer,” he asks, “why do we ask the question? That question is dishonest.”

Listening is a virtue — and a neglected one. We lack patience. We lack presence. We trample over conversations and call it dialogue, when often it is nothing more than a monologue shared by two voices. If listening to God is difficult, listening to others is no easier. And listening to what lives inside us — the unease, the noise, the discomfort — may be the hardest of all. Perhaps one of the great challenges of our time is precisely this inability to listen, to learn, to allow something greater than ourselves to speak.

We trample over conversations and call it dialogue, when often it is nothing more than a monologue shared by two voices.

In the homily, the figure of Elijah appears. A man from the Old Testament. Exhausted, persecuted, in what we would today recognise as a depressive state. He sat beneath a tree and wished to die. God sent him food and simply said: “Get up.” Elijah slept again, walked for forty days and forty nights, and eventually hid in a cave, waiting for God to pass by. There was an earthquake — and God was not there. There was a storm — and God was not there. There was fire — and God was not there. Until a gentle breeze appeared, almost imperceptible. And God spoke. Not in the noise, but in delicacy. “What are you doing here, Elijah? Come out of the cave. Come out of the darkness.”

Elijah expected God in strength, in force, in noise. But God came in the breeze.

To listen to God is to learn how to recognise Him in silence. And perhaps listening, in its deepest sense, is precisely this: learning to be present. With ourselves. With others. Learning silence. Living in silence. Silence heals, silence organises, silence reveals — even though it is so difficult to cultivate silence within ourselves.

Then, listening to others. Not interrupting. Not anticipating. Not reducing. Putting the phone down. Looking into someone’s eyes. Being truly present. How many relationships would have unfolded differently if someone had listened. Because to listen is to bring the other person into our own sphere of concern, to hear what is said between the lines, to recognise emotion.

That is not naïveté.
It is emotional intelligence.
It is love.

And finally, listening to God — and acting accordingly. Today, I am left only with this. Not answers, not conclusions. Just the urgency of listening.