Which do you find more personally rewarding: celebrating a funeral, or celebrating a wedding?

If you were conducting a survey of priests, and you asked them that question, I think most of them would respond by saying, "A funeral—without question, a funeral." Now that may surprise some of you, since at a wedding everyone is happy and at a funeral everyone is sad and depressed. Is this because priests are morbid and enjoy watching people suffer? No, not at all. It’s simply because--generally speaking--people are much more attentive at a funeral than they are at a wedding! At a funeral, the family and friends of the deceased recognize their need: their need for perspective, their need for hope, their need for comfort, their need for peace. Consequently, they will listen very intently to the prayers and the readings and the homily, sometimes hanging on every word. This makes the experience deeply rewarding for the priest, because he realizes that God is working through him to help those who are hurting.

On the other hand, at a wedding, the bride and groom are often so caught up in the excitement and pageantry of the moment that they don’t hear what God is saying to them in his Word and through the priest. Their focus is somewhere else. And then there’s the added temptation the couple faces of adopting a false sense of self-reliance: "We’re young, we’re intelligent, we’re healthy—so we don’t need much help from God. We can make it on our own." Actually, the people who are normally the most attentive at weddings are the men and women in the congregation who have been married for more than a year! For them, the honeymoon is long since over, and they’ve at least begun to realize that they definitely do need God's grace in their lives! The illusion of self-reliance is either gone completely, or it’s fading fast!

We all need to listen to God—and not only at funerals and weddings. We need to listen to God constantly, but most especially when we pray: when we pray at Mass, and when we pray in our personal prayer time. But that’s often the missing dimension of prayer, isn’t it? Someone once said that the Lord gave us two ears and one mouth so that we could listen twice as much as we speak, but that’s not always the way it works, is it? As Bishop Sheen used to say, we sometimes reverse the prayer of the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament. Samuel said, "Speak Lord, for your servant is listening." We say, "Listen Lord, for your servant is speaking." Thus our prayer becomes a monologue and not a dialogue, a speech and not a conversation. And perhaps this explains why we sometimes don’t receive comfort guidance when we pray: it might be because we’re doing too much talking and not enough listening. The Book of Job illustrates the point quite well, I think. Our first reading today was taken from Job 7. At this point in the story, poor Job has already lost his family, his possessions and his health. He’s in a state of emotional and spiritual turmoil and he cries out, "Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery? Are not his days those of a hireling? He is a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for his wages." And on and on he laments until he finally comes to the conclusion, "I shall not see happiness again." A pretty bleak outlook on life to say the least! But this is fairly typical of the first 31 chapters of the book: Job prays (in the sense that he talks to God), he complains, he expresses his confusion and pain, and he listens to the sanctimonious drivel of his 3 friends. And at the end of it all it’s quite clear that the man still has no peace! In fact, at the end of chapter 31, Job says in a spirit of complete frustration, "This is my final plea; let the Almighty answer me." And he does! After a brief interruption by another would-be consoler named Elihu, God speaks, and Job finally keeps quiet and listens. Now at the end of it all, Job is still suffering, but his attitude is clearly different. Listening to God has made him much more peaceful. Try to pick up the tone of these words, which he speaks when God is finished: "I know [Lord] that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eyes has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes." Job learned the value of listening to the Lord.

And then we have the example of Jesus in today’s Gospel scene from Mark 1. Notice how composed and purposeful Jesus is here. He’s not confused, and he never gets upset, although he’s under intense pressure. As soon as he arrives at Peter’s house, they ask him to minister to Peter’s mother-in-law. Then everyone in the neighborhood finds out he’s in town, and they besiege the house, seeking help and healing. Consequently he spends most of the evening preaching, curing the sick and expelling demons. Then, the next morning, his disciples track him down and they put pressure on him to return. They say, "[Come on back.] Everyone is looking for you." Jesus calmly responds, "Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come." Why didn’t Jesus get frazzled? Why isn’t there a hint of anxiety or indecisiveness in his response to the disciples? I’m convinced: it was because he had spent the first hours of that morning LISTENING to his heavenly Father! Mark tells us that Jesus had risen at an early hour, and had gone off to a deserted place in order to pray. And out of that dialogue came the knowledge of what he was supposed to do next. He listened to his Father, got his instructions for the day, and thus he was able to move on in peace and without guilt.

Is it easy to listen to God? No. Especially nowadays! In order to hear God speak we’ve got to be quiet, focused and attentive; and that’s very difficult in our fast-paced, noisy world! Let’s face it, we live right now in the age of the 30 second sound byte! If a message is longer than 30 seconds, many people lose their focus and zone out. No wonder some people have trouble with my homilies! They have "Spiritual A.D.D."

The bottom line is this: we all have the potential to be good listeners, but that’s a potential which we must work at developing; it doesn’t happen automatically. This, by the way, is one reason why Eucharistic Adoration is so beneficial: you come quietly into the presence of Jesus, without any external distractions. "Be still,’ the Lord says in Psalm 46, ‘and know that I am God." People who truly enter into the experience of Eucharistic Adoration learn over time how to listen more effectively to the Lord: to the Lord who speaks to them through the Scriptures, through the Church, and through the events of their own lives.