Ten years ago a brain tumour left me hearing impaired. After a few years, my hearing loss was deemed severe enough that I qualified for a cochlear implant. Those few years of being more deaf than hearing taught me a great deal about listening and how difficult it is to truly listen to another person, even for those whose physical hearing is perfect.

In my disability, I had to learn other ways of listening to people – lip reading, facial expressions, body language, but also what is often referred to as listening with the heart. It was only in deafness that I grew to appreciate the power and beauty of truly listening to another person. Listening in a focused and intentional manner with the heart has links with discernment.

Discernment requires an attentive listening that is followed up by action – even if the action is as simple as giving the speaker my undivided attention. Fr. John Veltri composed a prayer called Teach Me to Listen. The heart of the prayer says, “Help me to be aware that no matter what words I hear, the message is, ‘Accept the person I am. Listen to me.’”

At the beginning of his famous Rule, Saint Benedict reminds his community, “Listen carefully to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice.” Listen, be attentive, and put it into practice.

We hear in the Gospel, “The Good Shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. The sheep follow him because they know his voice.” The image of the Good Shepherd is one of the clearest images we have of Jesus’ tenderness. It is also a good description of listening and discernment. Discernment involves being able to distinguish between voices that we can trust and follow, and voices and words that are suspicious. I need to discern between the voice of God and voices that take me away from God.

The sheep hear and recognize the voice of the shepherd. They are able to discern if the voice is that of their shepherd or a bandit. The way of the shepherd is one of life for the sheep. The way of the bandit or stranger is a path to destruction and death for the sheep. Jesus is calling us to an attentive listening. And that attentive listening usually requires from us action or service. Listen, be attentive, and put it into practice.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s method of prayer relies on listening. In his spiritual exercise on the mystery of the Incarnation, he invites us to listen to the sounds of the people on the earth, to listen to God’s desire to bring about the salvation of all people, and to listen to the availability of Mary in Nazareth. He says, “This is to hear what they are saying … and then by reflecting on oneself to draw some profit from what has been heard.” Ignatius is not just thinking of Mary’s response and availability, but that of each one of us.

Like Saint Benedict and the Good Shepherd, Ignatius is not interested in listening just for the sake of physically hearing something. We have to put into practice what we have heard. We are not listening to a voice designed to lull us to sleep or to help us relax. We are listening to a voice that is asking something from us, a voice that is stirring us into action and service. Go and set the world on fire! Hearing is not a passive or neutral compliance. It is active. Attentive listening means I receive and respond appropriately to a message.

Attentive listening means that the sounds coming at us cannot be background music. We have to get away from our selective deafness and give undivided attention. That requires a kind of spiritual literacy. Just as media literacy means that I learn to be discerning about all the images and messages that come at me from the media, so spiritual literacy means that I am able to read what is going on within me and sift through what is coming at me.

This form of listening from the Good Shepherd, Benedict and Ignatius is incarnational. We listen and respond in the real world with all its distractions. This attentive listening is not reserved for times of retreat or prayer. It takes place at the breakfast table, on the bus, in church, in our conversations with each other.

In the First Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah encounters God at Horeb, not in a strong wind, an earthquake, or fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.” That silence is rare and it requires an attentive heart. Pope Benedict XVI reflected on “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization” in his 2012 World Communication Day message. He speaks of the relationship between silence and word, “two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved.”

Learning to communicate is learning to listen and contemplate as well as speak. So, let’s practice this listening with the ears of the heart. Let’s pray to grow in awareness that no matter what words I hear, the message the person is offering is, ‘Accept the person I am. Listen to me.’