Transcript
I was focused on my computer, as I was replying to an email, and our parish secretary came in the office and asked a question. From my peripheral view, I knew she was there, and then I looked at her, and I probably had a blank look on my face. Because I realised I wasn’t listening to her. You probably have experienced something similar where you were unable to properly respond to someone because you were preoccupied with someone else or something else.
There’s a lot of things that distract us nowadays. According to some studies, the average attention span now of a human adult is only 8.25 seconds. Which mirrors the length of time a person spends on a web page before looking at another one. Do you know that the Jewish people recite a few of the lines from our First Reading regularly, like twice or three times a day? I’m referring to the Shema! “Hear, O Israel!” I think there’s wisdom in repetition and being reminded constantly about something so important, and in this case, their identity as belonging to the One God.
For us Catholics, there is something that we also do repeatedly. It’s something that engages our hands, our speech and our listening. We say something out loud and using our hands make the sign of the cross. And it’s a wonderful reminder of our identity in Christ. It’s the pattern left to us by Christ on how we ought to relate with our neighbours. By making the sign of the Cross, may it shape or mold us into Christ’s image on the cross. Attentive listening is really a sort of dying to oneself, how so? Because by truly listening, we risk the possibility of being changed by what we hear. After I stared blankly at our parish secretary, I said, “Oh sorry I wasn’t listening”. I then gave my attention to her. But first, I had to let go of what I was doing, and in a small way it was a kind of self-emptying, and only then was there space, here, and here, for me to ask, “you were saying?”