A Listening Heart by Martin Roth

A Listening Heart*

By Martin Roth

In her American best seller Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, the poet Kathleen Norris compared growing in religious faith to writing a poem. “It takes time, patience, discipline, a listening heart. There is precious little certainty, and often great struggling, but also joy in our discoveries.”

The discovery that brought me the greatest joy was the Bible. It was like finding some long-lost family treasure that had lain untouched in the attic for generations.

There was always a Bible in our home when I was growing up—on the shelves somewhere amongst the Lenin and the Marx and the Rosa Luxemburg—even though we were an atheist family. But I doubt that it got opened. My own Bible now is opened frequently, as I avidly pursue stories of great divine acts that formed and transformed our world. For me there is an intense spiritual element to reading the Bible.

I have experienced more joys: of worship and prayer. And with a listening heart I have experienced the presence in me of God’s holy spirit, usually when I did not expect it.

I recall my baptism, one wintry Sunday morning in 1994, some months after my commitment to become a Christian. I was to read a testimony to our church congregation, explaining my religious journey. Then I was to be fully immersed underwater in the church baptistery, in recognition of my “rebirth”. I had seldom been more nervous.

Don’t worry, everyone told me. The Holy Spirit will take over. You’ll feel like you’re flying.

It didn’t happen, of course. I read my testimony in a strained voice. I stepped into the water, dressed in white, my pastor next to me. He recited a verse from the Bible, a verse that he “presented” to me, to serve me for the rest of my life in my Christian journey.

Next, in a judo-like move we had rehearsed in his office, he supported me as I plunged backwards into the water, then back up again. I stepped from the tub, my wife handed me some towels and I went to the men’s toilets to dry myself and get changed. I put my listening heart into overdrive, trying to discern some new feelings, new sensations, a change in me, anything that indicated that the Holy Spirit had arrived, that I was a different person. I just felt wet and shivery.

When the service ended members of the congregation came up and shook my hand and slapped me on the back. I felt like a child having a birthday party at which all the guests are adults. I smiled weakly and tried to be polite.

We had lunch with friends—still no feelings—and then went home. I had promised my children I would buy them an ice cream each, and we started walking together to the local milk bar.

And suddenly I realised I was flying.

What an extraordinary sensation. I seemed to be floating along the roadway. Floating past all the houses and trees—no; floating through the trees—no; I was the trees—and wanting to laugh and scream. I was bursting with love. I couldn’t contain it. I loved the world. I wanted to hug and kiss my children. Every passer-by. Every dog and cat. I wanted to embrace the sour old Chinese refugee who ran the milk bar and shouted at customers. I wanted to buy my children everything in the store.

The feeling lasted about five minutes, and now, like so many Christians, I have a listening heart that is also a pining heart, yearning for the spirit to lift me and caress me like that again.

I find myself drawn to those worship services that seek to impart a feeling of God’s presence. Until it disbanded, I often attended a weekly Taize worship service at a Carmelite monastery near my home. For 30 minutes worshippers sat in prayerful silence around a candle-lit cross. Then for an hour we sang melodic, contemplative hymns from the famous monastery in the French village of Taize, repeating the simple lyrics again and again, often experiencing a deep feeling of God’s presence in our hearts.

As I was writing this book I attended a two-week seminar on the role of the church in a post-modern age. Our lecturers were two New Zealanders, Mike Riddell and Mark Pierson.

Mike, who has billed himself as an “unemployed theologian”, is a talented and provocative novelist and non-fiction writer. Formerly a Baptist pastor, he once led a housing protest to the Auckland City Council and interrupted the meeting by stripping to his underpants. He then told the councilors that this was what they were doing to the poor of the city: stripping them of their dignity and leaving them naked.

Mark is pastor of an inner city Auckland church, and is constantly devising innovative, ritualistic styles of worship that attract artists, musicians and many young people.

During the seminar they taught us a little about the depth of spirituality that is part of the Christian heritage, such as Celtic worship, with its emphasis on creation and the environment, its mystic traditions and its stress on the feminine. They also showed how art, music and poetry can be integrated into worship, playing tracks that ranged from Pink Floyd to Sinead O’Connor to the Dances with Wolves soundtrack.

Music has, of course, traditionally been one of the means for worshippers to gain a sense of the divine, and it is little wonder that, in a world that is searching for God, sacred music is seeing such a revival. After the Three Tenors and The Four Seasons, some of the best-selling classical CDs of today are recordings of Christian music.

I used to listen mainly to ‘60s and ‘70s pop, and I also had a passion for world music. Now, I find myself drawn to Gregorian chant and to the divine vocal music of groups like the best-selling American female quartet Anonymous 4. (One magazine described them as “the fab four of medieval music”, and another as “the sound of heaven”.)

I listen to the compositions of Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German Christian ecstatic mystic whose music and poetry is sometimes quite startling in its passionate sensuality. One recording of her music, A Feather on the Breath of God, has sold over a quarter of a million copies.

It is surely no coincidence that three of the most talented and respected classical-music composers in the world today are deeply spiritual Christians: John Tavener (British, but a member of the Eastern Orthodox church), the Estonian Arvo Part (also Eastern Orthodox) and the Polish Catholic Henryk Gorecki. Their sparse, haunting style has become known as “holy minimalism”.

Tavener has no doubts about the nature of his calling: art is inseparable from religion, he declares; music is a form of prayer. His Song for Athene was played at the funeral of Princess Diana. Meanwhile, Part says he spends far more time in monasteries than in concert halls.

Gorecki’s Third Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, is based on a 15th-century Polish prayer known as the Holy Cross Lament, and on a prayer to the Virgin Mary, inscribed on a death-camp wall by an 18-year-old Polish girl imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II. A 1992 recording of the symphony has sold more than one million copies

It is music that is simple and uncluttered and unmistakably modern; there is little that is ornate or decorative. In the third movement the same quiet melody is repeated again and again, like waves gently lapping around your body. And as you listen you are at first just hearing the waves, but then you feel them and then you are in them, floating softly up and down with the rhythm. It is music that inspires hope and faith; music you might have thought was no longer being composed in a cynical age like ours.

Martin Roth graduated in law from Auckland University and then went to work as a reporter on the now-defunct Auckland Star. He also served with papers in the British West Midlands and worked on kibbutzim in Israel, before spending 17 years as a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. His reports from throughout Asia appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Arriving in Australia in 1993, he soon found himself a devout worshipper at a local Baptist church. He’s written about his lengthy spiritual path to Christianity in his 1999 book Living Water to Light the Journey.

Visit his website at: www.martinrothonline.com/