We build places of security in our homes and our offices and even in our cars. These places separate us from one another. Places that separate people can never be safe enough. Perhaps our only refuge is in the goodness in each other.
—Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings
Today of all days, what is most needful is to root ourselves in the homeland of thought.
By “the homeland of thought” I don’t mean Greece, where the tradition of thought known as philosophy had its beginnings. Nor do I mean any other geographical place, whether India, China, Mesopotamia, Africa, or any other such place. I am not using “homeland of thought” in that way, such that the preposition “of” functions possessively—as we might speak, for example, of “the house of Louise,” and mean thereby the house that belongs to some person named Louise.
Rather, I am using the expression “homeland of thought” to mean that homeland that is thought itself. By saying that what we most need to do today is root ourselves in the homeland of thought, I mean we need to put down our roots into thought itself as our homeland: We need to let thought as such be our homeland, instead of trying to secure ourselves within demarcated sections of the globe such as Australia, Austria, Canada, Cuba, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, the United States of America, or the Peoples Republic of China—or even places such as Longmont, Colorado, or Ocean Grove, New Jersey.
To let thought itself become our homeland is no more and no less than to cultivate constant, continuing thoughtfulness.
Toward that end, we need first to ask just what it is to be thoughtful.
2.
He [the Buddha] had found a way to make the experience of groundlessness nourishing rather than frightening.
—Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life
To be thoughtful is to be heedful. In turn, to become heedful requires that we first become still, so that we may listen attentively. As Malebranche observed back in the 17th century, attention is “the natural prayer of the soul”; so to say that the one thing necessary for us find our way home today is to become heedful can also be said this way: to find home we need to pray.
Pray tell, what does that mean?
It does not mean pray in the sense of beg, beseech, demand, or request that we be shown how to go home again, given some sort of roadmap of how to get there. It means, rather, pray in the sense of simply opening ourselves fully and without any expectations to hear what voices itself to us in the silence of our sheer, attentive listening.
“Listen carefully” is the English translation of the opening word of St. Benedict’s Rule for monastic life in RB 1980, which became the standard English translation right after it was first published (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1981). The Latin term in the original text is obsculta, which means not merely to keep one’s ears open to receive sound, as we who are not deprived of our hearing do without having to pay any attention to it. Rather, obsculta means to listen with full attention, in such a way that we do not block the pathways of what gives itself to be heard with any anticipations or demands concerning what may so give itself to us to be so heard, when we do listen carefully, with full attention.
Hence, Benedict goes on right after calling upon his readers to “listen” to direct them more fully by calling upon them to listen “with the ear of the heart.” To do that does not require that we first have medical scientists graft an ear on the organ in our chest that pumps blood throughout our body. It just means that we listen with full and utter attention to what gives itself to us to be heard—what calls to us, when we shut up and just listen with full attention.
3.
I press on, hoping to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has laid hold of me.
—Philippians 3:12
“[. . .] to find a land more kind that home, more large than earth— “Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
—Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
When we first truly listen “with the ear of the heart,” as Benedict directs us to do, then we hear at last—to our surprise and for the very first time—what we, as just who we are, are called to do and to be. We hear the hest—to use an archaic but apt term for “bidding” or “command,” from the same root as the German heissen, “to call —to which we have all along been “at the behest,” though we never heard and knew it before we so stop at last and just listen with full attention.
As humans, those “rational animals” as which Aristotle long ago defined us, we are at the behest, bidding, or command of what calls for thinking. Furthermore, what we are bidden to do is precisely to think that very thing that thus calls us to thought, gives itself to us to be thought by us. We are bidden to attend to what so calls us, to open ourselves to it—and in so opening ourselves to it, to make room for it to open itself. We are called to listen to what calls us to think it, so that we may give voice to what so calls, as the pealing of a bell in a peaceful valley gives voice to the very silence that the bell’s ringing breaks.
4.
If reading the preceding section of this post reminds you of Heidegger, it should. It should also remind you of Freud. However, I will leave that “unlikely pairing,” as I dubbed it in a talk I gave almost fourteen years ago, to be given further thought, if anyone feels so called.*
* Perhaps I will return to that “unlikely pairing” in some future post/s.