Pope Francis, since the beginning of his pontificate, has insisted on the need to listen. At the time we heard the call to exercise that "apostolate of listening" to which the Pope referred. Now it has become a fundamental theme of the new Synod on the Synodal Church.
A synodal Church is a Church that knows how to listen. This is what the Pope said in his homily at the opening of the Synod in Rome (10.10.2021): "The Synod asks us to listen to the questions, concerns and hopes of every Church, every people and every nation. And also to listen to the world, to the challenges and changes that it puts before us". But whatwhy this human hearing can be so decisive?
It is said of the German thinker Hegel, that when he was young, he was walking along a road with a friend. Then, they heard the sonorous echo of the church bells ringing for the death of someone. That sound penetrated forever in the ears and heart of the young Hegel, who suddenly stumbled upon the mystery of our sordid finitude: at the end of existence the lights go out, the eyes close and the ears stop vibrating. It is said that all his idealistic philosophy (in search of the ideal of the eternal), is a relentless combat against the signs of corruption and death. His philosophy is a gloss on death and finitude. For Hegel heard the bells of death, and perhaps also the distant echo of immortality that resounds in the heart of man.
Someone told me that he had the good fortune to attend the lectures of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, according to the witness, addressed the audience in a thin, hard-to-perceive voice. And yet his soft voice revealed a keen sense of hearing. With his philosophical meditation, Heidegger was delving into the mysteries of reality and the world. So much so that he conceived thinking as thanksgiving for the secrets of the world and of history. Only he who is capable of listening to the world is able to scrutinize its most hidden secrets. Thus Heidegger revealed himself as a profound thinker who developed a delicate philosophy of human existence in the midst of the vicissitudes of the world.
But Heidegger and Hegel take up ancient intuitions, already present in Greek mythical thought, as well as in the feeling of Jewish revelation. The obscure Heraclitus already said that men are called to have "an attentive ear to the being of things". And what defines Israel, that People that received God's Revelation, if not being a People of listening to God and his omens? Once again, in the midst of our time of words and technology, it is necessary to urge the new generations to learn silence, solitude and listening -a triad that is surely fruitful. But not only listening to the word, to news, to conversation, to song or to text. But above all, listening to things that do not speak but that open us to the mystery of meaning they contain.
The listener who does not see (and knows how to close his eyes to the world) seems to bring a different vision of the world and of history. The descriptions of the seer seem to give power over a reality that becomes a stage. The reality penetrated by the eyes becomes a field of exploration and experimentation, subject to manipulation and transformation.
The visionary man of our time has seen the future of a new man, a mixture of flesh and technology, capable of developing his physical, psychic and spiritual powers to the extreme. But, if we complement sight with hearing, and combine vision and listening in a harmonious synthesis, another world appears: a world that is certainly knowable, but at the same time called to be heard, that is, touched by the gentle caress of a listening that allows us to gradually enter the dark light of existence.
Augustine said that "touch defines knowledge". This is when the question arises as to the lawfulness of our contemporary way of treating the world: Is it lawful or not to treat the mystery of nature in this way? Light illuminates, colors are admired, figures are observed, faces are contemplated, movements are seen. But the good and evil that resonate in the conscience are not seen, but heard in the depths of oneself. It is when the ethical sense of the world and of our variegated relations with the world emerges.
Then, what should we do? It was the distant question that some asked that prophet of the desert who announced the arrival of the new times. John the Baptist had listened in the silence and solitude of the desert to the voice of God and the groanings of man. If humanity does not become apt to listen, it will become incapable of perceiving the signs of the times that announce the Last Coming of the Son of Man. Only the attitude of listening as an anthropological place allows us to scrutinize the signs of the times, like that wind that announces the storm or that song that heralds spring. The ear is consecrated as the interpreter of the meanings of existence. The art of listening can preserve us from the nihilism that finds itself without the strength to understand the meaning of the world.
