Please Listen!

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, November 16th, 2014

(I took this photo when images were fading into each other on the T.V. screen the evening Pope Francis was elected. This young girl was listening very intently as he spoke.) 

When I was a young priest at the Graan in Enniskillen, I learned an awful lot from the people who came every day for confessions, blessings and chats. One big lesson was the importance of first listening to people and getting some idea of where they were in their life’s journey, the burdens they were carrying, their joys and sorrows.

I remember well the day I welcomed an old woman and was surprised to find she had come the whole way from Omagh, using two buses, one from Omagh to Enniskillen and the other from Enniskillen out to the Graan. So I said to her, “Look, there are people coming here all the time so I’ll arrange with the next person to take you at least the bit into town.” We were three miles out of town and most came by car or bus. She was very happy and said, “Oh thank you, Father, that’s great, that will be a great help.”

 When the next man came for confession, I thought I had a really bright idea. It was the old style confession box meaning I couldn’t see the man but he sounded quite normal so when he’d made his confession, I said to him, “You know we normally ask you to say prayers as a penance but this evening I thought I’d ask you to do something practical instead. Is that ok?” When he said it was, I asked was he going into town and he said he was. So I briefly told him about the old woman from Omagh and asked him would he mind giving her a lift into town. As I say, he seemed normal enough up to that point but then he began to stutter and stammer and mutter to himself: “And that’s me penance?” “Well” I said, “Honestly, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I just thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, indeed, I don’t mind, Father,” says he, “I’ll do it, sure, if you want me to, but I think it’s only fair at the same time to tell you that I’m on a bike!” Lucky he did! Or I’d be up for elder abuse! I never forgot that man on the bike and my bright idea that wasn’t so bright! There were an awful lot of things I didn’t know about people and their lives but that didn’t stop me preaching away about all the things I had learned mostly from books. Many good people must have been just as flummoxed as the man on the bike!

There is great wisdom in these words I found somewhere: “When I ask you to listen to me and you start giving advice, you have not done what I asked. When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings. When I ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem, you have failed me, strange as it may seem. Listen! All I asked was that you listen, not talk or do – just hear me. When you accept as a simple fact that I do feel what I feel, no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you and get on with understanding what’s behind this irrational feeling. So please listen and just hear me.

”We are just ordinary people but we can help and heal people by listening to them, giving them our full attention and respect and giving them precious time.