Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
-
T. S. Eliot, “Ash
Wednesday”
In the Wild Horse Desert about ninety minutes south
and west of Corpus Christi sits a silent prayer retreat: No TV’s, no radios, no
internet, and only spotty cell phone service. They call it Lebh Shomea.
That’s what Solomon asked God for: a lebh shomea.
The Lord opened up God’s Big Ol’ Grab Bag o’
Goodies, the divine Disneyland that the televangelists are always promising.
Name-it-and-claim-it, Solomon my boy, and it’s all yours.
And the child king replied, “Give thy servant lebh shomea.”
It literally means, “a listening heart.” The Hebrew
verb moves in two directions, combining the ideas of hearing and acting. “I
want the kind of heart that hears what you command and then actually does it.”
And that’s where lebh
shomea meets Lebh Shomea. In the
sleepless rain of cyber-chatter that envelopes our days, bits and bytes
outshout the still, small voice that tells our hearts the truth. Sometimes a
listening heart has no chance unless we take it to a place where there isn’t
quite so much else to hear.
The very first time Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel it
is not to pronounce a truth but to ask a question: What seek ye? And the answer is interesting: Rabbi, where dwellest thou? (Jo 1.38) The Word is more interested
in hearing than speaking and the proto-disciples prefer presence to precept.
Malcolm Guite, in his book Faith,
Hope and Poetry, describes this as “the radical idea that the Word behind
all words and scriptures has been made, not more words, but flesh.”
Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound?
Only where there is lebh shomea, and enough
silence.
Shhh!
Doug
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