Let this be an opportunity to bear witness to Christ, a new form of evangelization that perhaps appeals more to young people. Certainly, this is the moment when the Church uses you to go out into the world.

We must strive to be a Church capable of listening to the religious expressions of the communities, of welcoming the religious richness of the rituals of the people, of offering opportunities for commissioning ministries, of perceiving the presence of God in the way of living in harmony with everything and everyone.

Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

The God of the sages does not merely ordain; God also listens.

I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.

As a Church, we are called to discern the voice of our Lord and to read history not only with human eyes but always in light of the Word of God. Only in doing so can we discover where the Lord wants to guide us, as a Church, as society and even as individual believers.

Must the Church conform to the world and its modern ideas in order to be understood and heard? Much depends on the clarification of the word "conform." The answer is "yes" if by conform is meant change and adaptation in order to express eternal truths in a way more understandable to modern man.

what lovely, larger life becomes ours when we listen to one another

By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.

True listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self.

Seen as a whole, the direction of theological thinking has been characterized by a transference away from attention to the being per se of supernatural realities, and toward attention to their relationship with man, with the world, and with the problems and the affirmations of all those who for us represent the others.

Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.

On the other hand, the Church cannot conform to the world as understood by Christ in his parables. To this world there can be neither conformity nor can we compromise with it. On the contrary, toward this world the Church and every Christian must be prophetic. We must cry out loudly the word of God, ready even to be stoned as were all the prophets sent by the Lord.

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.