Listening in an age of tinnitus

While we were visiting our children in Alabama last Easter, my husband, son, and daughter-in-law began to exclaim about an interesting bird call they were hearing. No matter how hard I tried, however, I couldn’t hear it.

Although I suffered earaches as a child, my ear health as an adult was generally good. Then one day, more than five years ago now, my right ear began to ring. (That’s the technical term but what I hear is like a buzz.) It hasn’t stopped since. I also have some hearing loss, especially of higher frequencies.

These problems sometimes cause me sadness or distress, but on the evening of the unheard birdsong I inexplicably felt a sharp pang of something like shame as well.

I couldn’t hear what I ought to be hearing! It seemed as if this inability was emblematic of every loss, symptom of aging, and injustice I’d ever known; emblematic of all my weaknesses, sins, and griefs. Of the human condition, in other words, as it resides in me.

Scripture is full of ears, of hearing and listening. Hearing is how we receive the Word of God (Romans 10:14), so “whoever has ears, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15 and others). In connection with the parable of the sower, which is all about hearing, Jesus said, “consider carefully how you listen” (Luke 8:18).

Listen! The call reverberates from Genesis through Revelation, to those who hid from “the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden” (Genesis 3:8) all the way to those “who hear” and thus say, “Come!” to the Alpha and Omega (Revelation 22:17).

“Blessed are your ears,” Jesus told his disciples, “because they hear” (Matthew 13:16).

So what does one do when hearing means everything – blessedness! – and one’s ears continue to fail?

Yes, I know the words are figurative, not just about the ears on the side of my head. But let’s stay with the physical for a moment, because it’s also instructive and I’m not the only one getting harder of hearing.

Our world is loud. Consider 90-plus decibel tasks with a hair dryer or lawn mower, or iPod volumes of up to 120 decibels. (A conversation takes place at around 60 decibels.) People are starting to lose their hearing much earlier today than in the past. According to a recent CBC news article, hearing loss in Canada is reaching “epidemic proportions.”

Our culture is often described as visual, but it’s the ears that wear the signs of our obsessions and carelessness: cell phones, portable music players – and hearing aids.

My condition of tinnitus (ringing in the ears) defines our age. We’re surrounded by sound, but hear too much buzz and not enough birdsong.

So the noise, our technologies, and loss of hearing are figurative too – of the spiritual challenges we face, with our multiple choices and distractions, and of responses that careen between trying to hear everything and hearing nothing at all.

But the call, still, is to listen. Listen to what? To the sound of God working, walking, and speaking in the world.

“My sheep,” Jesus said, “listen to my voice” (John 10:27). This assertion is so matter-of-fact, so encouragingly sure. But, I ask myself again, what if my ears – my spiritual ears – are failing me? Failing because of the noises delineated in the parable of the sower: the evil one, testing, worries, riches, and pleasures?

Here’s where Isaiah’s testimony about the Lord’s “servant” comforts my soul like the heated bran bag my parents pressed against my aching ears as a child. “The Sovereign Lord . . . wakens my ear to listen . . . I have not turned away” (50:4–5).

We can choose not to rebel, not to pull away, but it’s the Sovereign Lord who wakens and opens our ears. Day by day, in our intimate relationship, the mighty God unplugs the accumulation of not-hearing that marks our lives – our inattention, neglect, and sins against each other.

Listening as a disciple (“like one being taught”) means listening as the master does. We learn what God says, and what to speak to others (verse 4a). We also learn how God listens: with deep, unending love, and with a heart to respond to what is heard.

When God opens our ears, we hear again what we ought to hear and we are not ashamed.

Isaiah 50:4b–5 (NRSV)

The Sovereign Lord . . . wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears; I have not been rebellious; I have not turned away.

Dora Dueck is a Winnipeg writer who attends Jubilee Mennonite Church.