11 The Hermit should have Ears not Answers
Hopefully then the hermit is developing this art of listening, but the real difficulty is that people come seeking answers to their problems. The reason is simple enough, if your car breaks down you go to a mechanic, if you want a house built you go to an architect, and so on, and this idea is carried over into the spiritual life, and a hermit is supposed to be the expert in his particular field so he should be able to fix your spiritual problems, no? But please see this: nobody is an expert in the spiritual life, it makes no sense.
The hermit’s place is not to give answers but to help others find their own reality, to hear this call from God so that they are able to go forth from that. Otherwise all you do is conform others to your pattern of thinking which is of no consequence at all. If people just start repeating what they’ve heard that has very little meaning, one must learn how to think clearly, express yourself coherently, and so on, it doesn’t mean agreeing with this or that idea, but being able to think for yourself.
The world is full of answers, everybody has an answer for every kind of problem you can think of – gurus, psychotherapists, politicians, they’ve got answers, and you have only to look to see that everybody is still suffering, so evidently it doesn’t work. What happens is that someone goes to, say, a psychotherapist, and they learn to speak a new language, and they learn to speak with a certain sophistication about themselves in Freudian or Jungian terms or whatever, and all it is is conformity seeking security. But a hermit should be totally uninterested in that, because all that happens is that the problem gets reformulated, and a hermit is interested in seeing an end to the suffering.
True suffering is to be cut off from God, true suffering is when you have no relationship to truth, and that is sin. So the question is, can we put an end to suffering in our lives? No one can do it for you, so can you find sufficient space in your life so that suffering can come to an end? This is what is important, is it not? To my mind there is no point at all in people learning a new language, or engaging in a new set of rituals, that is not conversion. The conversion that matters is when people convert to God – that conversion is of total significance. This was what the Lord taught also: ‘Repent, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17). Turn away from yourself, from your own petty concerns, from all your self-centred activity, and the kingdom will be upon you, will be present to you. Surely that is the conversion that matters.
Another reason a hermit must have ears not answers is because people need to talk, and nobody is simply listening – there are the professional listeners, but they obviously have an ulterior motive. Everybody else is too busy, but a hermit does have time to listen, and he doesn’t want to be elsewhere, because he’s discovered this wonderful secret that God is present in all things and in all people. In talking about oneself that is a place where self-revelation can take place – not when you’re still on the superficial level, but when you go deeper. The hermit gives room where people can speak about themselves and thereby come to a deeper self-knowledge.