. . . Lend Me Your Ear
An ULTRA-SONIC
SPIRITUALITY

If you have ears to hear,
then hear.
        Jesus (Matthew 11:15)

After transitioning our thinking from matter to spirit, the second transition we must make to understand why prayer is the most powerful force in the universe is to transition our theology from vision to vibration, from eye to ear, from structure to rhythm.   Instead of squinting at the future, perhaps we should keep our ears cocked.

The relationship between text and tradition in the reading of the Scriptures has been described by postmodern philosopher and phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas as "a text stretched over a tradition like the strings on the wood of a violin."  Levinas argues that tradition needs to be seen as a "place," a "place" where "all the harmonics of the said resonate, wherein an entire life is breathed into the letters of the text, inspiring it?"¹¹  Tradition thus is less something measured in terms of fixity of sound and/or fidelity of transmission as in musical interpretation and nuanced performances.  To live out of a tradition is not to live by sight but by sound.

Is there a bigger buzzword in the business world today than "vision?"   Can you go to a conference on leadership without hearing about "the vision thing?"

Is there a bigger buzzword in the business world today than "vision?"   Can you go to a conference on leadership without hearing about "the vision thing?"

I know of one church leader who asks everyone he meets, "So what's your vision?"  To begin to understand the power of prayer, we must get over our fixation on "vision" and embrace the vibrational, sonic dimensions of theology.

Open my ears, that I may hear voices of truth thou sendest clear; and while the wave notes fall on my ear, everything false will disappear. Silently now I wait for thee, ready, my God, thy will to see. Open my ears, illumine me, Spirit divine.            Clara H. Scott (1895)

It's time we developed a theology of soundness, a sound theology.¹²   The Greek word "cathecesis" is based on our word "echo."   Could it be that our theology isn't as "sound" as it should be because we haven't understood sound as a way of experiencing the divine?  Could it be that we do not "endure sound doctrine" because we do not "hold fast the form of sound words" (2 Tim. 4:3, 1:13) from the divine soundscape?

Martin Luther insisted that God is a "deus loquens" -- a "speaking God."  Perhaps it is time to come to terms with the sonic realm of spirituality that has manifested itself in the West in the chanting of the Hebrews,¹³ Gregorian chants of the Roman church, the "Jesus Prayer" chants of the Eastern Orthodox church, the hymns of Protestantism, and the ancient Christian legend that Mary conceived Jesus through her ears because the ears are the purest of our organs and the ones most directly connected to our souls.

One of the greatest achievements of the human soul is not to see, as the modern world would have it, but to hear.  To hear clearly is religion.  It is the ears, not the eyes, that are the "gateways to the soul."  We would prefer the eyes over the ears because, as Lorenz Oken pointed out years ago, the eyes take us into the world whereas the ears take the world into us.  With the eyes we can construct our own reality; with the ears we have to deal with the reality of the way things really are.   Perhaps that is why Western spirituality has emphasized sacred time, sacred space and sacred image over sacred sound.¹⁴  Ook at how many tradmarked images there are, and only three trademarked sound: (1) the NBC chimes; (2) the MGM lion; and (3) the Harley-Davidson "Hog" engine--patent pending.

Ever notice how an owl's face is shaped like an ear trumpet?  An owl's facial ruff amplifies the sound reaching its ears by a factor of 10.¹⁵  Touch your ears.  If they were but slightly more powerful, you would be tuned into the chatter of rats.  Were your ears three times more powerful, they would be tuned into your own heartbeats and digestive processes.  Were they five times more powerful, you would hear what field mice were saying.  Seven times more powerful, you would hear what bats were saying.

Our ears are just powerful enough to develop a "hearing heart" and to discern God's voice.  In fact, "discern" comes from the Hebrew word that means "to hear."  The Scheme really begins, not with "Hear, O Israel" but "Discern, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."

As every magician and illusionist knows, you can't trust your eyes.  The eye "deceives;" the eye is easily fooled. That's why the "pinch test." Is it a real or artificial flower?  You touch it, pinch it.  The eyes create "optical illusions" as quickly as you can drop a pencil into a water glass.   No person looks the same to two people because each one of us has eyes that construct deata differently.  In spite of Goethe's motto that "optical illusion is visual truth," God gave us eyelids for a reason--to stop our eyes from deceiving and tricking us.  God didn't give us earlids for a reason: we can trust our ears more than our eyes.  Even though the eye processes information faster than the ear, there are three times the number of neurons connecting the ear to the brain than the eye to the brain.

Ever wonder which is worse?  To go blind like Milton (who wrote Paradise Lost when blind) or to go deaf like Beethoven (who wrote the Fifth Symphony when deaf)?  Why not ask the expert: blind/deaf/mute Helen Keller.  Keller was convinced from a lifetime of experience that deafness is worse than blindness:

I am just as deaf as I am blind . . . Deafness is a much worse misfortune.  For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus -- the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughs astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man . . . I have found deafness to be a much greater handicap than blindness.¹⁶

Eyes grow a little from their size at birth, but not much: a child's eyes are 90% grown by the age of 2 years.  Our nose and ears never stop growing.  Hearing is the first of the senses to greet us before we were born; hearing is the last of the senses to leave us at death.  The "ear-gate" -- so much more developed and sensitive than our "eye-gate" -- has been created to act as the natural conduit of connection between the Creator and all creation.

A piece of music that I love expresses thoughts to me that are not too imprecise to be framed in words, but too precise.  So I find that attempts to express such thoughts in words may have some point to them, but they are also unsatisfying.¹⁷
          Composer/pianist Felix Mendelssohn         

Philosopher/German jazz musician Joachim-Ernst Berendt's pathbreaking book The World is Sound (1987) is based on three questions.  First, "Why has our sense of hearing been so carefully differentiated..., much more so than our sense of seeing?"

Second, why are our ears given the "capacity for measuring, for the mathematical?  And why is our capacity for transcendence also located in our sense of hearing?  And why is our sense of balance, of equilibrium placed there also?"   You can't see that a colom emits a light frequency twice that of another one; but you can hear whether a higher tone really swings with a frequency twice that of the lower one.  The highly trained ear can even beat the tuning fork.

Third, "Why are the date we receive from our ears so much more precise than that from our eyes?  Why is the range of what we can hear so much wider -- by exactly ten-fold -- than the range of what we can see?"  (p.8).  Hans Kayser points out the astonishing fact that our ears are the only human sense organ that is able to perceive numerical quantity as well as numberical value:

The ears not only recognize exact numerical proportions, that is, numerical quantities like 1:2 as an octave, 2:3  as a fifth, 3:4 as a fourth, etc.; at the same time they hear values that they perceive as C, G, F, and so on.  So the tone value fuses two elements into one unit: the element of sensing -- the tone, that is -- with the element of thinking, of numerical value . . Among all our human senses, we only have one organ that is capable of this fusion: the ears . . . Our soul is thus capable of deciding on the correctness or incorrectness of an intellectual quantity.¹⁸

Others have pointed out how the ears can register more minimal impulses than any other sense.  The amplitude of the vibrations of our eardrum lies in the area of 10^-9 power.  That is smaller, we are told, than the wavelength of visible light and even less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.  The smallest stimuli our ear can just barely perceive, on the other hand, have to be amplified by a factor of 10^-6 power in order to reach the level of the highest volume perceivable, by a factor in the million range.  Were we to amplify the smallest impulses our eyes can register by the same factor, we would be blinded instantly.¹⁹

The answer to all three of Berendt's questions as to why we perceive more of the world with our ears than our eyes lies in God's creation of our ears as temples, altars for the presence and power of the living God.²⁰  From a biblical perspective, faith is not a "vision" thing.  Faith is a "vibration" thing.  martin Luther made it an axiom of the Protestant Reformation that the most important organs for a theologian are the ears.  Fides et auditu: or in the words of the Apostle Paul, "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word" (Romans 10:17).  Theology's first task is listening.  What seeing is to knowing, hearing is to faith.

From a deeply spiritual standpoint, you don't "see" a vision.   You "hear" a vision.  Sound becomes sight.  Vibrations becomes bisions.  The invisible becomes visible.  When the Day of Pentecost was come, how did the Spirit first manifest itself?  Only after "the sound of a rushing, mighty wind" filled the room did the "tongue of fire" become visible (Acts 2).  Over and over again in the Scriptures, sound becomes sight.

Some people who have perfect pitch actually hear in colors.  In fact, perfect pitch is also known as "color hearing."²¹  Sound travels in wave frequencies and so does light.  Speed up sound (i.e. the number of vibrations per second), or slow down light (i.e. the number of vibrations per second), and they are synonymous.  When the Ten Commandments were given to the Hebrews, "All the people saw the sounds."²²

We listen life, and maybe even other lifeforms,²³ into existence.  We sound forth in order to see fully.  We can even "listen a person's soul into existence," according to Christian mystic Catherine de Hueck Doherty.  Or in the words of theologian Nelle Morton, the biblical witness is one of "hearing into speech."

When faced with a sanitation problem in their African village, the residents faced the issue first by drumming.  Then they sang.  Then they danced the chicken dance.  After all that, they sat in silence and visualized the problem's "solution."  As the Friends have taught us perhaps better than anyone, listening is not passive, but active.  In the words of Quaker theologian Scott Savage, "Friends use the 'technologyh' of sitting, the 'dialectic' of waiting, and the 'activist platform' of listening.'"

How do I know what I think
until I hear what I say?
     -- American folk saying

When hearing is good,
speaking is good.
     -- ancient Egyptian proverb

When asked how he came up with the design for his most famous residence, Fallingwater House in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, Welsh American architect Frank Lloyd Wright replied, "The visit to the waterfall in the woods stays with me and a domicile has taken vague shape in my mind to the music of the stream."²⁴  When asked to commont on a piece of music, tenor sax player Charles Lloyd once said, "Words don't go there."²⁵  According to Toni Morrison, black history was written above all in music.²⁶

It's interesting how storytellers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have captured the hearing essence of the soul better than theologians have.  Did you see Jurassic Park?  When did they first know that T-Rex was about to appear?  They felt and heard the vibrations.  By the time they "saw" T-Rex, it was too late.

Did you see the Star Wars trilogy?  How did Luke Skywalker learn to lean into the power of The Force?  Did he develop his powers of vision?   Just the opposite.  He was trained in suppressing his natural inclination to "look" for The Force and instead "hear" and "feel" it.   That's what the blindfold-headgear was all about.  You learned to drive a car with a clutch the same way Luke Skywalker learned to pilot his spacecraft.  Amidst a lot of stalling out, grinding gears and rolling backwards, you were taught not to trust your eyes but to listen to the hum of the engine, the vibrations of the car, and to "feel" your way forward.

There is a way lf listeining which
is a way of giving.

Novelist/philosopher Marcel Proust ²⁷

Cosmis vibrations are everywhere.²⁸  If all matter is vibrating energy, then sound is the energy formed by vibrations.  Put sound and rhythm together and you get ... music.  From our toes to our teeth, from hail to Hale Bopp, everything emits vibrations, sounds to feed or famish the soul.  In Nadya Aisenberg's collection of poems there is a line about a land where

there are no words
but some notes
Eve taught the birds.²⁹

We live in an ocean of vibrations.  Paul says that there are many different sounds in the world, "and nothing is without sound."  If we don't know the meaning of the sounds, we can't interpret God (1 Cor. 14:101-11).  What to some is the voice of God, to others is sheer noise.  What to some is deafening thunder and lightning, to others is the voice of an angel (John 12:20-32).  What to some is "bad luck" or "good fortune," to others is divine providence.

A stone is frozen music.
Greek philosopher/mathematician Pythagoras

Every time a bud bursts and a flower appears, a sound is made.  We used to talk about the silence of the deep oceans, or the stillness of outer space.   Now we know that all of creation hums with the sounds of life.  Everything that is has sound and rhythm -- from otters and octopi to quails and quasars.  Fin whales can easily hear the bleeps of other fin whales 4000 miles away; some scientists argue 13,000 miles away.  Humpbacks often sing in rhyme, and the songs they sing are always changing while at the same time they are passed from male to male "so that in any one season all the whales of a single ocean will be singing the same song."³⁰

Job testified to how "The morning stars sang together" (38:7).   Jesus warned his disciples that if they failed to praise him, the very "stones will sing" (Lk. 19:40).  When they abandoned him at the cross, the earth did cry out.

This is my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father's wrold,
the birds their carols raise,
the morning light, the lily white,
declare their maker's praise.
This is my Father's world:
he shines in all that's fair;
in the rustling grass I hear him pass;
he speaks to me everywhere.
            Maltbie D. Babcock (1901)

In my opinion the two most important languages of humanity, theology and music, have the task of communicating precisely where other forms of communication are no longer possible.

Theologian/author Dorothee Soelle³¹