Recently, I came across these words by Eugene Peterson: "Prayer is first of all a means of listening. Prayer is an act of attention. We are not used to this. We suppose we are in charge of prayer. We aren't. God has spoken. We are required to enter a world of listening to God." [1]
My work requires me to be a good listener. All my ideas, theological insights, and teaching and writing material come from listening. To the biblical texts, to learned and experienced voices, to the whispers of the Spirit, to the extravagant presence of creation, and to my own heart and mind as they move through this world. Sometimes the work is difficult. I feel stuck. And then I realize that I have not spent enough time listening. The same thing happens in prayer. When it feels dull, flat, uninspired, or weak, it usually means that I am not listening, just babbling on and on, caught in my own thoughts and words. Real listening requires what Peterson calls the "cultivation of unhurried intimacies." [2]
Listening seems a lost art in some ways. I have observed too many conversations where neither party is really hearing what the other is saying, especially when they espouse different points of view. People often show up to a dialogue with no intent to hear, only to be heard. They come to prove a point, to change someone's mind, to explain or defend a position, to recount their own experience or put forth their opinion, but they seldom come to listen.
Sad to say, many of us who are involved in Christian work are pretty poor listeners. We are so busy preaching, teaching, evangelizing, praying, worshiping, counseling, and repeating pithy sayings that we have no time to actually listen. To be still. To wait. To take in the pain of the world. To see the confusion and fear on the faces of those we exclude, condemn, or dismiss. To stop short and realize we are not helping but hurting. When we don't listen, we create chaos.
Let me offer an analogy. One of the primary places I have learned to listen is through making music. Most of us have heard someone go off-key when they sing, or heard a musician play out of time. In many cases, the singer or musician was unable to hear themselves or the accompanying musicians, so they lost their connection to the song. Attentive and continuous listening is the only way to create beautiful music (and not cringe-worthy cacophony).
I remember learning to sing harmony as a child. I spent hours listening to music, straining to hear the secondary notes, the notes which weren't the loudest or the most obvious or the easiest to identify. And at some point, my ears and my brain finally got it and I was able to hear and reproduce the harmonies.
Harmony is all about listening. A harmony seeks to add something beautiful to the melody; it is not a melody in itself. Harmony listens and helps. It is never the main attraction. Some singers prefer to learn a harmony line in isolation and then join it to the melody. To me, the final product always sounds like two voices each doing their own thing. When a harmony is not learned through listening but as its own stand-alone solo, it prevents the singer from engaging in adaptive collaboration. They end up focusing on singing their part right and not on creating a beautiful song together. When we are not good listeners, we end up screeching out our own melodies without giving much attention to what the rest of the band or choir is doing. We end up being out of tune and out of sync, ruining the whole performance. For everyone.
If we want to foster harmony instead of chaos, community instead of competition, peace instead of conflict, beauty instead of pain, and compassion instead of control, we must become better listeners. And it takes practice, a lot of practice.
One of the first things we can do is to listen to ourselves and recognize where we are not good listeners. If we identify our problem areas, we can begin to make concerted efforts to change our behaviour. We can also ask someone to be straight with us about how well we listen. Here are some points to consider.
How can we tell if we are not very good at listening?
1. What is said to us bounces off and never really affects our response. We feel that we "already know."
2. We tend to bring everything back to our own situation, experience, or view.
3. We seldom ask questions in order to learn more about someone else.
4. We find it hard to accurately and empathetically restate what someone says to us.
5. We find it difficult not to have the final word.
6. We are easily distracted when someone is talking to us.
7. Our ideas are formed mostly in isolation (or in an echo chamber) and not in rigorous, diverse, communal discourse.
8. We tend to communicate through monologues or small prepared speeches.
9. We can't remember the last time our view changed on something.
10. We frequently interrupt people when they are talking.
11. We are more concerned with being right and being heard than with helping and caring.
12. People seldom thank us for listening to them.
13. Most of our prayer time consists of talking to God and very little time is spent in silence.
"People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer." - Alice Duer Miller
"Whoever has ears, let them hear..." - Jesus (Matt. 11:15, Matt. 13:9,43, Mark 4:9,23, Luke 8:8, Luke 14:35)
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[1] Eugene H. Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (New York: Waterbrook, 2017), 59.
[2] Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 4.
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