Learning to Listen, Learning to See
Repetition is the key to success.
– Dr. Charles McCabe, Massachusetts General Hospital
One thing about memorizing your way through a book of the Bible is that you start to see things you almost certainly would never have seen otherwise. The memorization technique that I use involves a lot of repetition—and in one sense, quoting whole chapters at regular intervals gives you a birds’-eye view of the story. But in another sense, repeating each verse ten or twenty times, when it’s the verse I’m adding to memory that day, brings out surprising details. Repeat anything twenty times to yourself, and the meaning starts to morph. New things emerge. It reminds me of the feeling you get when you put on a pair of loops and make that first cut into skin: the subcutaneous world blossoms out, blood and fat and all that you normally never see but was at work all the time under the surface.
“What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God.”
For example, I began to notice when John writes “said” versus “answered” (mostly because it was difficult to remember which word goes where). Sometimes it seems arbitrary. But other times there appears to be a pattern. At the end of John chapter 1, a skeptical Nathanael “says” things to the Jesus who is “answering” him, but it is only when he realizes Jesus is God that he “answers” him: “Nathanael answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” There is a difference between speaking and answering. One involves listening, the other does not. Eugene Peterson titled his book on the Psalms Answering God, and in it he writes, “What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer.”
Repetition also gains more significance. In John chapter 4, Jesus is sitting by a well in Samaria when he tells the disciples, “Look, I tell you, and lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.” Two chapters later, Jesus is sitting on a mountainside when he “lifts up his eyes” to see a large crowd approaching, and the first thing he asks is, how will we feed them? In both situations, the disciples miss the point: “where are we to buy bread?” “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” They perceive along the physical plane, but Jesus is saying, there is living water and bread to be given, a spiritual gleaning to be had, that has nothing to do with physical life but everything to do with spiritual life. The initial repetition is emphatic—look, lift up your gaze, see—and then two chapters later, John tells us that is indeed exactly what Jesus does when the crowd comes towards him. This is how he sees, and this is how he tests us, just as he tests the disciples when he asks them to find bread enough for thousands.
Following Jesus for the disciples was about learning to listen, and learning to see, along an entirely new dimension. To go more than skin-deep. Do I listen to God? Can I honestly say that my prayers are an act of answering? Do I see people as he does? To what do I lift up my eyes?
