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Often there is a great deal of noise in our hearts. We have to learn to reduce it to a gentle silence and listen to God. We need to do what the Gospel says: make straight the paths of the Lord (Lk 3:4) in our own hearts.
To do this, we need to pray to the Lord for a “bulldozer” to push away the rockfall and debris. God will do this for us if we stop the swirling dust of our own mutterings, the constant using of the pronoun “I”, our thinking that we are always right and someone else is wrong, our non-listening to our own brothers and sisters.
The weight of listening is heavy. That is why we need to pray for a spiritual bulldozer to make straight the ways of the Lord in our hearts. Then God himself might walk these paths, unencumbered.
He can come into our hearts and do the listening there. He can listen to others through us, talk through us, understand through us, help through us. He can console those who come to us.
If the paths of our hearts are made straight, he will come running.
It is time, time to pray so that we might listen to the hunger of others. Usually people don’t want us to do too much for them. They want us to listen. There is such a great hunger for this today.
Excerpted from Grace in Every Season, (2001), Dec. 17, p. 331, MH Publications, out of print
