These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
11. Listening
Listening: Queries
When is it hardest for you to be ready to listen?
To what extent do you open yourself to the risks of
listening? How have you been changed by deeply listening to another?
What gets in the way when you seek to translate the
ideas, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of another into familiar
terms? When is this most likely to happen?
Listening: Advices
Speak with your own, authentic voice, using the terms
true to your experience. Encourage and welcome others to do
the same. Hearing truth as others understand it is a way of
deepening your own faith.
Friends have been noted for their practice of
discernment. We are led to use this peculiar capability both in worship as
well as in Quaker conversation.
Just as compassionate listening can be a healing
experience, inattentive conversation can be unkind and hurtful.
Undivided attention is a precious gift.
Read between the lines. Listen between the words.
Listening: Voices
As we learn from each other, we may initially need to
translate the words other Friends use to describe their faith, much as
we would a foreign language. With practice this becomes easier,
and although we may never adopt their language as our own, we
are enriched and brought closer to each other by the ongoing practice
of being able to listen outside the comfort of our own
religious vocabulary. We rejoice in the Grace of a God who speaks to
each of us in a voice we can understand, but who also provides
others to help us understand those things which are outside our
own experience.
New England Yearly Meeting, 2006
When listening, Friends need to be aware that certain
words carry powerful emotional weight for them personally, and
that they may hear meanings which reflect their own emotions
and sensitivities rather than the intentions of the speaker. Each
person is encouraged to be faithful in using the language which
feels authentic and appropriate to their message, and those
listening are encouraged to hold the actual words as lightly as
possible, while seeking to be open to the Spirit which enlivens them.
New England Yearly Meeting, 2006
With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing,
because listening to your brothers and sisters until they have said the
last words in their hearts is healing and consoling.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty
Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You
cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are
preoccupied with your appearance, or with impressing the other, or are
trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops
talking, or are debating about whether what is being said is true or
relevant or agreeable. Such matters have their place, but only after
listening to the word as the word is being uttered. Listening is a
primitive act of love in which a person gives himself to another's
word, making himself accessible and vulnerable to that word.
William Stringfellow, Friend's Journal
"Authentic listening is an act of love. To listen is to
become vulnerable, to risk being drawn into someone's suffering, to
expose our assumptions to challenge. Listening can require great
courage, which is why we will often tolerate injustice or even strike out
in violence rather than risk listening."
Beyond Borders Newsletter
"You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at
the same time."
M. Scott Peck
How falsely a listener may construe what we say if he
takes only our words. Our words are often halting and many times
plainly not what we mean. Back of what we mean on the
conscious level, there is almost always a deeper unconscious meaning
that is at work.
Douglas Steere. 1955
The fathomless depth of the listener who can go beyond
words, who can even go beyond the conscious meanings behind
words and who can listen with the third ear for what is
unconsciously being meant by the speaker, this fashion of attentive
listening furnishes a climate where the most unexpected disclosures
occur that are in the way of being miracles in one sense, and the
most natural and obvious things in the world, on the other.
Douglas Steere. 1955
It is a powerful discipline for the "listener" to try to
listen without agenda, without the compulsion to help,
abandoning the need or desire to appear knowledgeable, wise or
comforting. There may be no more tellingly difficult spiritual practice
than the effort to receive what is being said by someone else
hospitably, without editing, without correction, without unsolicited
advice. Yet it is this open listening that makes room for the Spirit of
God to be present in the midst of the interaction, illuminating
and guiding what is taking place.
Patricia Loring, Listening Spirituality
As we listen in this way, particularly in the beginning,
we often learn more about ourselves than we do about the person
we are trying to hear. We learn the limitations of our
hospitality, where our resistances to the reality of the other person lie,
how we require others to conform to our ideological structures
and ways of expression before we will receive truth as they see it,
how unprepared we are to trust in the capacity of others to work
out their own solutions with divine assistance.
Patricia Loring, Listening Spirituality
Simple, respectful, prayerful listening is at least as good
for the soul of the listener as for the person listened to.
Patricia Loring, Listening Spirituality
I am not talking about listening with the human ear. I
am talking about "discernment," which means to perceive
something hidden and obscure. We must listen with our spiritual ear,
the one inside, and this is very different from deciding in
advance what is right and what is wrong and then seeking to promote
our own agenda. We must literally suspend our disbelief and
then listen to learn whether what we hear expands or diminishes
our sense of Truth.
Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Compassionate Listening
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A
duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
These Voices, Advices and Queries have yet to be approved by Baltimore Yearly Meeting. Your comments to the Faith and Practice Revision Committee would be appreciated.
|
