Sometimes in mid-life there is a wake-up call to change direction, realising we have other potentials. The privilege of a lifetime, wrote Carl Jung, is to become who you are. As Gerard Manley Hopkins expresses it:
Myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, ‘What I do is me: for that I came.’
Those who practise meditation and arrive at this station in their journey will be quicker to recognise the announcement: ‘All change’!
Any good counsellor knows that the greatest contribution they can make to a person who comes to them in extremis, is not to offer any kind of ‘solution’, but rather to enable the person to tell their story in all its complexity. ‘Let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication,’ cries the Psalmist.
In my book Older I give an example of perfect listening. When I was being prepared for ordination at Glasshampton Monastery in Worcester, Brother Gregory told me how he had received a letter from the headmaster of a major public school asking if he would see a sixteen-year-old boy who was heavily into drugs. Brother Gregory saw the boy. Some weeks later he received a letter from the headmaster: ‘I don’t know what you said but he is completely changed.’
Brother Gregory smiled as he told me this and added, ‘I didn’t say a word! I simply listened.’ Clearly the quality of his listening acted as a mirror in which the boy could see himself. The lesson is that the more we practise silence in our meditation, the better able we shall be to respond to others by giving them our complete attention.
