THE POWER OF HEARING

Have you ever seen a child, an infant barely able to stand on her
own, dance to the sound of music? I’m sure you have: her eyes
wide and brilliant, the little swaddled bum bouncing up and
down, splayed fingers waving at the ends of outstretched chubby
arms, reaching for something joyous and not quite reachable,
laughter burbling from a face aglow with happiness. That child
didn’t need to be taught to dance. The sound she heard reached
straight down into her innocent soul and set her body in motion.
The same child might be frightened into tears at the sound of a
stranger’s sneeze.
A couple, grown used to each other through many years of
banal, daily living, hear an old song on the car radio and turn to
each other with warm and knowing smiles, reliving the same
cherished memory without a word.
You hear from a passing acquaintance a tidbit of “information”
about someone you have known and respected for years as a
person of inviolate integrity; suddenly you find yourself doubting
his character.
A long-fractured relationship is brought to reconciliation by
hearing a simple word of confession or apology or forgiveness.
The healing process can finally begin: the balm of peace is
spread on the old and festering wound.
Such is the power of what we hear.
Of all the human senses, our hearing has the greatest sensitivity
and dynamic range. We register sound by processing variations
of pressure in the air around us. Those tiny pressure changes
are gathered by the shell of the outer ear and funneled down the
auditory canal to vibrate the tympanic membrane—what most of
us call the eardrum, which is a good name, since it works in
much the same way as a drum.
Behind the eardrum, in the middle ear, are three bones called
ossicles that amplify and transfer sound onward to the cochlea
in the inner ear. The cochlea is a tiny nest of fluid-filled tubes
and hairlike transmitters; these translate the vibrations into
nerve impulses and deliver them to the brain, where they are
interpreted with astonishingly fine discrimination as a wide
spectrum of sound.
Apart from the outer ear—which, alas, can sometimes be
disconcertingly large, despite its being the least important piece
of our auditory equipment—the whole construction is incredibly
tiny. Those ossicles, sometimes called the stirrup, hammer, and
anvil (because of their resemblance in shape to a blacksmith’s
massive tools), are the smallest and most delicate bones in the
human body.
Amazingly, with this flimsy equipment, a healthy human ear is
sensitive enough to discern minute changes in atmospheric
pressure.
Some scientists say that the level of performance of a normal
human ear can’t reasonably be expected from the materials
involved. In other words, just how we can so effectively
distinguish different levels and qualities of sound is still
something of a mystery.
For most of us, understanding the mechanics of hearing isn’t all
that important. What we hear is, though, and so is how we hear
it: the nature of the sound we hear, the context in which we hear
it (including our own mental/emotional state, and who or what
produces the sound), the message we interpret therein, and the
effect it has.
Sometimes music makes us want to dance, and sometimes it
makes us want to smash the radio.
But hearing may be a more-than-physical experience. Most of
us understand that we also possess a kind of internal ear, a way
of hearing words and sounds that makes no impression at all
upon our incredibly sensitive eardrums. We sense that we
should listen closely to this interior voice—that it may have more
important things to say than the relentless, cacophonous assault
of the world around us, or the echoes of other voices that clang
about in our skulls during quiet moments. And yet, perhaps, this
internal “sound” may also at times be heard in the external.
Thomas Merton wrote of arriving, after “sloshing through the
cornfield,” at his hermitage and settling in for the night as the
rain drummed on the roof:
The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal
myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor.
Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing,
judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves,
soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood
with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the
hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at
night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly
innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the
talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of
the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long
as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
There are moments, aren’t there, when a very ordinary, familiar
sound takes on the cadence of the Divine’s voice? Job 26:14
(ESV) describes a number of ways God makes His power and
presence known in the natural world and then says,
Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a
whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who
can understand?
Throughout the Old Testament, God’s nearly constant lament
about His people is that He has been speaking to them (“Do you
not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the
beginning?”), and that they have known He was speaking, “Yet
they did not listen or incline their ear.”
I don’t want to miss hearing that Voice, whether it whispers or
thunders. Every time I’ve heard it before, it was loving and
tender, full of blessing even when it delivered a message to
bring me to my knees: challenging, refining, comforting,
affirming, anchoring.
And so I pray:
Lord, open my ears, that I may release what I have heard, and so
hear You, become a listener, and truly hear others.