Listening With Your Heart

I just finished reading a wonderful book called "Love, Anthony" by Lisa Genova. While I originally picked it up because it was about autism, it is actually about so much more. The author artfully combines the themes of loss, grieving, autism, and finding the strength to redefine your life after a tragedy. I found myself stopping every few pages to reflect on what I had just read and try to figure out how I could apply it to my own life.

One of the more meaningful passages occurs when the main character, on a whim, stops in a church and knocks on the door of a priest, after lighting a candle for her dead son.

She braces herself to hear the same tired platitudes she had heard a million times before, braces herself to be summarily dismissed after some trite statement that mean nothing to her. After all, what could anyone possibly say or do that would lessen the pain of losing your son at eight years old? She asks the priest how she could possibly believe in God. How she could possibly find God in a world that would allow that to happen. "He's not answering my prayers," she said.

The priest tells her she won't hear God if she tries to listen with her ears. You have to listen with your heart, he says. It takes her a while, but eventually she figures out how to listen with her heart.

When I got home from services at the synagogue I started going to a few months ago tonight, I wrote to myself, "I found myself humming along to the songs even though I still have no idea how to even approximate the words." For once, that felt like enough. I felt connected and peaceful and tried to focus on that and not on the other less harmonious thoughts rattling around my brain. I felt a sense of positive energy and, for a while, couldn't stop smiling. It's so much easier when you're not obsessed with how you don't know the words, or thinking about what other people have that you don't. I was trying to listen with my ears, but found instead how meaningful it is to listen with your heart. Your ears and brain will constantly judge "Am I doing this right?", but your heart knows what's right. When you're calm enough, if you go with your heart, you will get to the space you were meant to be in.

I often have trouble getting into this mental space of being able to hear with my heart. Usually negative emotions keep me from hearing anything at all, with my heart or my ears. When I consider something, I analyze it with logic borne of my experiences, and often have trouble imagining something that I haven't experienced exists. That's not where love exists, though. Love is a feeling that you have to get past analysis to feel.

 When I experience the feeling of connection with someone else, I calm down, and my heart opens up. I can feel the love and spirit in the energy around me. Then, at least for an hour, I feel filled up and smile. I don't believe in a judgemental God, but I believe in the love of other people. Feeling connection in the singing of other people seems like a good use of a religious space to me... regardless of whether or not you know the words or religious laws.