"..and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice and hold fast to him." Dt. 30:20

Listening is a lost art form. We of this decade, or rather, of this century, are visual creatures: seemingly freed by the photograph and the television, though perhaps instead limited. We have forgotten, in our literacy, the pleasures of poetry, prose, play and story heard. We cannot fully grasp the power of a sonnet or understand the metrical foot because it no longer occurs to us that listening will reveal new territory, a deeper connection with the creation. Instead we read and listen with our minds, silently speaking to ourselves- vulnerable to our own bias and misdirected interpretation.

I just listened to a reading of Franz Kafka's The Bucket Rider. There is something in the language (even interpreted) and the flow of the story that I know I would have missed had I been simply reading. Being forced to close my eyes and visualize the story as the words entered my ears made for a more vivid experience. My stomach hurt when the Coal Dealer's wife pretended not to see the desperate speaker or hear his woeful cries. She chose not to hear the requests of one in need. She chose not to listen.

Sometimes I choose not to listen. Sometimes, God puts a person directly in front of me with giant arrows and a flashing light to direct my attentions. This person cries out to me. And there are times when I choose not to see or hear them. I am not alone in this, but I will not justify or rationalize based on the breadth of this sin. There are times when I choose not to hear when the Lord is calling. And somehow Franz Kafka, a depressed, abstract, Jewish, Czech-born writer who lived at the turn of the twentieth century, revealed this to me.

It is nearly one and I haven't finished my reading.