Listening to our lives

This Lent we're doing two programs through St. David's--both of them as means of listening to our lives. Very different means. Through Six Tuesdays we'll be practicing listening non-verbally by way of meditation. Through Lenten Soup we'll be reading Fred Buechner's book Now and Then and listening to our lives by way of words, ours and others.

This key passage in Buechner speaks about for itself about listening through words:

Listen to your life.

All moments are key moments.

You sit down at your desk in front of your typewriter, or if, like me, you don't use a desk and a typewriter, you sit down wherever you sit down with a pad of paper in your lap and a pen in your hand. Is it a book you were going to write, or a letter to a friend, or a diary, if you keep one? Or are you sitting down not to write anything at all, maybe, but just to think, to remember, or just pray, maybe, which is another kind of thinking, another way of remembering? Which ever it is you sit down to, the process is much the same. Writing, thinking, remembering, praying -- you need words for all of them….By means of vowels and consonants, you must put together the best words you can -- words that, if possible, not only mean something but also evoke something, call something forth from the person you address with your words. Christ himself both spoke such a word and was such a word.

I haven't found a page in Now and Then where Mr. Buechner, through his lovely and open-hearted way with words, has not evoked in me a deeper appreciation and desire for listening. Through our conversations each Lent around a good book, you who participate in this more sociable practice have never failed to evoke in me a similar response.