In the third of her meditations for the journey towards Christmas, Sr Teresa White prompts us to ask God to sharpen our ability to hear

Sometimes we hear sounds, words, music, but do not really listen, and so we miss the message. Is this what T. S. Eliot meant when he said that we “had the experience but missed the meaning”? Hearing can be passive, but listening is always active, dynamic. Waking in the quiet of night, it can happen that a word, a sound, heard but barely registered during the day, comes to mind, unbidden. It is then that hearing deepens into listening. Listening means taking seriously what we hear, taking it to heart – being attentive, responding, perhaps taking action. Advent is a good time to ask God to sharpen our ability to hear, to help us hush the interior babble that keeps us from really listening.