When Seeing is Too Much: What Do You Hear?
A stone welcome sign reads “Demopolis, City of the People, Founded 1817,” located in Demopolis, Alabama.
Rev. Dr. Cassandra Gould—widely known as the Pastor in the Public Square—serves as the Director of Political and Cultural Engagement at Faith In Action, a national community organizing network and is an Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. A public theologian, pastor, and organizer with over 30 years of experience, she is nationally recognized for integrating biblical justice with public engagement and for her advocacy against financial predation. A gifted writer, her mentorship and coaching were instrumental in helping us birth BLK South, and we are deeply honored to have her serve on our board. Learn More
I’ve always heard that when one sense is diminished, another rises to compensate. My eyesight has never been perfect. No 20/20 vision for me without contacts or the occasional pair of fly glasses. I hear and smell everything, sometimes more than I want to. Lately I’ve begun to wonder if that, too, is a spiritual discipline: when vision fails, listening becomes the way we discern truth.
Because in this season, my eyes, like many, are overloaded. Overloaded with the sight of posts filled with mis and disinformation. They are crowded with the sights of the empire: militarized police on neighborhood corners; masked ICE agents harassing workers; state-issued vehicles slamming into the cars of ordinary families as if they were enemy combatants. In my own city, the Capital City, a Black-led city, a place that has tried to hold on to the flavor of the days of Chocolate City, the streets are swollen with troops. Camouflage at the library. Camouflage near the playground. Camouflage posted like sentinels at the grocery store. A slow-moving parade of fatigues, marching through the streets as though this nation were foreign soil needing to be subdued.
It is a vision of takeover. Or perhaps a carefully staged illusion, crafted to keep us afraid, disoriented, distracted and obedient. I recently went home to Alabama so I could close my eyes and hear. Maybe that is the invitation of this moment: to choose hearing when the seeing is too much. To let our ears become instruments of discernment when our eyes are overwhelmed by the spectacle of power and the theater of intimidation. Could it be that in a time of trouble and chaos we need to hear at all costs? Hear from the Spirit, and hear from those who walked before us through storms that should have crushed them!
Members of the National Guard patrol on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Scripture reminds us that hearing is often clearest when the chaos of evil and uncertainty are present.
In 1 Kings 19, Elijah must wait out the windstorm, withstand the earthquake, and endure the fire before the whisper reaches him. Revelation did not arrive in the spectacle; it came once the spectacle was ignored.
In 1 Samuel 3, the boy prophet hears the voice of God at a time when “the word of the Lord was rare,” when visions were scarce, when revelation seemed absent, the call still broke through the silence.
In Luke 3, when Caesar ruled as a dictator and the land was overseen by corrupt governors and false prophets, the word of God bypassed the palaces entirely and found John in the wilderness.
And in Jeremiah 9:20, when the social fabric was torn beyond repair, God instructed the wailing women to open their ears. to teach lament, to pass the sound of mourning and resistance from mother to daughter, neighbor to neighbor.
Scripture insists: in chaos, in empire, in devastation, God still speaks. But only those who make space to hear will notice.
So in this moment of upheaval, despite my schedule. I make room to hear. I listen not only for the Spirit, but for the cloud of witnesses whose endurance is its own divine testimony. While being on the red clay dirt of Demopolis, Alabama this is what i hear:
Carte-de-visite showing a considerably younger Harriet than normally seen in the known images of her, just coming off her work during the Civil War. Photographed in Auburn, NY
I hear Harriett. I hear the steady, Spirit-led certainty of a woman who outran slave catchers, dogs, rivers, and terror, whispering, “Keep going. You know the way because the Spirit knows the way.” I hear her saying, “Everybody won’t go but take as many as you can.”
I hear Grandma Johanna, born enslaved in the Blackbelt of Alabama, forced to bear children by those who believed they owned her flesh. And yet, somehow, she heard GOD. She heard instructions to change the game for her family for generations to come. I hear her saying, “Evil won’t have the last word. You can still change the game. You don’t only come from fighters you come from builders.” Her survival is my evidence and my blueprint.
When I close my eyes, I hear my mother, Carrie on the bridge in Selma, facing troopers and tear gas and uncertainty, saying, “Keep going.” Her faith was not in what waited at the end of the bridge, but in the God who demanded the crossing. 15 years after her transition I often have to close my eyes to hear her. I hear her singing her signature song, “His eye is on the sparrow, so I know, He watches me.”
Could it be that this is the call of our moment?
To hear when seeing deceives?
To let our ears become the instruments of discernment our eyes cannot be?
So I shut my eyes, not to escape reality, but to deepen my encounter with it.
And in the quiet, I hear the Spirit.
I hear the ancestors.
I hear the sound of people who refused to surrender, who dared to dream, to build, to make bricks without straw. I hear laughter. I hear joy.
What do I hear?
I hear the wisdom of people who survived what should have been unsurvivable.
I hear the prayers of those who didn’t have the luxury of comfort but still made a way out of no way. I hear a call that rises above the noise of empire, a call to keep moving, to stay human, to trust that liberation has a sound of its own and we will know it when we hear it.
Be still and hear what the Spirit is saying...
Reflection Questions:
What might I hear from God, the Spirit, or my ancestors if I slowed down long enough to listen?
Where in my life am I relying too much on what I see, and how might listening offer a different kind of truth?
R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G
