Turning/Listening

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On September 8, 2002

By Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

Jack Reimer:  ON TURNING

Now is the time for turning

The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red and orange.

The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the South.

The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter.

For leaves, birds and animals turning comes instinctively.

But for us turning does not come so easily.

It takes an act of will for us to make a turn.  It means breaking with old habits.

it means admitting that we have been wrong; and this has never been easy.

It means losing face; it means starting all over again; and this is always painful.

It means recognising that we have the ability to change.  These things are hard to do.

But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways.

Let us turn from callousness to sensitivity, from hostility to love,

from pettiness to purpose, from envy to contentment, from carelessness to discipline, from fear to faith.

From pain to healing.

Let us turn around, deep spirit of Life, and bring us  into oneness with our finest visions.

Revive our lives as at the beginning.

And turn us toward each other for in isolation there is no life.

Peter Senge -- Author of the Fifth Discipline – a handbook on learning organizations wrote:

"To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning."

Albert Camus:

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.

Sermon

Do you remember role call in elementary school?  Perhaps it was different in your school, but I remember morning after morning so many teachers calling out attendance — Angelica  Appelfarb? Present. Benjamin Bennington?  Present. Hilary Landy?  Present.  Neatly seated in our small desks we would raise our hands and answer “present!” or sometimes “here!”.  And just so today I ask you – and myself – “are you present? Are you really here?  Not just sitting there – but truly present …

You may be relieved to know that I am not going to call on you each by name – I’m going asking you to answer to a much tougher teacher – your own conscience.  So take a moment and ask your self – am I present today? Now? Take your own attendance.

That is the meaning at its best, of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year.  Rosh Hashanah means turning – the turning of the year.  The Jewish story goes that, at the New Year God turns to a fresh page in the book of life and takes the spiritual attendance for every living person.  Then, if you answer “present”, if you have been deeply and positively engaged in life your name is written fresh into the book of life.  The good news, as far as Rosh Hashanah goes, is that once the attendance is called there are ten days – called the Days of Awe in which you can take a good self-inventory, make amends, and show up more fully into life.  The news for Unitarian Universalists is that every day we know that the page turns, the attendance is taken, and we may count ourselves present – everyday we are given a new a chance to be more and more present.  I’m asking you to answer to a more rigorous and deeper teacher – your own conscience – are you fully present – not perfect – but fully present to life?

What does it mean to be present?  The educator, Paolo Friere, said that we are called – we have a vocation – voca – call -- to be fully human – to embody the best aspects of humanity.  That’s what I mean by fully present.  This is indeed a challenge – to bring our bodies, minds, our hearts – our physical, ethical, and spiritual selves to this world, this project of life.

It is this idea – this reality – of the call into full humanity – that makes listening such a key – such a foundation of our human Being.  In order to answer this call into life it is necessary to begin by listening.  Truly listening.  We are wired for listening.  Babies develop through months of fluid enclosed eavesdropping.  Listening to heartbeats and to the muffled sounds of the world – our voices, music, television – car horns. Endless sounds enfold them and the fluid vibrates and moves around their new bodies.  Then they are born into this world of sound and signals – they feel vibrations even if they cannot hear – they pick up the signals with their bodies.  Babies enter the world able to cry – but not able to talk.  They learn that most delicate of skills by listening and sounding and feeling the shapes of words in their mouths.  We can learn and become so much more if we listen, listen with our whole selves.

People need to listen and to be listened to in order to flourish. Hosea Ballou, the flamboyant 19^th century Universalist preacher said, “Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character.”  He was right, we are what we hear. No child will develop speech without listening – but it takes both sides of this vital equation – no child unheard will flourish. We hear our way and are heard into adulthood. I remember thinking, after reports of school violence increased, that the gunshots heard in schools were the sounds of our young people trying to get our attention – those explosive sounds were the language they had learned for expressing their frustration, anger, hopelessness, fear, their despair.

People need to listen and to be listened to in order to flourish.  We never outgrow this need.  Not “I hear ya” listening but real listening.  Henry David Thoreau – who loved his solitude but also loved company, said, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid to me was when someone asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

One hundred and fifty years later, I attended a mindfulness retreat near the place that Henry David wrote those words.  There, I had to reckon with my own strengths and weaknesses in listening and I saw more clearly than ever that listening is the most powerful tool we have in our relationships with one another.  Yet, while we’re constantly talking to one another we seldom actually listen.  Listening takes work and commitment.  It’s more than hearing – it’s not passive.  When you encounter the word listening you can almost see a person lean forward in her chair or his chair – lean into the words.  In fact listening is very active – it takes focus, practice, and work. 

First there’s static on the line – a friend of mine referred to this in a recent conversation as monkeys in her head.  When she said it I could hear them chatter – do the laundry, write the article, finish the project, clean the fish tank, it’s hot out, it’s cool, I like this, I don’t like this –that’s the static on the line.  You hear them most clearly when you stop to meditate – does your head clear or do you hear the chatter?  Try it now – just sit for a moment and listen -- can you hear the sound of my voice? The traffic? The breathing of the person near you? The sounds from downstairs?  Or do you find that static on the line again?  The chatter – this chair is hard, where is she going with this? I can see where she’s going with this! my shirt label is rough, I wish I’d had another cup of coffee, I wish I could put up my feet and so on.

To truly listen – here or anywhere else – requires hearing through all of that – and even further, developing the skill to quiet all that chatter.  To listen and to be able to learn requires that deep quiet.  The chatter is like a protective coating – a Teflon coating on our brains.  Rebecca Shafir, a communications educator and speech pathologist, says that people sometimes worry that they are showing signs of memory loss when, in fact, they never really absorbed information in the first place.  Of course some of us really do suffer from memory loss – but did you ever have experience of standing with someone who is trying to talk with you and you somehow don’t like what they are wearing – or you notice the dandruff on a shoulder – or you are distracted by a southern lilt to which you are not accustomed.  And if a tape were able to record what one were really hearing, the dominant sound would be one’s own voice.  If later one finds one can’t recall what the other person had said or recall their name – it was likely because one had not heard and taken it in the first place.  It is a skill to approach one another with fresh curiosity.  I regret that there have been conversations in which I have not been entirely present. To be able to listen opens us up to a world of fresh awareness and connectedness – to be heard is to be given a place in the world -- to be offered room to think, to connect, and to grow.  To be truly heard is one of our deepest desires – beyond desire – it a need. 

It has been called creative listening -- because it creates new possibilities between people.  It’s called generative because it generates aliveness.  Eugene Gendlin named that listening which clears the static – Absolute Listening.  Thich Nhat Hanh calls it Deep Listening.  Rebecca Shafir calls it mindful listening.  Marshall Rosenberg and Gene Hoffman call it Compassionate Listening.  It is compassionate because it gives that for which we hunger – deep recognition, because instead of hearing the noise in our own heads we offer our attention to the other person.

But how do we do this?  Quiet our monkeys? Turn off the static? Listen with openness?

Well, it’s important to recognize the chatter in the first place.  Marshall Rosenberg says that the practice of compassionate listening is the practice of breaking habits and automatic reactions.  We, Unitarian Universalists like to think of ourselves as free thinkers – to be truly free is to be free of automatic responses – of reflex reactions – to hear and to think with freedom.  We fondly joke that we have some trouble singing hymns because we are busy reading ahead to see if we agree with the words.  Really, it’s no joke.  We’re excellent critical thinkers – but sometimes our critical thoughts crowd the wire and prevent us from really listening – to another person’s perspective.  They may use one word that sends us off into chatter-space and we simply stop hearing them.  For example -- How often have you heard someone use the word “God” and assumed that that person was a Christian?  Or assumed what they meant by that word?  Did you then assume that you had everything in common – or did you then assume that you had nothing in common?  We are as unable to listen when we agree as when we disagree, simply keeping the judgment machine on ups the chatter.  There are no fresh thoughts because there are instead firmly fixed assumptions in our heads.  Suppose when that person said “God” you simply listened.  Suppose, after listening for a while, you simply asked what they meant by that word and instead of judging their answer simply heard it – heard it as theirs?  Rebecca Shafir calls this putting yourself in their movie -- she means leaning in to what the other person is communicating with your full being – paying attention the way you would in a darkened movie house – eyes full on the screen – open for the next frame at every moment, feeling the Dolby sound.  When we are busy judging it is as though we have a frosted window between us and the other person.  Suppose we were to open our doors. This is not to say that we should give up our critical thinking – but suppose we could simply receive one another – listen to one another and know that our critical thinking will not abandon us – that we can engage it at any time.  It may seem like a risk – to open up and listen – but the risk is simply that we will hear something new – different – challenging. 

When we listen we open doors between one another – we hear one another into speech – as Nelle Morton put it.  We come alive to one another and we come alive through one another.  Margaret Wheatley wrote: “What would it feel like to be listening to one another?  Not mediation, negotiation, or debate – just simple listening.  We need time to sit together, to listen together.”  Even when a person is speaking of anger or in anger or in pain or in some other large feeling, it’s possible to listen with this open quality – to understand their anger, their feeling as belonging to them – to them.  To truly listen is to listen under the words – for the meaning.  Of course, we’re equally responsible to speak with care – to choose our words not to hurt but to simply express our own thoughts and feelings without blame or judgment.  And that equally takes practice.  Still, there is less that we can do with speech than we can with listening.  The simplest example of this is when we meet in the presence of grief – those times when “we just can’t think of the right words.”  Yet we know that when a loved one dies no one can fix it with words – there are no right words – only the gift of compassionate listening.  When the heart is broken it cannot be mended with words – our listening presence is enough.  For most of life there is no fix – only learning new ways of being – and no one can tell us those new ways—we have to feel our way, learn, listen our way toward them – practice until we find our way. And we do need to find our way – as a church community, as a nation, as a world – we need to find our way beyond the habit responses that govern not only our individual acts but also our nations.

It’s easy to think about this in the abstract – Gene Hoffman the Quaker activist said “Everyone has a partial truth, and we must listen, discern, acknowledge this partial truth in everyone” Sounds fine so far but it gets tougher as she continues – “we must listen, particularly to those with whom we disagree.  I believe that the call is for us to see that within all people is the Spirit.  It is within the Afrikaner, the Contra, the Americans, Palestinians and Israelis - everyone.  By compassionate Listening we may awaken it and thus learn the partial truth the other is carrying.”

It does get tougher – doesn’t it? All these divergent voices – shouting, injuring, creating massive rifts between people.  Who wants to listen to enemies?  Who wants to listen to murderers?  Who can show such compassion?  Longfellow said: "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."  Sounds tough, though.

Susan Skog in Radical Acts of Love, tells about Don Marxhausen, who received a call for help from the parents of Dylan Klebold, after their son had gunned down his classmates at Columbine School.  Marxhausen spent hours with the family and even performed Dylan’s memorial service.  For this listening he was ostracized by his community.  It’s not always easy to answer the call to be fully human, to be truly present.   All around us and often within us there is the noise of hatred, the habit of anger, the reflex of closing the door.  Yet, in the midst of terrible noise there are the sounds of healing and listening.

Skog also tells this story: “When Nachson Wachsman was captured by Palestinian terrorists, a botched rescue attempt ended in his murder.  Nachson’s father, Yehuda, was still mourning the loss of his son when the father of the man who’d killed him called.  His son’s action had convinced him that enough blood had been shed.  Wachsman agreed and the two men arranged to meet.  Now together they tell their story to groups again and again as part of the Compassionate Listening Project.”  What this story tells me is that in the midst of hatred there is the hope of listening toward a new way.  Just as this compassionate listening can bring tender healing, it also has a redeeming power in the world.  Even in the hardest of places.  Not easy but real – even in the hardest of places.

And we are blessed together, beloved community – because this place, this church, is not the hardest of places. Here we have created the time and space to be together – to create community in the midst of a fractured world.  To seek the truth with love.  Here is our place to practice the transforming quality of compassionate listening – and it does take practice – to quiet the monkeys, to stop habits and find freedom, practice to hear ourselves and one another into life.  Yet even here, at times we feel wary of one another.  There are times that our own anxiety drowns out the voice that is trying to reach out for understanding.  We are, indeed, human, and, indeed, while we prize freedom we have further to go down that road to real freedom and fuller humanity.  The very good news is that we have this place to practice – to work toward freedom together.  To work toward the fulfillment of the covenant we speak together.  Marianne Williamson said – “In learning to show up more fully for one person, we learn to show up more fully for life.”  It is the hope of our covenant for every one of us to raise our hands and say – Present.  I did mean it when I asked you to take your own attendance – but I mean also that we attend on behalf of one another – we are not here alone and we are not here for ourselves alone.  So I offer that as we show up more fully here for one another we will then be able together to show up more fully into the world.  We are here in covenant -- to make our way together.  Together we turn the pages.  Together we call and respond.  Together we hear our community and our covenant into life.  And when our covenant is fully alive together we will write chapters of healing, hope, and of renewed life into countless corners of the world.  La hashanah tovah.