This is the first post of my pilgrimage of listening. I’m spending this week in preparation for the trip, reflecting on where I am beginning. I will be off the grid for some of my travels but hope to blog as the Spirit moves. 

“Stop looking for me and let me find you.”

I was sitting in front of a window in Pelussin, France (pictured above) when I heard these words in prayer. They took me by surprise: I thought I was supposed to be the one seeking God.

I don’t wish to enter a dualistic frame wherein “seeking” and “letting oneself be found” are mutually exclusive. My experience leads me to believe that both effort and grace play their roles in the spiritual life.

You’ve got to live your religion,

Deep inside, when you try

For the kingdom on high

By His grace

(Van Morrison, “By His Grace”)

The dance of effort and grace is the reality of our beautiful human calling. We exist in the dynamic energy of this “both and.” When the prodigal son returns home, of course it is not his journey that earns him a place in his father’s house; he was “found” all along in his father’s heart. But his steps, taken out of hunger, bring the few twigs which allow the fire of grace to ignite.

Back to the small village of Pelussin, where I was taken aback by the instruction to stop looking. I had spent the previous four months serving in the kitchen and general house team at Hautecombe Abbey. I was coming to realize it was not “chez moi,” but I desperately wanted to follow the will of God. And I thought that for this year, that entailed living and praying with the Chemin Neuf Community as I discerned whether I might be called to religious life or ordination.

This is where I feel a turn from the eye to the ear helps me understand this call to “stop looking.” And to do this, I can’t help but call on audio ecologist Gordon Hempton. In his interview with Krista Tippett, he talks about the power of sound to reveal to us where we are. Deeper than the eye can see, sound grounds us in space, its vibrations connecting us to our surroundings.

Listening, says Hempton, is not about waiting to hear a particular sound. It is about presence. It thrives in equanimity. We are indoctrinated from a young age in particular hierarchies of sound, told what is important versus what to tune out. But Hempton advocates a different approach, full of welcome and free of judgment.

Instead of us naming and assigning value to the sounds, the sounds tell us where we are. 

When I left France to “let God find me,” it was wrapped in a sense that already I am found. This realization was at once a big leap of faith and an inevitable culmination of all I had heard. It was Jesus breaking bread with us at Emmaus, so tangibly there and so quickly gone.

Prosternez-vous, devant votre Roi, adorez-le de tout votre coeur.

Faites monter ver sa majeste des chants de gloire pour votre Roi des rois!

(my translation- poetic, not literal:)

Bow down in awe before your King, humbly adore him with all your heart.

Let praise arise, touch his majesty, with songs of glory to bless our King of kings!

(“Prosternez-Vous” by S. Fry)

As I have walked forward in letting God find me, this song continues to resonate throughout my heart. As Gordon Hempton feels when he hears a train whistle echo across the land, when I hear this song, I know where I am.

“Why were you looking for me?” Jesus asks Mary and Joseph in Luke 2:49: “Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”

My pilgrimage is not a pilgrimage of finding God through focused sight, but being found by God through listening. It is a call to bear witness to our essential “foundness.”

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I wonder when it was that the prodigal son realized his foundness. The story as a complete narrative reveals it to us outsiders, but for him, I wonder:

was it the embrace? the ring on his finger? the taste of feast on his tongue?

I wonder if he was just beginning to hear the silent song of being found that we are also in process of hearing our whole lives. Heaven, I’ll venture a guess, is this eternal foundness, and it is not until that death that we truly experience all that the return of the prodigal means. But we get these tasty sounds from time to time on our planetary pilgrimage.