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On September 26, 2022, Pope Francis received in audience a group of women religious from 34 countries, the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters of the Holy Family, in Rome for their general chapter. The Pope spoke with them about the art of listening, based on the theme of their meetings.
"It is nice, this thing of sending the tongue on holiday and devoting oneself to listening," he said, bringing laughter from the sisters, "that you work more on hearing than on speaking."
"To listen, the first thing that is needed is silence, deep silence, inner silence, that which we find in prayer," he added.
The Pope cited Paul VI in his address, and that saint-pope's lament that "very often, our lifestyles are 'full of noise.'"
And Francis made an astute observation, that "for many, raising the voice, physically or morally, presents itself as the solution to coax" others to do what they want.
But then, he suggested, often those who have followed someone shouting turn away to flock to another shouting even louder. And in the end, our humanity is, he said, "brutalized."
Detach from noise
Jesus asks for something else, the Pope said: "to go against this grain, to seek out silence, to detach ourselves from the world, from noise."
In silence, we can then discern, the Jesuit Pope explained: "to identify the different sounds, to weigh them and to distinguish them. In such a way, that initial clamour begins to take shape; what seemed dissonant will be understood and situated, it will have a name, it will have a face. No note will be too high or too low, and no sound will be strident to our ears if we find the harmony that only our silence can give. And I say that only our silence can give, because harmony is found, not imposed."
In this, we have to guard against the temptation to have "a beautiful melody" and then try to silence or reject what is "not in tune with it."
The Pope urged the sisters to be "prophets of listening" -- to listen to the voice of God, who calls us to love others and to love his gift of creation.
In this silence, and silent listening to God, we go from cacophony to symphony, the Pope said, if we "truly convince ourselves that raising our voices is not the path, that the only path is Jesus."
