This week I am giving three days of talks to spiritual directors-in-training. My topic is On Being Present. Among the various things I will talk about is Nelle Morton’s powerful experience and idea of hearing the other into speech. And not just into speech but into the unfolding truth of our blessed and broken lives. This is the privilege and responsibility of the spiritual guide. To evoke the Story deep within the other in and through attentive, loving, generous, and compassionate presence. The excerpt below is taken from Morton’s 1977 essay “Beloved Image” which later appeared in her book The Journey is Home. So, here’s to all the kind, gracious, trustworthy, and encouraging listeners in our lives who have called forth by their very presence that which is deepest, truest, and most beautiful in us.

Today’s Life-Line is:

It was in a small group of women who had come together to tell our own stories that I first received a totally new understanding of hearing and speaking. I remember well how one woman started, hesitating and awkward, trying to put the pieces of her life together. Finally she said: “I hurt… I hurt all over.” She touched herself in various places as if feeling for the hurt before she added, “but… I don’t know where to begin to cry.”

She talked on and on. Her story took on fantastic coherence. When she reached a point of most excruciating pain no one moved. No one interrupted. Finally she finished. After a silence, she looked from one woman to another.

“You heard me. You heard me all the way.” Her eyes narrowed. She looked directly at each woman in turn and then said slowly: “I have a strange feeling you heard me before I started. You heard me to my own story.”

I filed this experience away as something unique. But it happened again and again in other such small groups of women. It happened to me. Then, I knew I had been experiencing something I had never experienced before. A complete reversal of the going logic in which someone speaks precisely so that more accurate hearing may take place. This woman was saying, and I had experienced, a depth hearing that takes place before the speaking – a hearing that is far more than acute listening. A hearing engaged in by the whole body that evokes speech –a new speech—a new creation. The woman had been heard to her own speech. (Emphasis mine)

~ Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home