listening as worship
Thursday, 15 May 2008 — peter
Walking down the hallway this morning, I caught a glimpse of someone lying in bed reading the paper. The room looked dim, blinds lowered almost to the windowsill. I took a few more steps and, without further thinking, turned around, knocked and entered. The patient, call him Mr. Grant, lowered the paper and with a smile of surprise coached me to raise the blinds just do. What made you stop by? he wanted to know, oxygen mask askew, bright eyes piercing out from under bushy white brows. It looked a bit dark for reading, I explained.
Seemingly without segue, he spoke of three sons who are looking after him, cutting the grass at the house while he’s away, one fixing the shower, the other arranging for daily visits from a home care worker to make his breakfast and peel a few spuds for supper. And how he’d tavelled to Hawaii with his wife of 52 years and how doctors had told her to get back home because she had skin cancer. And how his hearing aid stopped working and had been sent for repairs and how his hearing was gone in one and below 40% in the other ear. And why had I stopped by? And would I come and visit him at home, ring the bell (best come around the back), seven blocks from the shopping centre, in a house bought back in ‘62 for less than three thousand, and guess show much it’s worth today!
Where’s this going, asked a tiny voice in my head; not important, said the other: just listen. This man is telling you a story. It matters little whether you understand the details. Listen to the sound, the music, the emphasis in his telling. “True listening brings us in touch even with that which is unsaid and unsayable,” writes John O’Donohue.
Close to dying, his wife long gone, sons nearby or imagined, hearing shot, breathing a pain. What was important at that moment? Martin Heidegger says that true listening is worship. Here was Mr. Grant (pro)claiming fragments of his life and I was his witness. Nothing else mattered.
Today was the third day in the new role as interim Coordinator of Spiritual Care at Victoria Hospice.
Sunday, 18 May 2008 at 15:34
Listening,such a difficult skill to have when the mind darts in a hundred directions seeking the emotional bandage. And yet we forget that the medicine that works best is to just listen.