quote:

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Go for a slow and mindful walk.
Show the children every little thing
that catches your eye. Don’t look for
lessons or seek to teach great things.
Just notice. The lesson will teach itself.

-The Parent’s Tao Te Ching

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One night, after a long and stressful day, I settled in to sleep. My daughter was leaving early the next morning for a new job in North Carolina, and we were devoting some time to our goodbyes. We went to dinner at a favorite restaurant and drove around the beaches where she had run headlong into the wind since she was eleven. This was a precious time for us, deepened by the death of my mother (her adored grandmother) a week before. The delicate balance of life and loss weighed heavily on each of our minds and hearts.

Somewhere around 1 am, the sound of the telephone pierced the peace of the night. I’d been on a call late into the evening with a friend who was also in a delicate place of loss, so I answered the phone still half asleep. A soft voice asked, “Are you awake? Is it okay if we talk?” Thinking it was the friend from my late night conversation, I sleepily agreed, “Sure.” The caller abruptly hung up. Then he called again. This process went on four times before I came to full realization that I wasn’t talking to my friend but to a stranger. The phone would ring, and a soft voice now identifiable as a child’s would ask, “Are you awake? Is it okay if we talk?” As soon as I agreed, the caller would hang up the phone.

On the fourth attempt, an hour after the first, the child escalated into a full-blown crank caller, mumbling something incoherent, but definitely intending to frighten or intimidate me. I buried the phone beneath a pile of pillows so I wouldn’t hear it again and fell back into a troubled sleep. When I woke the next morning, cranky, there were four more calls on my answering machine. The last was recorded at three a.m. By then, my caller was out of control. His mutterings were frantic. One message involved music containing the sound of a gunshot.

Despite being rattled by events of the long and broken night, I had sufficient presence of mind to retrieve the caller’s phone number. It was listed in the name of a person who has done work around my house, a lovely man with whom I have had a good working relationship for years. I had grown to depend on him for any handiwork I was not able to do alone. I was aware that he had remarried recently, and I thought there was now a child in his home, but I wasn’t sure of this. Debating what to do, I decided that anything was better than doing nothing.

I called this man’s home. When he answered, I identified myself and explained what had happened. He had a young stepson who had disappeared with the portable phone the night before. When confronted, the boy burst into tears and admitted he was my caller. His worried parents talked with him, decided upon consequences that were appropriate to his actions, and told him he would have to meet with me to apologize and learn something about how his calls had affected me. They called to ask for my cooperation. Still suffering from sleep deprivation and more than a little irritable, I agreed to meet this boy. I was prepared to give him what folks would once have called “a good tongue lashing.”

A short while later, a skinny little kid with long, luscious eyelashes, delicate features, and rivers of tears pouring down his face, got out of his mother’s car and stood--absolutely frozen--in my driveway. He could not move. He could not look at me. He could not speak. He just stood there, scared to death, his head turned away and down. He did not move a muscle. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.

This was a little boy with a heavy heart.

I watched him briefly from the sanctuary of my kitchen, and then I went outside and held out my hand. He looked away, didn’t take my hand. He smelled of sweat-drenched little boy fear. “So!” I said, “This is the guy who frightened me so badly last night?” He couldn’t have weighed eighty pounds, soaking wet. He did not even reach my chin. He was a little boy.

“Yes,” he whispered, “I’m sorry.” The whisper was barely audible. His mother prompted him to look me in the eyes as he apologized. Hard as that was for him to do--and it caused him no end of anguish--I think she was right. It was important that he look directly into the face of the fear he had generated, right into the eyes of the person whose life he had impacted. In that moment, I became more than a disembodied voice on the other end of a telephone connection. I was now a real person to him.

And I looked into his eyes. They were the eyes of a child who was lost, frightened and lonely. I heard his voice whisper from earlier that night, “Are you awake? Is it okay if we talk?” I wondered about this child who had needed to talk so desperately that he had called a random number in the dark of the night and found a person who just happened to counsel people with troubled hearts. Who was this boy, and what was breaking his heart?

He is a child with a good mother and a fine stepfather. They were right on top of the problem, and quite appropriately. The boy and I talked about why he had called me. He claimed that he hadn’t known who I was, that it was just a coincidence that I knew his stepfather. If that was true, the wild unpredictability of God had certainly intervened. This boy, in an act of random desperation, reached someone who was able to hear a plea for help in his voice and to act on what I heard. Someone who did not permit this incident to pass without notice. How easily it could have been otherwise.

We talked for just a few minutes. I told him he was courageous to be willing to meet me and to apologize in person for what he’d done. “You did a brave thing by coming here, and I thank you.” With those words, his eyes flickered with just the tiniest bit of life.

This little boy needed to be loved, no matter how troubling and serious his misdeeds. He needed to talk to someone--anyone--so badly that he called out to a stranger in the middle of the night, hoping for a response to his question, “Are you awake? Is it okay if we talk?” He needed to know that he wasn’t alone in the world. He needed to believe that someone would listen as if he mattered. Who among all the choir of angels will hear me if I cry out?

His mother and his stepfather got a big wake-up call themselves and paid attention to this boy’s needs in a deeper, fuller way. In the end, not a bad resolution to what was certainly a bad night. But this leads me to wonder how many other children wander out there--lost and unattended--in the middle of the night? Full of the confused feelings that come with growing up, and no one to listen. No one to pay attention or to give love when love is what’s needed. This question haunts me, and well it should. There are too many of them, and not enough adults who are listening when they cry out.

My late night caller frightened me. I could have spun all kinds of stories or projections about who he was and what he was up to. I could have called the police and sent them to his door. I didn’t do that, and my heart rests more peacefully. I chose to set aside my irritation and go out to meet him instead. In making this choice, I found myself holding out a hand to a sad, lost, hurt and confused little boy. It was the right thing to notice his tear-filled eyes, to look into the downcast face of his shame, and to find compassion--mercifully, even love--for the heavy heart of a troubled child.

As I did this, I remembered nights when I too had been a child desperate for someone to know, and to understand, how scared and alone I felt. I had taken the opposite action of this boy, and stayed silent in my fears. No one knew about the terror in my heart, or how alone I felt with it. I was just a bit older, not much, when my innocence was stolen and desperation entered my world. How many times have I started out to be angry with another for injuries done to me, as I did with this child, and came to see the face of my own wounds reflected back to me? If I’m open to the lesson, every one of those times is an important opportunity to learn something about myself.

Is there any one of us who has not, at some time, done something terribly misguided in order to cry out for others to listen, to love us, no matter what we have done? Is there any one of us who has not been helped, or healed, often in profoundly ruptured places, when someone actually did?

Among other things, I teach communication skills to help those in relationships and families learn how to reach each other more effectively. One such useful skill is how to listen to one another devoutly. To underscore the point, I often call this holy listening. This is the art of putting our own needs aside for the period of time that someone else is trying to communicate something important…and focusing, intentionally and intently, on their message. This boy’s telephone calls pierced the quiet rest of my night and accosted me in the most abrupt and unexpected way, but something greater than fear intervened and I was able to hear this child with a devout attention.

When I moved my own fears to the side and listened devoutly, I heard a distinct cry for help and responded. Had I given fear free run, I would still be afraid today, wondering about the caller and when he would return. Now I know that he was a skinny, scared kid, wanting someone to hear him, someone to pay attention to him, and someone to care about the state of his confused spirit. There is in all of us the universal need of call and response. If I call out and no one answers, I believe I am alone. If someone listens devoutly, then I experience God. The response is proof of God’s existence in another.

I still see the boy’s stepfather regularly. He doesn’t say much about the boy, but when I ask, he will tell me that he’s “doing all right.” I listen for what is hidden in the message, and what I hear is a softness in his voice, a kindness for the boy, gratitude that I care enough to ask. Because of this, though I will never know for sure, I have a sense he really is doing all right…or will, once he passes through the hardships of growing up. I think of him fondly: that little guy standing in my driveway, so afraid he could not raise his head to look at me.

I think of all the scared little kids, trying to grow up in a world where not enough loving adults listen to them, let alone listen devoutly. I pray that this will change in time for them to know we care when their spirits are confused or hurt. As a wise rabbi once said: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

• With your eyes closed and your heart open, remember a time when you were in need of someone to listen to you with devout attention. To listen as if you were the only person who mattered, and they had all the time in the world for you to speak. What did you learn from that experience, and how are you carrying that lesson with you today?
  
  
• Is there someone in your life who needs you to listen to him or her in a deeper and more intentional way?
  
  
• When that person calls out, how will you answer? How will you prepare to listen devoutly?

Take the risk to do that. Notice how you benefit from that experience as much, perhaps more, than the person who asks for your attention. Where do you find the Mystery, and what is it “up to,” in an encounter like this? What is the opportunity for you to expand your consciousness in this encounter?



Meredith Jordan
Rogers McKay