The Monk in Each of Us is a marvelous introduction to the late Abbot Joseph Boyle. He was funny, kind, entertaining, insightful, and most of all, authentic. He described the “levels of listening in prayer,” with purpose and joy simultaneously.
To give you an idea of his insight, here are two minutes of his talk for you to read if you haven’t watched the first fifteen minutes of his presentation above.
“So what I would like to do with you this morning is pick up this theme of listening, which the national office made the theme for the year. And when I first heard that the theme was going to be listening, I felt, well, good, that’s an activity; I suppose year by year they’re going to go down different activities we do and see what’s going on with it. But as I got into looking at it and praying over it, and trying to bring together some material in my mind and heart, I got an idea of just how important listening is for life in general. For our lives together, you know communication, but especially how important it is for our spiritual lives. It’s at the core of our spiritual lives. Without listening, there is no spiritual life. It all begins in this listening. So, I got more interested in the project and put more attention to it and more prayer to it, and what I came up with, which is what I want to share with you, is actually not a lecture. But I want to present a spectrum of images and stories, real stories, and let these images and stories reach down into your heart and evoke from you whatever meaning resonates with you regarding each of these elements in our process.”
