Give Me a Heart Able to Hear

Give Me a Heart Able to Hear                             The Dover Church

August 19, 2012                                                 1 Kings 3, Psalm 34

         The motif of God, an angel, Rumplestiltskin or a talking frog, offering a young person one wish is common in the stories of cultures around the world. Human beings seem to be haunted by the desire for something more to make life perfect. This morning, it is young King Solomon who gets the nod, just starting out, daunted by the prospect of his life before him. It’s such a universal story because it happens to all of us. Do you remember when it happened to you? I can, many times.

         First it was a bike with a banana seat and baseball cards in the spokes so I could look and sound like a cool motorcycle rider. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was for a sailboat and adventure, sailing around the world to Africa, Tahiti, the Galapagos, Hudson Bay, Antarctica, a cross between Thor Heyerdahl and Jacques Cousteau. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was to play baseball like Carl Yazstremski, hockey like Bobby Orr, and basketball like John Havlichek. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Then, in the summer of 1975, it was, against all odds, for the Boston Red Sox to beat first the Oakland Athletics and then the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Then it started to be about how other people, specifically people my own age, saw me. If the guys thought I was cool and the girls found me attractive, my life would be perfect.

         Then it started to be my family, which was going through hard times. If everyone could just pull together and be nice, or just somehow be different than we were being, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was rowing. If I could achieve some real glory as an oarsman, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was Sweden. I went there to live, looking for my family roots, who I was, who I might be. If I could somehow find whatever it was I was looking for, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was to be a world class scholar of Old Norse sagas, the next J.R.R. Tolkien, a fountain of wisdom and obscure facts, to be the expert in some ivy covered building somewhere where I would read and write and lecture. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Strangely enough, riches and treasure rarely seemed to capture my fancy, but I'm not going to lie to you. Every now and then the enormity of some lottery jackpot would catch my attention. “Imagine what I’d do with $246,000,000?” If I had that, my life would be perfect.

         Then it was flyfishing. If I could fly fish for trout and striped bass more days than not, my life would be perfect.

         Then a bunch of things actually came, all at once. First a dog. Then a wife. And then kids. Ella was easy from day one, but once I had a Marie-Laure and the boys, I had to figure out how to be a husband and a father. If I could do that, my life would be perfect.

On top of that, I wanted to figure out how be a good pastor, how to keep living a life close to and aware of God in the midst of the hustle and bustle of my busy days, and I really wanted to help a church take off and be the church I always dreamed of: dynamic, energy filled, on fire for God and God’s kingdom work. Oh, and still fly fish for stripers and trout more days than not, be a good husband and father, walk the dog, raise bees, have a garden, have some good friends, get 8 hours of sleep every night, and live long enough in good health to see our boys grown and happy and on their own. If I had that, my life would be perfect.

Can you remember when the angel came to you? What you wished for? What, if you had it, would make your life perfect?

Young King Solomon could realistically expect all the unrealistic things our society markets so well to us: stunning beauty (both his parents were remarkably attractive), physical strength, skill in battle, good health and long life (his father, David, had had all four), an exciting sex life (he was king of a polygamous society and eventually had hundreds of wives), power, wealth and lots of people telling him how great he was (once again, he was king so all of that goes with the job). What I am trying to say is that Solomon would be all over People magazine today and and many of us would envy him his perfect life.

But what does he ask for? Our Bible says, "Give your servant an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil." The original Hebrew, however, is "give your servant a leb shama, "a heart able to hear." Solomon was renowned for his wisdom, which our story claims started right at this point, but I disagree. He already knew that he would need a leb shama, a heart able to hear, for a whole life, whole being a synonym for perfect, both meaning shalom in Hebrew. The fact that he knew enough to ask for this shows that he was already wiser than I have been most of my life and wiser perhaps than most of us most of the time.

What I have learned in the 20 years or so I have been reading about and practicing prayer, silent meditation, and mindfulness, is that most of us most of the time have hearts which are unable to hear. We don't see or hear what's actually going on within us, right in front of us, and all around us, because we are unwittingly being jerked around, compelled and even stampeded by all the noise inside our heads, all the regrets about the past and worries about the future. We are unable to be present to the actual moment in which we are living. Think about all the times you have failed to understand what someone else was saying to you, either because you came in angry, anxious, stressed out, or just in the opposite frame of mind to what you were about to hear. When your preconceived notion what this person would say, or your desire to hear something other than what this person had to say, allowed you only to hear the words and register them in your mind, but not to hear them with your heart, where you could feel them, care about them, and have them become part of you.

Let me give you an example from my vacation in France this summer. I spent two weeks with Marie-Laure's family, basically having 2 hour lunches and 3 hour dinners, with much of the time in between spent either planning and preparing the next meal, or cleaning up from the last. As I was sitting there with my wine and cheese in the middle of the day with conversation ebbing and flowing and everyone delighting in one another, my American mind was itching and nudging, "you're wasting your previous vacation, Max. You should be fishing, hiking, sightseeing, not sitting around drinking wine and getting fat." My heart able to hear, however, urged me to relax into it and enjoy these wonderful people who delighted in my company.

Our minds are constantly judging: good - bad, right - wrong, so quickly that we often fail to hear what is actually going on, let alone feel the other in our hearts. The same sunset which delights you on the beach in Eastham absolutely infuriates you as it glares through your windshield as you crawl home in traffic, westbound on the Mass Pike, late from work again. Same beauty. Different heart.

If you practice meditation, you discover how much noise goes on in your mind, restless interior monologues of planning for the future, thinking about the past, and all the ways all the people in your life are messing it up, which block you from the present moment. Solomon asks for "a heart to hear" because he knows how many people his life is full of as king of Israel. It is an enormous burden, trying to be able to judge between good and evil amongst so many competing agendas and interests.

My friends, our lives are no different than Solomon's, full of people who delight us and anger us in turn, all of whom we form an opinion of once we let them in close enough, and then that becomes the lens through which we see and hear them thereafter. We know what he'll do or what she'll think or what they're going to say or what my opinion will be.

It isn't easy to acquire a heart able to hear or keep it once you get it. It is hard work, something I have worked at off an on for the last 20 years, with varying degrees of success, occasionally wide open, most of the time, pretty constricted. Before I was introduced to all of this, I was like a solid rock who knew what was what, right and wrong, me versus them with winners and losers, always looking for either the upper hand or an escape route. And now, I know I missed a lot.

It is hard, because you have to slow way down and soften way up, neither of which is encouraged in our society. We like fast and crystal clear, the best crystal being a diamond and there's nothing harder than that. We don't want to waste time along the way. We want to get where we're going and get everything in our way out of it. But the spiritual life is slow, soft, open, and non judging. And here's the clincher. If you work your way through meditative practice to having a heart able to hear, do you know what you'll find? Your life is perfect, irregardless of  the circumstances.