I realize that most of you were not English majors, but please indulge me for a moment because I want to make my father feel like he didn’t blow a bunch of money on my tuition and talk about Homer’s Odyssey. For those of you who have read the story you might remember something odd in the narrative. Well there are actually a lot of things odd in the narrative not least of why it took Odysseus ten years in a boat to travel a distance he could have walked in ten days. However the odd thing I am talking about is why Homer describes the color of the sea as being the color wine-dark rather than blue or some other color we might recognize in describing the sea. There are of course many theories of why he chose this description. Some speculate that the Greeks did not have a concept of the color blue so Homer had to kind of make something up that approximated the color of the Aegean Sea, although I am at a loss to see how really dark wine in any way approximates the color of that particular sea. I even did research and according to the Sherwin Williams paint swatch the Aegean is more of an aqua or teal than it is a deep purple. Others have argued that the Greeks diluted their wine and that after pouring enough water into the wine it somehow turned to aqua or teal colored. Now I have not personally tried this experiment but let me go on record as expressing some skepticism about adding water to a purple liquid will somehow make that liquid turn to aqua and make it look like one of those drinks Captain Kirk used to have on Star Trek. What all of this suggests is that the Greeks were seeing something different than us – somehow dark wine being used to describe the color of the Aegean Sea made sense to them. The point in all of this and what it seems to point out is that the Greeks had mental categories that we don’t – either in wine or in the sea. Suggesting that there are things for which one needs to be trained to understand and to see. The Greek mind was somehow trained to understand what Homer meant when he said that wine dark was the color of the sea. It conveyed an idea to them that is lost to us. We simply do not have the knowledge. The brain is trained to hear and understand certain thing; which of course gets us to Jesus and sheep.
In today’s reading we hear from Jesus that, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” For those of us who follow Christ there should be a familiarity to his voice, something in our brain should be trained that makes us stop and look around to see who was calling us. The voice of Jesus should tap something just like when someone shouts out our name. On a slight side note I should mention a funny thing that happens at Nashotah House now and then is when someone calls “father” in the Refectory and six people’s heads jerk around to see who was calling them, because they have all been trained to respond. But unfortunately with Jesus it is not quite this simple. For while I think we understand that we respond to our name or can identify colors that we know, how do we hear the voice of Jesus and follow his command, because, after all, we do not generally hear from Jesus in an audible way. And so how are we to hear that type of voice? For most of us have not been trained in how to listen to the voice of Jesus. And the reason for this lack of training happens because we live in a very noisy society, a society that is largely afraid of any sort of silence, a society that has created countless ways to never be without a distraction of some sort. Just as an experiment look around the next time you are standing in a line and notice how many people have pulled out their cellphones (that is if you are not on your own cellphone). The idea of silencing our mind and truly being open to listen for something is very foreign to us. But, unless we train our minds to hear from Jesus we are not going to hear him. Just like the Greeks saw something in the ocean that we are unable to see, Jesus may be speaking to us and we are not hearing it because we are not at a place where we can hear it. And so how do we train our minds to hear the voice of Jesus? There are of course many ways, but I want to focus just for a minute on using silence. And I don’t mean silence in the sense of locking yourself in your room with a pillow over your head, but rather in the sense of not bringing things into our lives that are meant to distract and pull our attention in one way or another.
Our inability to hear Jesus largely stems from a loudness epidemic. Think about our society today like being at a raucous party. When you are at such a place and want to get someone’s attention you have to talk very loudly, but then your loudness makes someone else have to talk even louder and so it goes with the loudest getting the most attention. Now note that loudness has nothing to do with the importance or the magnificence of what the person is saying, but just the volume. And loudness is not simply an audible quality – there are all sorts of written things that are incredibly loud. Glance at the headlines and see just how many of them scream at you. Here is just a brief sample of headlines I have seen recently: “CANNES FESTIVAL FEARS ATTACK”, “HORROR – Sewage pours from ceiling of New York Penn Station” and my favorite, “Epic Fight between two male giraffes.” The headlines are the equivalent of someone yelling or of looking at a car wreck on the freeway – they are jarring and shocking and as a result they scream for our attention. But this is an environment where it is a very hard to find the person who says, “Be still and know that I am God.”
I have trouble not believing that there has to be some correlation between the rise of distraction and the decline in religious belief. If we cannot hear God how can we believe in him. There are days where I feel that I would be a better happier person if I got rid of my smart phone. I mean I am old enough to remember the days when you went home on Friday and you heard nothing about work until you showed up on Monday morning. This allowed you to do things like spend time with your family and go to church without being distracted. Last weekend I received 10 emails about work related subjects. How are we going to hear the voice of Jesus if we are not quiet and distraction free for long enough to actually hear it?
I don’t think I am quite at the point of suggesting that we all become luddites but I think we need to limit our distraction – turn off the phone now and then, go for a walk without using headphones and don’t turn the radio on in the car. If we want to hear the voice of Jesus we are going to have to take some time in solitude and quiet so that we can train our minds to hear the voice of our shepherd and respond to him so that we may be his both now and forevermore.