On Prayer and Glorifying God

[[Dear Sister I was taught that prayer involves a number of forms including adoration, contemplation, thanksgiving and supplication. My pastor taught me the acronym ACTS to help me remember this. But I read a Catholic hermit saying the following [[ . . . Praising God is different from praying, as praising asks for nothing from God but rather gives God sole glory.]] I have no way of asking her about this statement since she has no contact information on her blog but I wondered if Catholic hermits have a different way of understanding prayer than my pastor so I am asking you.]]

Thanks for your question. Wow. To be frank, I would be surprised to hear any Catholic say such a thing, no matter their state of life or vocation. That's because the acronym you cited is often taught to elementary school kids as a way of remembering the main forms of prayer and to help them understand the way they are to give their whole selves to God in prayer. We all have heard homilies using this acronym from time to time when the readings reference the nature or the importance of prayer. I think I may have been taught this in the late sixties when I was taking instruction to become a Catholic. (By the way, I have heard it presented with "c= confession" rather than contemplation and I will speak of it that way here. I think contemplation would then fit under "Adoration".)

In either case it is important to remember that all prayer or worship is always the work of God within us. The corollary is that we are made and yearn for this to be more and more real in our lives so that we may become our truest selves! Our hearts are theological realities first of all; "heart" is defined in the TDNT,** for instance, as the place within us where God bears witness to Godself. Once we are aware that as we come to God and allow God to work in us in our minds and hearts and as we allow God to transform us in times of need,  joy,  reflectiveness, and love, we also come to be our truest selves, we begin to understand the deepest truth of prayer, namely that prayer is less something we do than it is something we are called to become by allowing God to witness to Godself in the whole of our lives.

The term we use for allowing God to dwell in us and witness to Godself is "glorifying" God. We glorify God when we reveal him to the world. And here it is critical to remember that reveal means not only to make known, but also to make real in space and time. We glorify God when we allow God to become incarnate in us, when we let him transform us into the imago Christi (image of Christ) we are made to become, when, in other words we pray and allow ourselves to become prayer. We are grateful in this way and it is an act of adoration and confession as well. To put this in theological terms we could say that when we allow God to be God in this way we become speech ACTS, language events whose essential nature is divinely motivated and shaped.

Hermits are contemplatives not only because it is a primary form of prayer for us, but because it reflects the way of life we have embraced and cultivated.  In truth hermits have embraced a way of life which involves a number of types of prayer every day precisely because it is contemplative; thus, it is a life of gratitude and praise, a life where we try to be essentially attentive and open ourselves so that the God who dwells deep within, may "come to us", "dwell within us" more fully (more extensively and effectively) to complete us as the covenant persons we are meant to be. As this happens we become instances of praise --- instances of profound prayer. In my eremitical life I don't ask God for much in the sense of plying him with lists of things I need or desire. That is not to say I do not have such things, I definitely do. But in the main my single prayer is ordinarily a prayer that is an opening of self to the One who would be with and dwell more fully within me to empower, encourage, and celebrate with me. When I am feeling particularly needy the form that prayer takes is, "O God come to my assistance, O Lord make haste to help me." But at other times the form that prayer takes is simply, "Thanks be to God." In my best moments then, prayer is a single act of praise which involves all of the things referred to in the acronym A.C.T.S. but above all it is an act of praise, an act in which God is most truly glorified.

Should I not call this prayer --- as the source you cited seems to imply? Of course I should. Again, at bottom prayer is the work of God attended to and embraced in the various modes and moods of human existence: adoration (the times we simply love God and all that is precious to God); confession (the times and ways we, empowered by the God of truth, say who we really are and what values we embody whether this is verbal or non-verbal and whether it represents us in our strength and integrity or our weakness, brokenness, and falseness); thanksgiving (all the times and ways we act by the grace of God with wonder, attentiveness and gratitude for the gifts of life and the Source and Ground of Life); and supplication (all of those times we especially turn to God in need, in our poverty, in our incompleteness and our desire for union). In each of these we turn to the God who is already present and active within us seeking him to become even more present and active and we do so only by the grace (or powerful presence) of God. In each of these ways and moments we PRAY and become prayer. In each of these ways and moments we glorify God.

** TDNT = Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, The TDNT is a ten volume work including the significant words of the New Testament; it provides detailed presentations of the different linguistic, theological, and cultural contexts of each word by looking at OT, intertestamental, and extratestmental literature as well as at the Greek and other important literature bearing on the meaning of these words. The definition of heart provided above is from the article on καρδια (kardia).

A Contemplative Moment: Listening to the Word

Listening to the Word

"The Word is very near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart" Nearer even than that, because you yourself are his creative word of love. You know God and can listen to him because you are his image, his icon, because he has mirrored himself in your being and his creative word is even now bringing out that likeness, and giving you to yourself. Your obedient listening to to his word is at its most fundamental in this humble, loving acceptance of yourself  as his word.

The word within you is your own center, your deepest reality and your freedom. It is God's utterance of your name, the name that reveals to you your destiny and meaning and all that you can become, as Jesus spoke Mary Magdalene's name to her in the garden. There is a growing sense of identification between ourselves and this word, and in this we are sharing in our fumbling way, in the experience of Jesus.

He is the Word, yet as man he had to listen, and still does listen, to the Word that he is. His listening was made perfect in his Easter reality where obedience meant only union, freedom, and joy. This is what the gift of the Spirit is, this consciousness of identification with the Word within: this is being a child of God, and we cannot but cry, "Abba!" Like Jesus you have to listen and listen. It will take you all your life to hear the Father's word of love for you; indeed, it will take you all your eternity.

by Sister Maria Boulding, OSB

Stanbrook Abbey, England

in The Coming of God

Magnificat: On the Song Which IS the Hermit (Reprise)

Today's readings include the Gospel of Luke and Mary's Magnificat. Many of the characters in Luke's version of the Gospel story move from muteness, barrenness, fear, and confusion to prophetic speech and songs. In fact the move to canticles and prophetic speech is a sign of faith and the person's fulfillment in their vocations and humanity. Parrhesia or boldness of speech is the primary form of true discipleship, the result of the faith and hope which is the disciple's while the Christ is God's Word Incarnate. In light of all this, and also because of what I have written recently about the heart of the hermit, I wanted to reprise a post I put up here several years ago (2007) just a couple of months after my perpetual eremitical profession: Magnificat: On the Song which IS the Hermit. Of course, we are all called to share this vocation to incarnate the breath and word of God, but I think it especially describes the life and vocation of the hermit and particularly the paradoxical charism canon 603 refers to as the silence of solitude. I think this is the experience Mary knew and Luke captured so very well in today's Gospel.

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Theologians often think of the human being as a "word event," that is, we are responses to the words and being of others, crafted and shaped by those words and persons and creating ourselves (or being created) in response to reality around us. We can wander lost through the world, unformed and unknown, we can even impinge on others' lives without the dynamic of dialogue, or address and response, but it is only in response to another person's address that we actually have a personal place to stand, or that we come to be the persons we CAN be. More fundamentally, theologians recognize that we are each the answer or response to a divine word of address and summons spoken in the very core of our being. We speak of this reality variously: "God calls us by name to be"; "we have a vocation or call to authentic humanity"; "the human heart is, by definition, a theological reality and the place where God is active and effectively present in the core of our being", etc.

Of course, the definitive image of authentic humanity is Christ, Divine Word-made-flesh. Theologians reflect that each of us are called to be "Word made flesh" --- though not as definitively as that incarnation accomplished in the Christ Event, still with coherence and cogency, articulateness, truth, and power. Throughout our lives the incarnational word we are is shaped and formed, redacted and composed, in response to the Name or summons God speaks in the core of our being, and which ALSO comes to us (or is sympathetically sounded in us) in a variety of forms and intensities from without in the Scriptures, Sacraments, other people, nature, etc. And of course, it is also distorted and falsified by our own sinfulness, and by our defensive responses to the sinfulness and influence of others in our lives. While we are called to be joyful and coherent embodiments of the Word of God incarnated in our world, we are as often cries of anguish, snarls of anger, sobs of pain, and the lies of insecurity and defensiveness which so lead to the falsification of our being.

Ordinarily, of course, the responsive composition we each are is a mixture of true and false, real and unreal, coherent and incoherent, articulate and inarticulate, anguished and joyful. Only in Christ are we rendered more and more the response we are MEANT to be. And yet, deep within us God speaks the Name we are to embody, the vocational summons we are to incarnate in all of its uniqueness AS our own lives in this world. It is an unceasing, unremitting hallowing right at the core of who we are, and when we are truly in touch with this and truly responsive we become the Word event which God wills us to be. If, as Fr Robert Hale, OSB Cam, once remarked, it is true that "God sustains us as a singer sustains a note," then we are each called to become a song, a particular fiat witnessing to the grace (that is, the powerful presence) of God in our lives. God is the breath which sustains us moment by moment, and we are the song which embodies this breath.

The hermit's existence is paradigmatic of this reality. She really is called to be the song at the heart of the church. Birthed in silence and solitude, shaped by obedience to the Word and breath of God, exercised in the singing of psalms daily --the regular chanting or recitation of the divine Office, the reading of scripture both aloud and in silence, held in the heart of God and steeped in the formative rests of contemplative prayer and shaped by the stories of all those persons she holds in her own heart, the hermit moves day by day towards becoming the articulate and coherent expression of God's creative providence we recognize as a magnificat.

Of course, gestation and birth are together demanding, painful, and messy businesses. So is the composition of a truly responsive life. Those cries of anguish, snarls of anger, defensive lies, and sobs of pain we ALSO ARE, don't simply "go away" of themselves without the hard work of recognition and repentance. Healing, sanctification, and verification (making whole and true) is God's work in us, but it requires and involves our active cooperation. It is this dynamic that makes of the eremitical silence, solitude, prayer, and penance a therapeutic crucible or editor's desk where we are --- sometimes ruthlessly --- revised, redacted, and recreated. Evenso, at bottom eremitical life (indeed ALL christian life!) is a joy-filled reality; we incarnate the merciful love of God which heals and sanctifies, enlivens and sustains. We become a coherent articulation or expression of the breath and word of God spoken both in the core of ourselves, and in so many ways in our church and world. We ARE the songs which God sings in the heart of his church, magnificats of God's love and mercy sounding in (and out of) the silence of solitude.

"Ephphatha!": Obedience as the Dynamic of Authentic Humanity (Reprise)

Yesterday's Gospel brought us face to face with who we are called to be, and with the results of the idolatry that occurs whenever we refuse that vocation. Both issues, vocation and true worship are rooted in the Scriptural notion of obedience, that is in the obligation which is our very nature, to hearken --- to listen and respond to God appropriately with our whole selves. When we are empowered to and respond with such obedience our very lives proclaim the Kingdom of God, not as some distant reality we are still merely waiting for, but as something at work in us here and now. In fact, when our lives are marked by this profound dynamic of obedience, today's readings remind us the reign of God cannot be hidden from others --- though its presence will be seen only with the eyes of faith.

In the Gospel, (Mark 7:31-37) A man who is deaf and also has a resultant speech impediment is brought by friends to Jesus; Jesus is begged to heal him. In what is an unusual process for Mark in its crude physicality (or for any of the Gospel writers), Jesus puts his fingers in the man's ears, and then, spitting on his fingers, touches the man's tongue. He looks up to heaven, groans, and says in Aramaic, "ephphatha!" (that is, "Be opened!"). Immediately the man is healed and "speaks plainly." Those who brought him to Jesus are astonished, joyful, and could not contain their need to proclaim Jesus and what he had done: "He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak."

I am convinced that the deaf and "mute" man (for he is not really mute, but impeded from clear speech by his inability to hear) is a type of each of us, a symbol for the persons we are and for the vocation we are each called to. Theologians speak of human beings as "language events." We are called to be by God, conceived from and an expression of the love of two people for one another, named so that we have the capacity for personal presence in the world and may be personally addressed by others, and we are shaped for good or ill, for wholeness or woundedness, by every word which is addressed to us. Language is the means and symbol of our capacity for relationship and transcendence.

Consider how it is that vocabulary of all sorts opens various worlds to us and makes the whole of the cosmos our own to understand, wonder at, and render more or less articulate; consider how a lack of vocabulary whether affective, theological, scientific, mathematical, psychological, etc, can cripple us and distance us from effectively relating to various dimensions of human life including our own heart. Note, for instance that physicians have found that in any form of mental illness there is a corresponding dimension of difficulty with or dysfunction of language. Consider the very young child's wonderful (and often really annoying!) incessant questioning. There, with every single question and answer, language mediates transcendence (a veritable explosion of transcendence in fact!) and initiates the child further and further into the world of human community, knowledge, understanding, reflection, celebration, and commitment. Language marks us as essentially communal, fundamentally dependent upon others to call us beyond ourselves, essentially temporal AND transcendent, and, by virtue of our being imago dei, responsive and responsible (obedient) at the core of our existence.

One theologian (Gerhard Ebeling), in fact, notes that the most truly human thing about us is our addressiblity and our ability to address others. Addressibility includes and empowers responsiveness; that is, it has both receptive and expressive dimensions. It is the characteristically human form of language which creates community. It marks us as those whose coming to be is dependent upon the dynamic of obedience --- but also on the generosity of those who would address us and give us a place to stand as persons we cannot assume on our own. We spend our lives responsively -- coming (and often struggling) to attend to and embody or express more fully the deepest potentials within us in myriad ways and means.

But a lot can hinder this most foundational vocational accomplishment. Sometimes our own woundedness prevents the achievement of this goal to greater degrees. Sometimes we are not given the tools or education we need to develop this capacity. Sometimes, we are badly or ineffectually loved and rendered relatively deaf and "mute" in the process. Oftentimes we muddle the clarity of that expression through cowardice, ignorance, or even willful disregard. Our hearts, as I have noted here before, are dialogical realities. That is, they are the place where God bears witness to himself, the event marked in a defining way by God's continuing and creative address and our own embodied response. In every way our lives are either an expression of the Word or logos of God which glorifies (him), or they are, to whatever extent, a dishonoring lie and an evasion.




And so, faced with a man who is crippled in so many fundamental ways --- one, that is, for whom the world of community, knowledge, and celebration is largely closed by disability, Jesus prays to God, touches, and addresses the man directly, "Ephphatha!" ---Be thou opened!" It is the essence of what Christians refer to as salvation, the event in which a word of command and power heals the brokennesses which cripple and isolate, and which, by empowering obedience reconciles the man to himself, his God, his people and world. As a result of Jesus' Word, and in response, the man speaks plainly --- for the first time (potentially) transparent to himself and to those who know him; he is more truly a revelatory or language event, authentically human and capable through the grace of God of bringing others to the same humanity through direct response and address.

Our own coming to wholeness, to a full and clear articulation of our truest selves is a communal achievement. Even (or even especially) in the lives of hermits this has always been true insofar as solitude is NOT isolation, but is instead a form of communion marked by profound dependence on the Word of God and lived specifically for the salvation of others. In today's gospel friends bring the man to Jesus, Jesus prays to God before acting to heal him. The presence of friends is another sign not only of the man's nature as made-for-communion and the fact that none of us come to language (or, that is, to the essentially human capacity for responsiveness or obedience) alone, but similarly, of the deaf man's total inability to approach Jesus on his own. At the same time, Jesus takes the man aside and what happens to him in this encounter is thus signalled to be profoundly personal, intimate, and beyond the merely evident. Friends are necessary, but at bottom, the ultimate healing and humanizing encounter can only happen between the deaf man and Christ.

In each of our lives there is deafness and "muteness" or inarticulateness. So many things are unheard by us, fail to touch or resonate in our hearts. So many things call forth embittered and cynical reactions which wound and isolate when what is needed is a response of genuine compassion and welcoming. Similarly, so many things render us speechless: bereavement, illness, ignorance, personal woundedness, etc. As a result we live our commitments half-heartedly, our loves guardedly, our joys tentatively, our pains self-consciously and noisily --- but helplessly and without meaning in ways which do not edify --- and in all these ways therefore, we are less human, less articulate, less the obedient or responsive language event we are called to be.  To each of us, then, and in whatever way or degree we need, Jesus says, "EPHPHATHA!" "Be thou opened!" He sighs in compassion and desire, unites himself with his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit, and touches us with his own hands and spittle.

May we each allow ourselves to be brought to Jesus for healing. May we be broken open and rendered responsive and transparent by his powerful Word of command and authority. Especially, may we each become the clear gospel-founded words of joy and hope in a world marked extensively and profoundly by deafness and the helplessness and despair of noisy inarticulateness.

The Silence of Jesus vs Eremitical "silence of solitude"

Throughout this last week of Lent and into the Triduum we will be confronted increasingly by Jesus' silence, indeed his muteness in the face of the world of powers and principalities arrayed against him. Increasingly the Word of God incarnate is rendered mute. In Mark's passion narrative this awful silence is rent only by Jesus' cry of abandonment --- that moment when Jesus' passion becomes even deeper than it had been and he suffers the loss of that relationship which is most foundational and intimate to him plunging him into an absolute hopelessness and helplessness. It is at this point, I think, that John's Jesus cries out, "I thirst!" And his thirst goes unslaked.

Because I have been writing and thinking about "the silence of solitude" in the past several months the contrast with Jesus' increasing muteness during his passion and what canon 603 refers to as "the silence of solitude" is more striking to me than it has ever been before. The hermit's silence is not one of powerlessness --- though indeed, in terms of the world's categories, a hermit is marginalized and relatively powerless --- nor is it one of absolute aloneness or abandonment. Instead it is the silence of covenant and friendship, of rest and essential peace in Christ. It is, as I have written many times now, a silence which sings of abundant life, a dialogical reality where God's love is the counterpart of human poverty and muteness, and the result is a sacramental silence which speaks powerfully and prophetically of fullness and completion.

But in the next three days especially we meet a vastly different kind of silence. It is the horrifying silence we all deeply fear, the silence we feel compelled with desperation to fill with even empty sound and trivial speech so terrified are we of being alone in the sense that Jesus was left alone; it is the silence which alternates with the music of love and affirmation and which presses us to seek companionship and reassurances we can never provide for ourselves alone. In the next three days Jesus, the Word incarnate, becomes increasingly subject to this silence. He enters increasingly into a loneliness which excludes all communication, all meaning, and all capacity for transcendence. His silence is the silence of one who has absolutely no one who can elicit or empower speech, no one who can summon him beyond himself --- one who is without anyone who can elicit or empower love, and is without the relatedness which is the ground and source of all meaning. It is the abyss of isolation which renders all speech -- including the speech or language event one is and is called to be -- absurd and impossible.

As I wrote in the piece on Jesus' descent into hell, hell is an abyss of ultimate and unremitting isolation, loneliness, emptiness, lovelessness, and inhumanity. It is precisely that impenetrable "place" or "space" within and outside us where speech, language, or communion becomes impossible and where, as Benedict XVI writes, no word of another can reach and no love can advance. It is this hell, this spiritual or personal black hole, into which Jesus is increasingly drawn in these last days of Lent, and during the Triduum especially. Despite superficial similarities, the silence, or better, the muteness associated with this state is precisely antithetical to the "silence of solitude" of the hermit; it is the silence against which one can see most clearly how rich and full the silence of eremitical or solitary life truly is. The hell of muteness crushes; the silence of solitude empowers song. These two different realities are what makes it especially important to discern the difference between those whose silence is that of isolation and those who are truly called to the silence of solitude as hermits. The first witnesses to hell and the sovereignty of death which blots out Life and Speech, the second is the background of heaven and the sovereignty of God who is Life, Love, and creative Word.

Whence the Name, Stillsong Hermitage??

Dear Sister O'Neal, the name of your hermitage sounds kind of new age or something. Why didn't your diocese pick something more religious and Catholic sounding?

Hi there!
Just to be clear, the name of my hermitage is something I decided on, not a decision of my diocese, so it is a personally significant name and one I (through the grace of God, I think) am wholly responsible for. Hermits generally name their hermitages. Perhaps it will help if I explain its origin and you can decide then if you think it is "new age" rather than profoundly Christian. I would ask you also read the heading at the top of this blog because it also helps explain the name.

In theology there is the notion that human beings are "word events" or "language events". This is a piece of understanding the communal nature of every human being, and especially of seeing the dialogical nature of our existence. We are not isolated monads, but instead are created and shaped by our interactions with every person we meet, with the larger world, and of course, with God. But most fundamentally we are shaped by the words addressed to us and by the ways in which the words we ourselves are are heard and received by others. In our earliest moment or before, we are given a Name which allows us to be called or addressed personally, and which gives us a place to stand in human society. We grow or fail to grow depending upon the ways we are addressed, and we grow in our capacity to respond to others' words (and to our own name) similarly. On the most profound level we are constituted by our dialogue with God. More, we are constituted AS a dialogue, not only with others, but with God whose very address constitutes an ongoing living reality within us. In other words, more and more as we mature, we become incarnate words, greater and greater articulations of that unique name God calls in the depths of our souls.

But of course, things do not always go as they should and sometimes life shapes us into something less articulate than this, something distorted and even defined by pain and woundedness --- something far less than the full expression of abundant life we are called to be. And in my own life there was a period where, when I reflected on who I was in terms of my identity as a language or word event I came to describe myself more as a cry or scream of anguish than anything really articulate. (Note that a scream neither communicates much nor is capable of responding to another's word of address; it is relatively inarticulate and unresponsive and, while effective in signalling great pain in the short term, in time it merely pushes people --- and genuine assistance --- away.) And then, through a lot of personal work, spiritual direction, and the grace of God --- part of which is a call to eremitical life --- I achieved a degree of healing which changed all that. In time I became (or came to see myself) not simply as an articulate language event (a word), but a song, a contemporary Magnificat or Te Deum --- if you will allow the metaphors.

When it became time to name the hermitage I chose to combine a word which signified peace, silence, solitude (and especially as these all come together in the hesychastic "silence of solitude") along with a word which reflected the joy, healing, and growth as language event this hermitage helped occasion and represented. I considered adding things like "of the cross" or "of the Incarnation," but in the end I chose simply Stillsong. It seems profoundly incarnational (and therefore also Marian) to me.

This last week on retreat I had an experience (or series of experiences) which reaffirmed the wisdom and deep appropriateness of this choice, an experience where it seemed my whole being was singing and which also may have represented the recovery of a part of myself which had, through trauma, been silenced. So, new age? No. Profoundly Christian? Absolutely.

"Ephphatha!": Obedience as the Dynamic of Authentic Humanity

Tomorrow's lections bring us face to face with who we are called to be, and with the results of the idolatry that occurs whenever we refuse that vocation. Both issues, vocation and true worship are rooted in the Scriptural notion of obedience, that is in the obligation which is our very nature, to hearken --- to listen and respond to God appropriately with our whole selves. When we are empowered to and respond with such obedience our very lives proclaim the Kingdom of God, not as some distant reality we are still merely waiting for, but as something at work in us here and now. In fact, when our lives are marked by this profound dynamic of obedience, today's readings remind us the reign of God cannot be hidden from others --- though its presence will be seen only with the eyes of faith.

In the Gospel, (Mark 7:31-37) A man who is deaf and also has a resultant speech impediment is brought by friends to Jesus; Jesus is begged to heal him. In what is an unusual process for Mark in its crude physicality (or for any of the Gospel writers), Jesus puts his fingers in the man's ears, and then, spitting on his fingers, touches the man's tongue. He looks up to heaven, groans, and says in Aramaic, "ephphatha!" (that is, "Be opened!"). Immediately the man is healed and "speaks plainly." Those who brought him to Jesus are astonished, joyful, and could not contain their need to proclaim Jesus and what he had done: "He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak."

I am convinced that the deaf and "mute" man (for he is not really mute, but impeded from clear speech by his inability to hear) is a type of each of us, a symbol for the persons we are and for the vocation we are each called to. Theologians speak of human beings as "language events." We are called to be by God, conceived from and an expression of the love of two people for one another, named so that we have the capacity for personal presence in the world and may be personally addressed by others, and we are shaped for good or ill, for wholeness or woundedness, by every word which is addressed to us. Language is the means and symbol of our capacity for relationship and transcendence.

Consider how it is that vocabulary of all sorts opens various worlds to us and makes the whole of the cosmos our own to understand, wonder at, and render more or less articulate; consider how a lack of vocabulary whether affective, theological, scientific, mathematical, psychological, etc, can cripple us and distance us from effectively relating to various dimensions of human life including our own heart. Note, for instance that physicians have found that in any form of mental illness there is a corresponding dimension of difficulty with or dysfunction of language. Consider the very young child's wonderful (and often really annoying!) incessant questioning. There, with every single question and answer, language mediates transcendence (a veritable explosion of transcendence in fact!) and initiates the child further and further into the world of human community, knowledge, understanding, reflection, celebration, and commitment. Language marks us as essentially communal, fundamentally dependent upon others to call us beyond ourselves, essentially temporal AND transcendent, and, by virtue of our being imago dei, responsive and responsible (obedient) at the core of our existence.

One theologian (Gerhard Ebeling), in fact, notes that the most truly human thing about us is our addressiblity and our ability to address others. Addressibility includes and empowers responsiveness; that is, it has both receptive and expressive dimensions. It is the characteristically human form of language which creates community. It marks us as those whose coming to be is dependent upon the dynamic of obedience --- but also on the generosity of those who would address us and give us a place to stand as persons that we cannot assume on our own. We spend our lives responsively -- coming (and often struggling) to attend to and embody or express more fully the deepest potentials within us in myriad ways and means; we spend our lives calling others to this same embodiment and expression.

But a lot can hinder this most foundational vocational accomplishment. Sometimes our own woundedness prevents the achievement of this goal to greater degrees. Sometimes we are not given the tools or education we need to develop this capacity. Sometimes, we are badly or ineffectually loved and rendered relatively deaf and "mute" in the process. Oftentimes we muddle the clarity of that expression through cowardice, ignorance, or even willful disregard. Our hearts, as I have noted here before, are dialogical realities. That is, they are the place where God bears witness to himself, the event marked in a defining way by God's continuing and creative address and our own embodied response. In every way our lives are either an expression of the Word or logos of God which glorifies (him), or they are, to whatever extent, a dishonoring lie and an evasion.




And so, faced with a man who is crippled in so many fundamental ways --- one, that is, for whom the world of community, knowledge, and celebration is largely closed by disability, Jesus prays to God, touches, and addresses the man directly, "Ephphatha!" ---Be thou opened!" It is the essence of what Christians refer to as salvation, the event in which a word of command and power heals the brokennesses which cripple and isolate, and which, by empowering obedience reconciles the man to himself, his God, his people and world. As a result of Jesus' Word, and in response, the man speaks plainly --- for the first time (potentially) transparent to himself and to those who know him; he is more truly a revelatory or language event, authentically human and capable, through the grace of God, of bringing others to the same humanity through direct response and address.

Our own coming to wholeness, to a full and clear articulation of our truest selves is a communal achievement. Even (or even especially) in the lives of hermits this has always been true insofar as solitude is NOT isolation, but is instead a form of communion marked by profound dependence on the Word of God and lived specifically for the salvation of others. In today's gospel friends bring the man to Jesus, Jesus prays to God before acting to heal him. The presence of friends is another sign not only of the man's nature as made-for-communion and the fact that none of us come to language (or, that is, to the essentially human capacity for responsiveness or obedience) alone, but similarly, of the deaf man's total inability to approach Jesus on his own. At the same time, Jesus takes the man aside and what happens to him in this encounter is thus signalled to be profoundly personal, intimate, and beyond the merely evident. Friends are necessary, but at bottom, the ultimate healing and humanizing encounter can only happen between the deaf man and Christ.

In each of our lives there is deafness and "muteness" or inarticulateness. So many things are unheard by us, fail to touch or resonate in our hearts. So many things call forth embittered and cynical reactions which wound and isolate when what is needed is a response of genuine compassion and welcoming. Similarly, so many things render us speechless: bereavement, illness, ignorance, personal woundedness, etc. As a result we live our commitments half-heartedly, our loves guardedly, our joys tentatively, our pains self-consciously and noisily --- but helplessly and without meaning in ways which do not edify --- and in all these ways therefore, we are less human, less articulate, less the obedient or responsive language event we are called to be.

To each of us, then, and in whatever way or degree we need, Jesus says, "EPHPHATHA!" "Be thou opened!" He sighs in compassion and desire, unites himself with his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit, and touches us with his own hands and spittle. May we each allow ourselves to be brought to Jesus for healing. May we be broken open and rendered responsive and transparent by his powerful Word of command and authority. Especially, may we each become the clear gospel-founded words of joy in a world marked extensively and profoundly by deafness and the helplessness and despair of noisy inarticulateness.