Column on Listening

We started a series on civility at First Presbyterian recently. Its theme was civility is a demonstration of respect. One of the key items of respect is to listen to them.

Men are sometimes accused of selective hearing. I do enjoy a finding that as males age, we do not pick up the frequency of a woman’s voice as easily as we do other sounds. Men often do better at listening when they sit next to someone, but don’t look directly at them, as in a bar setting.

To offer a listening ear is one of the great gifts we can offer another. To listen for understanding, without  coming up with a counterargument, unless asked, without judging the person, without coming up with options to fix an issue, unless asked acknowledges the speaker. We often feel silenced. We often feel unheard. In our time, we then try to gain attention by adding emotional intensity to our words.

I was going to get a jolt of coffee and yes something sweet at Luciana’s recently and ran into the czarina of Sierra club on her way to the yoga studio to “get her Namaste on.” The word is basically a greeting, but for many it has a sense of greeting someone soul to soul in a gesture of respect. Listening puts Namaste into practice.

One of the best listening skills is to notice the emotional change and temperature of a speaker, without them s feeling the need to shout it. When that gets reflected back to them, it not only shows that you are listening, but you may well be giving them information about themselves of which they were unaware. In other words, we can listen with our mind for content; we can listen with our heart for tone.

Listening to another, especially one with whom we disagree can be a taxing task. On the other hand, listening can sometimes be pure pleasure. Music’s pleasures go beyond the aesthetic and may become therapeutic.

Listening can be a gateway into the spiritual, just as the visual. When I was a boy in Catholic school, the catechism said that prayer is talking and listening to God. The senses can lead us into another realm of experience. With the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation approaching, I have been reading a lot of Martin Luther. Hear him on music: “I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God…The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them.... In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits...”

In older Protestant churches, the ear is the vital sense organ. In the “worship wars” the battle was joined mostly on music itself between more classically oriented tunes and more contemporary folk and rock-based tunes. In both camps, our focus on the tune has led to not paying much attention, not listening, to the lyrics of the hymns.

As the seasons change, so do the sounds of the fall. Not only can we watch the leaves turn on the river road, but we hear them crunch underneath when walking at Pere Marquette Park. Maybe it offers one of the deepest forms of listening: silence.. Even with the birds and insects and the rustle of the leaves, we can be encased in silence. For a while the clatter of phones and the clamor of noise shut down. In the silence, we may well hear intimations of the divine.