Friday, August 22, 2014

My Third Ear and the Way God Made Me

     I was born with three ears.  So went the family story often repeated during my childhood.  My mom gave birth to me, her fourth child, phoned my father and said, "We have a baby girl with three ears." Surgically removed a day later, an ear-shaped skin tab occupied the space just in front of my right ear.  I didn't super much love hearing this story when I was a child because it left me feeling "wrong" somehow. However the story has a new frame from which I view it and now holds much meaning for me in my occupations.
     I am a stenographer.  I report public meetings, depositions, court proceedings and hearings.  I record each syllable spoken by every person in a room.  My job is at times tortuous, exhausting, impossible yet fascinating and educational.
     I am also a spiritual director.  Prayerfully, attentively, with focus I listen to people share their journeys with God, their experiences of Him, their longings for Him, their questioning where and whether He is.  It is difficult, way beyond me, and a calling I consider blessed.  The times I and a directee sit together listening to her heart I consider sacred, I consider holy.
     So I have these two occupations, one left-brained, one right-brained, one secular, one spiritual, both requiring me to listen attentively -- in court reporting, for each word spoken and in spiritual direction, for the heartbeat of God.
     Until recently I thought of my court reporting job as not spiritual, as more concrete.  But I recognize now, since the spirit of the Living God is inside me, I carry His and my spirit into the workplace and reflect Him in a way unique to me.  Even in this left-brained, detailed, uncreative job, I am able to be present to another person, sitting just a couple of feet away, listening to their recitations of losses, descriptions of their families, careers, vast knowledge of subjects varying from duties as a construction worker or mariachi musician to scientific facts about fringe-toed lizards.
     Most tender is when someone talks about how life used to be -- before her husband died, before an accident left her forever altered -- and what life is like now as she adjusts to the losses suffered.  A young woman in court three feet from me paints a picture with words of how she buries her partially amputated foot in the sand at the beach so others cannot see, how she was unable to dance with friends at a wedding because her dress shoe, though duck taped on, would not stay on her foot, the inspirational part about her pursuing her master's degree in industrial design while recovering from the accident involving her car rolling, skidding as it swerved to avoid a big rig suddenly in its freeway lane. Her foot had been on the dash while her friend drove.  Tom Petty was playing on the radio.  The metal of the car was sheered away as the car skid on its side.  Her toes were also sheered away.  This happened on Day 2 of her full-of-promise road trip toward graduate school, where she planned to learn engineering and design of medical prosthetics.
     I am present to listen, to hear, to record.  I use machinery, yet I am not a machine.  I am a human being with a heart, a soul, a spirit.  Only a couple of times have tears escaped from my eyes as I have listened (I have also had to bite my lips hard to hold in laughter),  yet beneath my secretarial, editor face and just a few inches down is my heart, a human heart welcoming and responding to the person before me.
     When I do not hear properly because people are speaking over each other or the speaker is too quiet, I must say, "Please repeat that," or, "Excuse me?"  Once in a while what happens when I do so is, the person shifts her attention from the attorney to whom she is speaking and begins answering the questions looking straight at me.  "Ever since my husband was taken from me" -- the story unfolds, and I am able to receive it, in a sense hosting the speaker, providing a space for her to be heard.
    I administer an oath at the beginning of a deposition.  "Please raise your right hand."  The witness looks me in the eye and says, "I do" after I've concluded with, "so help you God?"  Once I had a witness who at the end of the proceeding looked at me and said, "I came in here planning to lie.  I have no idea why I told the truth."
     Then there are the attorneys.   It is incredible to me how often attorneys talk about their lives while I am setting up my stenograph machine.  One attorney reports to me how he's doing on his new discipline of gratitude and how God is changing him.  Two others during a break share about their vacations.  One, a non-practicing Catholic, had just vacationed in Ireland, so he and opposing counsel spoke of the Catholic-Protestant tensions existing there.  His son's mother-in-law had just died, and he went to the funeral.  Having written off religion, at age 70, he found himself thinking about God often.  Why?  Because he said, despite everything he has had against the church, what impression won't leave him is watching the funeral attendees sing worship songs.  "They seemed to really believe what they were singing," he said.  "And people brought food to my son's family and to the funeral.  It's like they really do love each other."  I am collecting needed spellings from the witness, running to the restroom, gathering exhibits during breaktime, but I get this peek into another person's experience of God and how He is getting his attention, wooing him to His love heart.
     A court reporter can arrive to a job, introduce herself, administer the oath then not utter a peep the entire day.  Being seen and rarely heard, she makes herself unnoticed.  She is an onlooker sitting along the fringes of the scene, yet more attuned to the matter at hand than anyone else present.  She catches the story, discerning what punctuation to use, when sentences end and begin.  This is a skill, and this is an art, especially because most people do not speak in grammatically sensible ways.  The spiritual director also uses few words but notices much, asking questions to help the directee define her experience of God.  In a sense this act involves choosing what to punctuate, where to explore further, dive deeper, when to leave a huge paragraphical pause, waiting in silence.  I as a director am an onlooker, a witness to this unfolding story of God's pursuit of another and her responses to and resistances of Him.
   So it is that both of my occupations require super-keen hearing.
  At times I picture that new baby I was, presenting myself to the world with my extra ear-shaped skin tag.  It was a shadow of who I would be, and it is a picture of who I am continuing to become, a holy listener.

Diane Mann 2014