Lynne Baab

Three Psalms for Holy Week

Tuesday April 11 2017

A handful of psalms are quoted in the Gospels. Here are reflection questions about three psalms that have strong connections with Jesus’ journey to the cross.

Psalm 69
Answer me, O Lord, for your steadfast love is good; according to your abundant mercy, turn to me.

Psalm 69 is one of the most often cited psalms in the Gospels, and two of those quotations occur in Holy Week: John 15:25 and John 19:28. The mood of the entire psalm, with the pleas for deliverance and deep sorrow, evokes the events of Holy Week that take Jesus to the cross. As you pray this psalm, imagine you are praying it with Jesus.

Questions for reflection

1. What do you need deliverance from right now? What about your community and the world beyond?
2. As you walk with Jesus to the cross and feel some of his sorrow, what do you want to thank him for?

Lord Jesus Christ, I take you for granted. I forget the pain you suffered for me, for all people, and for the entire creation. Help me to see your love more clearly.

• • • • •

Psalm 41
Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted the heel against me.

On Thursday of Holy Week we remember Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, when he gave them instructions and prayed for them (John 13-17). Judas, who ate bread with Jesus and the other disciples, then left to betray Jesus (John 18:1-11). It’s so easy to view Judas’s actions as something quite extraordinary, but all of us have the tendency to betray those we love.

Questions for reflection

1. In what ways have you behaved so unkindly to people you love that they may have felt betrayed?
2. When you have acted unkindly toward others, what helps you turn back to God to receive forgiveness?

O Lord, the capacity for betrayal is so powerful in me. Be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you.

• • • • •

Psalm 22

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.

Psalm 22, a plea for deliverance from suffering and humiliation, is another of the psalms quoted most frequently in the Gospels. Two of those quotations, in John 19:24 and 19:28, occur just before Jesus’ death, in the account of the soldiers casting lots for Jesus’ clothes and of Jesus’ being thirsty right before he dies. “It is finished,” Jesus then says (John 19:30), his obedience to the point of death bringing us salvation and peace with God.

Questions for reflection

1. What do you most need to learn from Jesus’ death?
2. Spend some time in silence, pondering the gift of Jesus’ death for you.

Lord Jesus Christ, Redeemer and Savior, thank you for your sacrifice for us. Thank you for your great love that took you to the cross.

Dunedin event - For those of my readers who are women in Dunedin, I am leading a women's retreat on Saturday 6 May from 10 to 3. The theme is "Falling in love with Jesus afresh: Jesus' encounters with women." Location is Leith Valley Presbyterian Church, 267 Malvern Street. If you'd like to come, please let Nancy Parker know: 021-457-360, parkernmr@gmail.com.

“Holy curiosity” as a way to think about effective listening

Friday March 6 2015

Albert Einstein coined the term “holy curiosity” in the 1940s to describe the freedom of inquiry he considered to be important in science education. People of faith have adopted this phrase because it evokes so much about effective Christian ministry. In order to meet needs, we must be curious about what they are. In order to give aid or help, we need to be curious about the ways to do it most effectively and in forms that empower the recipient. Our curiosity needs to have a holy quality about it, centered in God’s gentle and insightful love.

Curiosity can take two forms. One version of curiosity is nosy and prying, and it comes across as invasive. That kind of curiosity arises out of the listener’s need to know all the details about a person’s situation, perhaps so the listener can gossip with others about it or appear to be knowledgeable in other settings. A more subtle form of invasive curiosity arises when we feel proud of our listening abilities, so we draw people out in order to demonstrate our listening skills, so we can feel good about ourselves. Any self-focused listening can slide into being nosy and prying.

In contrast to nosy and invasive curiosity, the second form involves being interested and concerned, eager to understand the other person’s interests, priorities, and experiencesif she wants to talk about them. When the listener is motivated by God’s love, then this form of curiosity becomes holy curiosity, which undergirdsthe kinds of conversations in congregations, workplaces, and homes where people are able to express the overlap of their faith and their daily lives. Holy curiosity makes possiblepastoral care listening and listening for mission, and it lays a foundation for proclamation of the Christian Gospel.

Obstacles to holy curiosity come in several forms. So much of the fear that impedes listening in everyday settings comes from not truly believing that we can grow in understanding the priorities and values that lie behind another person’s convictions without agreeing with them. Listening often changes us because we understand more about how other people think and feel, but listening does not necessarily mean that we change our own central beliefs in response. Holy curiosity enables us to try to understand others’ beliefs and priorities, being open to change within ourselves but also being open to holding strongly to our own convictions. I love this quotation from a communication textbook: “There is a difference between understanding and agreeing with a speaker. We need to develop new psychological habits that encourage us to keep an open mind and a positive attitude to the motivation behind what is communicated to us orally” [1].

Another obstacle to holy curiosity is the conviction that we already know what the other person means when they say something. I told one of my friends about an upsetting stay in the hospital, and I mentioned one nurse who was like an anchor to me while I was there. At that point my friend commented that she was glad the nurse was helpful to me. Later in the conversation my friend returned to the topic, sayingshe hadn’t asked more about why the nurse meant so much to me simply because she assumed she already knew what made a nurse helpful. It took her until later in the conversation for her holy curiosity to come into play, making her wonder what I had particularly appreciated about that nurse.

Some additional resources on listening:

• an article on listening past inner noise
• an article on letting go of agendas as we listen to others and to God
• a variety of blog posts on listening
• two YouTube videos with similar titles but different content: Listening for Mission and Ministry and Why Listening Matters for Mission and Ministry

(During Lent I’m posting excerpts from my book on listening. If you’d like to receive an email when I put a post on this blog, sign up under “subscribe” in the right hand column. Book excerpt from The Power of Listening by Lynne M. Baab. Copyright © Rowman & Littlefield. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.)

[1]Terry Mohan, Helen McGregor, Shirley Saunders, and Ray Archee, Communicating! Theory and Practice, 4^th ed. (Sydney: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 417.

Why Do We Listen?

Thursday February 26 2015

A few weeks ago, I suggested that perhaps a focus on listening might be a good thing to do in Lent. For the weeks of Lent, I’m going to post excerpts from my book, The Power of Listening, in case you’d like to work on your listening skills. I’m beginning with some thoughts on the purpose of listening.

Humans listen for many different reasons. Like most mammals, birds, and reptiles, humans listen at a very basic level to protect ourselves and our loved ones from danger. For a raccoon or robin, listening brings awareness of predators. When I ride my bicycle, I pay attention to the car and truck traffic on the road, and part of my awareness comes from listening. When I had young children and I walked with them near busy streets, I used all my senses, including hearing, to try to keep them safe from harm.

Listening plays a role for some animals in their ability to find food, and a parallel for humans might involve all the listening we do that gives us information for all sorts of purposes. As we listen for information, we easily move from facts to analysis of the facts, and then to deeper meaning. Note the progression in complexity and level of meaning in the following series of questions: What time does that movie start? Where is the theater located? What kinds of things are reviewers saying about the movie? Does it sound like a good movie? Does this movie have spiritual implications? If I took a group of high school students from the youth group to that movie, what kinds of issues might we discuss afterwards?

Communication scholars make a distinction between hearing and listening. Hearing involves perceiving a sound with the ear, while listening involves paying attention to the sounds received by the ear and perceiving the meaning in them. We might say listening involves being alert to the sounds we hear. When we listen, we heed the sounds, tune into them, give consideration to them, or process them actively. In fact, the English word “listen” comes from two Anglo-Saxon words. One of them means “hearing,” and the other means “to wait in suspense.” Conversations might manifest greater love and attentiveness if we adopted an attitude of waiting in suspense to learn something from the other person’s words.

In common parlance, we interchange the meaning of these two words—listen and hear—quite frequently. “Yes, I hear you,” we might say when we want to indicate that we’re listening carefully. Or we might say, “I’m listening to the radio,” when we’re immersed in another task and the radio has become background noise only.

When I take the youth group to that new movie and we talk about it afterward, I will hear the words that come out of the mouth of the youth group members, but will I truly listen to what they are saying? Will I hear the emotions behind the words? And what interpretation will I give to the words I hear? Many factors impede our ability to listen carefully, even if we are physically hearing the words people say.

The challenges of interpretation grow more intense when conversations focus on deeper issues, when the purpose of listening becomes more nuanced. Why might I desire to listen deeply to the youth group members when discussing a movie with spiritual themes? Is the goal to help the students feel that someone cares about their thoughts? To help them make deeper connections to Christian themes? To motivate them to draw near to God in prayer? And to what extent am I accurately perceiving the central issues the students are trying to talk about, particularly when I have a goal or agenda for the conversation?

Which aspect should the listener pay attention to? To the facts? To the emotions of the person telling the story? To the strategic implications? Can we listen to all those things simultaneously?

Some additional resources on listening:

• an article on listening past inner noise
• an article on letting go of agendas as we listen to others and to God
• a variety of blog posts on listening
• two YouTube videos with similar titles but different content: Listening for Mission and Ministry and Why Listening Matters for Mission and Ministry

(Book excerpt from The Power of Listening by Lynne M. Baab. Copyright © Rowman & Littlefield. Used by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt  may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.)

Of clouds and attentiveness

Tuesday February 17 2015

A couple of years ago, in a moment of air-headedness, I ran my car into a post in a parking lot. The wheel well collapsed into the wheel. After calls to our insurance company and a body shop, I found myself in the cab of a tow truck.

I asked the driver, a man about 40 years old, where he was from, and learned he had been born and raised in the same suburb of Dunedin, New Zealand, where he now lives. I asked him if he had lived anywhere else, and he said he had spent a few years in Brisbane, Australia, where the consistently sunny weather drove him crazy.

He said he likes the rapid changes in weather that we experience here in Dunedin. “Just look at that sky,” he enthused. “It’s gorgeous. All those clouds. That’s what I missed in Brisbane.”

I glanced at the sky. “All those clouds” were, from my point of view, gray and drab. Admittedly, I was probably a bit shell shocked from hitting the post and hearing that awful crunch of breaking plastic, but it was not the sort of sky that I could imagine getting enthusiastic about.

The driver dropped me, and my beleaguered car, at the body shop. I picked up a loaner car and made my way home. At the first stop light, I looked at the sky again. I noticed the variations in the shades of gray within the towering clouds, and the small peeks of blue sky and yellow light around the clouds. The tow truck driver had been right. The clouds were beautiful. In order to see the beauty, I needed to look closely.

A Jewish Sabbath prayer goes like this: “Days pass, years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” I don’t know if I’m better at sightlessness than other people, but I do know I’m exceptionally good at it.

The Sabbath has been one spiritual practice in my life that has slowed me down enough to look at the beauty of the world God made and at the miracles God continues to perform. I don’t think it’s any accident that the Jewish prayer about walking sightless among miracles is a Sabbath prayer. I’ve written a book and a lot of articles about sabbath keeping, enabling me to reflect on that particular spiritual practice as a way to be more attentive to God’s world and work around me. I still keep a sabbath, and it has been one of the joys of my life.

In the past few years I’ve been broadening out to consider other spiritual practices that encourage attentiveness and mindfulness:

• The intentional practice of thankfulness.
• Pausing to take a deep breath, then focusing on my surroundings for a few moments.
• At the end of each day, looking back over my day for signs of God’s presence (the prayer of examen).
• Saying grace at meals in a way that is not perfunctory but actually involves a few moments of attention to the smells and look of the food I’m about to eat.

Lent begins this week, and Lent is a great time to try a new habit or pattern or practice to help us draw near to God. This idea of attentiveness or mindfulness isn’t new for me, but I still need it desperately. I need the joy and peace that comes from seeing God’s gifts and God’s hand in my life. For Lent this year, I’m going to focus on attentiveness.

Here’s my question of the day: what helps you notice God’s goodness surrounding you?

(To receive an email update whenever I post on this blog, sign up in the right hand column under “subscribe.” This post originally appeared on the Thoughtful Christian blog, Gathering voices.)

An option for Lent: focus on growing as a listener

Wednesday January 28 2015

Our ability to listen is not set in stone. We can grow as listeners. In the past five or six years, I’ve been reading, teaching and writing about listening. Everything I’ve learned indicates that listening skills can be developed.

Why might listening be a skill to focus on during Lent? Aren't fasting or trying to pray more often more typical Lenten practices?

Almost any Lenten practice is better than doing nothing. Maybe this is a year for you to try fasting from something different or praying in a new way. Those are great ideas. But if you’re wondering why I might recommend growing as a listener as a Lenten goal, here are my reasons:

1. Jesus was a champion listener, and one way to view Lent is an opportunity to be transformed a bit more into Jesus’ image. Read John 3 and 4 (or almost any section of the Gospels) and watch for Jesus’ ability to listen profoundly to all sorts of people.

2. Listening well puts us in a place of receptivity to the other person’s goals, desires, opinions, thoughts and concerns. In other words, listening well can help us engage with other people on their terms, which is an aspect of love. Growing in love lies behind any spiritual practice we might choose for Lent.

3. Listening well helps us grow in humility. Some degree of humility is necessary to go to the place of receptivity described in #2, but going to that place often also helps us grow in humility. It’s a bit of an upward spiral: humility helps us listen better, and listening well helps us develop humility further. Growing in humility is another important goal of all spiritual practices.

4. Listening well helps us see the image of God in others in way we could never have imagined. The unexpectedness of listening, the surprise of what we learn from it, seems to me to be a lovely reflection of the surprise of the work of the Holy Spirit in us. Surely experiencing the Holy Spirit in new ways is a good goal for Lent.

If you’d like to set some listening goals for Lent, you might find ideas from some of the resources I’ve written to help people grow as listeners. A good number of these resources are posted here on my website. Here are two articles on:

• dealing with inner noise as we listen
• letting go of agendas as we listen

And some blog posts about:

• what makes listening holy
• listening and compassion
• listening to God
• the role of listening in Christian discipleship
• hospitality and listening
• listening to people we disagree with
• an amusing story of why listening matters

And there’s also my book, The Power of Listening: Building Skills for Mission and Ministry.

I believe a Lenten commitment to pay attention to listening will bear lovely and unexpected fruit. The last few years of focusing on listening have been fascinating for me, and I’ve experienced lots of stimulating and unanticipated growth. And here's a reminder for this year: Lent starts in three weeks, on February 18.

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