The Holy Father and other Church leaders last weekend concluded their Lenten retreat. Pope Benedict spoke of the prayer of Solomon, for "a heart that listens."
Solomon's prayer is from the First Book of Kings, Chapter 3 verse 9:
Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?
Said Pope Benedict:
It really seems to me that this sums up the whole of the Christian vision of the human being. In himself man is not perfect; he is a relational being. It is not his cogito [I think] that can cogitare [think] of the whole of reality. He needs listening, he needs to listen to the other and especially to the Other with a capital "O", to God. Only in this way does he know himself, only in this way does he become himself.
From my place here I could always see the Mother of the Redeemer, the Sedes Sapientiae, the living throne of wisdom with Wisdom incarnate on her lap. And, as we have seen, St Luke presents Mary precisely as a woman with a heart that listens, who is steeped in the word of God, who listens to the Word, meditates on it (synballein), composes it and preserves it, who cherishes it in her heart.
The Fathers of the Church say that at the moment of the conception of the eternal Word in the Virgin's womb, the Holy Spirit entered Mary through her ear. In listening she conceived the eternal Word, she gave flesh to this Word. And thus she tells us what it means to have a listening heart.
Here Mary is surrounded by the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, by the Communion of Saints. And thus, in these very days we have seen and understood precisely that it is not in the isolated "I" that we can truly listen to the Word but only in the "we" of the Communion of Saints.
I may try to unpack some of this as the week goes on.
Meantime, as we continue through Lent, let's pray for a heart that listens for God, and when it hears Him, listens to Him.
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