“Listening, Sister Ann said, is a memorable form of love.” That line is from the title poem of the poet and priest Spencer Reece’s latest collection of verse, The Road to Emmaus, which finds him remembering his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, “Durell” – a wounded, complicated, and lonely man who nevertheless helped sustain Reece during his own struggles. Perhaps such a relationship explains why the story in Luke’s gospel of the resurrected Jesus, who appeared in a strange, unrecognizable form to two disciples traveling to Emmaus, is so powerful for Reece. It was only after sharing a simple meal with Jesus, talking and listening, that they knew who he was. Revelation, it seems, does not require the grand gesture, and does not happen in the way we expect. Simply “abiding” with another person, to use the language of the King James Bible, is a form of grace that can begin to heal the world’s brokenness.
The interview that follows, I’d argue, really is about listening as a form of love – listening to those whose stories we all too often ignore. Reece lived for year in Honduras on a Fulbright fellowship, teaching English to the girls at the Our Little Roses orphanage in San Pedro Sula – the murder capital of the world. To help them learn English, he taught them about poetry, and had them write their own poems. A selection of these poems was published in last month’s issue of Poetry magazine as “Las Chavas,” a slang term that can be translated as “Homegirls.” Reading them can offer a deeper sense of what life really is like there than statistics about poverty and death, as bracing as those are. Here is one of the poems, “I Was Six Years Old,” written by a girl named Katherine:
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