The Call and the Response
On learning to answer | The Word in the Wild, Epiphany 2, Year B
On the first morning of the New Year, I went outside in the pre-dawn dark and listened. It didn’t take long before I heard it, a melodic “chuck chuck.” It was the call of an American Robin, my first bird of the year. First birds are a tradition among birders. It can serve as an of omen, an ambiguous sign of what lies ahead in the year of birds. Most want to avoid the invasive and raucous European Starlings or House Sparrows, and all hope for something extraordinary, but usually the year begins with a common bird—a crow, or cardinal, or robin. I was satisfied with mine, a pleasant, everyday bird that is a joy to watch all year round. For the rest of the day, I kept listening, and by its end I had over 30 species to begin the year.
I’ve been training my ears since I was a child to distinguish the sounds of birds. It takes practice, especially for the more subtle species. And my listening for birds has trained me to tune in more generally—to hear the world around me at any given moment. This practice has taught me that at any time, in any place, there are calls going out—sounds and words that are seeking an answer.
Philosophers, from Martin Heidegger to Jean-Louis Chretien, have understood the nature of language, or even being itself, as an answer to a call. And this reflects the biblical vision, where light and land, sky and sea, animals and plants are all called into being. Chretien, in his profound book The Call and the Response, quotes Nicolas of Cusa saying, “To call is…to create, to share in being through communication is to be created.” There is something, then, that is created in me as I listen to birds in the pre-dawn dark or strain in a forest to sort through the varied voices, recognizing each as they sing. In my listening I am responding and this response turns me toward a new relationship with the heard.
To hear the call, though, is an active work. I stand in the forest, cupping my ears to amplify the voices around me. I hear chip notes, they all sound so similar, and yet they are different—here an Orange-crowned Warbler, there a Yellow-rumped Warbler. Whose call are we hearing, whose are we heading? That has long been a question of the spiritual life. It was the question young Samuel had to sort out at the beginning of his ministry. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” is the response Eli taught him. Samuel says it, offering himself in response to the call. It was a response that became his whole life.
Eli, who knew the right response, had ceased to offer it in return to the call. He had let his loves become disordered, allowing his affection and loyalties to his sons keep him from a proper listening to God. For this, God told Samuel, “I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.” There are many ways that our hearing can become spiritually impaired. Love for the wrong things or in the wrong order, is certainly high on the list. But in our Gospel we see another common barrier—expectation.
In listening, we always arrive with an expectation, and yet such an expectation can sometimes keep us from hearing. “Can anything good from Nazareth,” Nathanael scoffs. It’s like a story Will Campbell relates in Brother to a Dragon Fly in which a “progressive” Northerner told a Civil Rights activist that he’d never vote for someone with a Southern accent. It’s bigotry, plain and simple, and the unfortunate thing is that in it we could miss the voice of one calling us to something new, a creation born from communication.
Thankfully, Nathanael comes around and listens, even to someone with a Nazarene accent. In doing so, his response becomes the ground for a shared conversation, working in call and response to create a whole new reality. And that voice, that call that brings forth our being, is still at work, walking along side us, creating a new reality even amid the noise, inside and out, that makes it hard to listen.
Our work is to learn to hear the call, practicing our listening, so that we can pick out the voice God from among the chatter of the world. And when we hear it, we should respond like Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” In that listening we will join in the great communion and communication of Love that is always calling, always creating.
Lovely piece and interesting to read on the heels of a rereading/listening to Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake in which the protagonist’s call begins with a bird and then increasingly to other (interior?) voices.