Listen with an open heart.

June 9, 2025

You pray to a God who listens. You pray to a God who understands. It is this presence of God that provides the guidance that you seek, but the listening and understanding that we speak of is not a listening with the ears and understanding of the mind. 

Perhaps it can be likened to resonating strings on an instrument. When one plucks a string and allows neighboring strings to vibrate without the interruption of that vibration through contact with a finger, the other strings will vibrate according to their own characteristics of resonance. When those other strings resonate, when they vibrate, they are unimpeded. They are free, and their response is the only natural response available to them. 

So it is in your relationship to God. When your string is moved, the presence of God and the presence of your guides all vibrate as a part of what is natural for us. When you are beset by concerns, your thoughts are energies, and those energies move outward, and the presence of God vibrates with you. In that vibration, the result becomes more than merely the vibration of two generators of energy, for the combined vibration has a richness and fullness that is not possible otherwise. This richness of sound is analogous to the richness of a spiritual union between human beings and the creative and creating energy that is God. 

We speak of the combined sound of the resonating strings as being something new. When you allow yourself to resonate while in the presence of others, you are in your own way listening as God listens. 

We spoke earlier of the importance of simply being present, for that importance is a kind of sympathetic resonance with another person. When you listen to another, it is in the act of listening that you are creating something new. What you are creating is the kind of bond that characterizes your relationship to God. God’s response to your concerns is in harmony with those concerns. Your growth as a human being is enhanced when you open yourself to the presence of the resonating, loving energy that is God. 

We say God hears your prayers. Those are not necessarily prayers that are offered aloud, but they are prayers nevertheless for they are comprised of an energy that resonates with God’s energy. In so doing, your life is given more depth, more richness, more character, more strength. 

That relationship that we describe as a kind of resonance between you and God is no different in principle from your relationships with others. Your ability to listen with an open heart requires that you be able to resonate without judgment. You resonate with another because that energy responds as a part of the natural response that is possible with all human beings. We ask you to listen to others. In so doing, we are asking you to let your energy be moved and set into motion nonjudgmentally with the energy sent out by another. When you allow that energy that is yours to resonate in concert with someone else, you are responding without judgment and only with love. 

We speak of understanding and the importance of listening so you can understand, but listening is not a passive process. That would be like saying that a string nearby another that is plucked is being held so that it cannot vibrate. In so doing, there is no movement by both strings. If you listen to another with judgment in your heart, you are preventing your own spiritual energy from vibrating in a meaningful way with the spirit of another. 

All human beings are given a spirit, an energy, an energy that is capable of being loving, an energy that is capable of moving in consonance with the energies of those nearby. Too often for many different reasons, that energy is prevented from being moved, and it sits there, and that becomes a passive presence. Your gifts of being with others depends solely on your being willing to remove restrictions that you may place into your response to others. There is no love that is grown if you just listen to another with no sense of compassion, of care. The only listening that is truly beneficial is one in which you vibrate with the energies around you. 

It is true, of course, that there are energies that are negative and destructive. We are not suggesting that you resonate equally with such negative presence, but rather go beyond what is expressed in such dark terms and begin to understand where the negativity and destructive behavior may be finding their roots. Then you begin the resonance with what truly lies within another. You cannot care beyond the words if your vision is hampered by judgments, for you can easily be blinded by your opposition and fail to see what is good that lies beyond the actions, the words. We advise you often not to become overwhelmed with what may be said but try to understand what is being meant, what is behind that which is expressed in word and action. 

Consider your own experiences of self. When you express anger, you express that anger not because you are an angry person fundamentally but because there is something that impacts your perceptions, and your response to that is anger. When you express that anger to someone else, it is easy for the other person to respond directly to your anger in ways that are not helpful, for they don’t resonate with what lies beyond and behind the anger you feel. If another experiences your anger and truly wants to understand and help in being supportive and loving, that person will seek a vision of what it is that was impacted beyond your perceptions and initiated your response. 

When another listens that way, you may feel a release of the anger because you’re somehow accepted for who you are and not rejected by what you’ve said. It is in accepting another that the sense of loving support allows this resonance of spirits. 

When you are filled with fear or anxieties and you want to reach out and pray to God in your pain, the energy that is God’s presence recognizes the pain that you feel but also sees who you are beyond the pain, and it is that energy presence that ultimately vibrates with the essence of who you truly are. Yes, we say God listens and God understands, but that is no different from our assuring you that you and all others have the true ability to listen and to understand when you are present to others in need. You then become in great measure part of God’s response to another in need. 

We say God hears you. We say listen to others. Just as you may reach out to God in pain, others may impact you through their pain. God does not judge you from your actions or words, and you must not judge the sacredness of another because of their actions or words. This connection we make between you and the Spirit Center of God is the same connection you are capable of having with your neighbor and your neighbor having with you. 

Being loving is not just a concept. It is an active engagement that sees with heart vision beneath the surface, and in seeing what is beneath the surface, you come to realize that there is no distinction between you and another. As the presence of the Spirit Center, God, clearly sees beyond the surface of you, God’s response is because of an awareness of the reality that you and God belong to the same entity. You are not separated from God. Your neighbor is not separated from you. A foreign culture a world away from your daily life is in no significant way separated from you. 

Sharing and exchanging the loving energy of mutual acceptance is essential and should be an integral part of your journey. It should characterize the process that you are engaged in as a living human being. You are asked to see others with an open heart as God sees you with a loving heart vision. There is no judgment of your value in the view of God, and there should be no judgment of others in your vision. 

All of this is part of the process of living. What is the goal? What is the objective? The objective for all human beings is ultimately to become pure love, but you understand that that is an objective that is not achieved in human life. But the process of human life, the process of learning to be loving in human life is absolutely essential for the ultimate objective of being all love. Your attention is on the resonance. Your attention is on unrestricted capacity to listen, and when you listen in this fashion, the energy of your spirit vibrates with the energy of other spirits. Together there is growth of harmony, growth of peace as we have defined it, and most importantly growth in the process of becoming more loving. 

God hears your concerns. Hear the concerns of others. That listening takes effort and practice. Sometimes you may feel you have been successful, and at other times the success seems to be fleeting or nonexistent. But the pursuit toward a loving presence is the real engagement of a meaningful life. 

You are given life to grow. You are given life to experience love and then to offer it. You are given life to learn what it means to be present, to actively listen, to allow your spirit to resonate with others. It is in that mutual resonance that the full strength and color of a loving connection can be realized.

You understand that God listens to you. Let those around you know that you listen to them so that when they reach out, they will know they have been heard and that they are affirmed and valued and cherished just as you can feel affirmed and valued and cherished by God. 

Open your heart vision. Allow yourself an experience to truly listen, to truly be present, and all that you do will belong to the process of enabling God’s presence to be felt by others. Let others be warmed by your presence as you are warmed by God’s presence. 

Amen.