Faith | Deeper listening doesn’t mean you agree, but please let them be heard

My favorite funny card shows a grandmotherly person putting dessert on the table and saying, “If you don’t talk politics you can have pie.”

Bribery might work to keep the peace at the dinner table but shutting down communication between people doesn’t heal the wounds our divisive words can create. There are people that I’ve known for years that I can’t talk with about the weather, before we start arguing about climate change.

What can we talk about these days without getting into an argument? Movies? Sports? What celebrity is making headlines? Our difficult and damaged relationships with friends, family, neighbors, even members of our congregations, are not going to be healed by discussing Taylor Swift or the World Series or even Dr. Who.

How can we build bridges over the deep divisions of politics and other social issues?

Some people just want to out-shout those who disagree. Quieter folks want to persuade people who think differently that they are wrong. Neither of these attempts at dealing with deep divisions leads to a stronger, safer community.

“Deep” is the word I keep coming across. Deep divisions, deep wounds. “Go deeper” I hear. Really? Going deeper sounds too invasive, too intimate, too apt to create more division.

And yet, going deeper can be the way to work on one of the vows we make at baptism in my Christian denomination, the vow to respect the dignity of every human being.

Going deeper, to basic loves, fears, losses, needs, allows the possibility of growing in compassion and curiosity, two words in the instructions for an Episcopal Church program called, “From Many One.” It uses four questions to explore what really matters to people.

In a safe environment for personal thoughts and feelings, a person responds to four questions and is listened to by another person without comment or cross-talk. Then the roles are reversed.

“From Many One” is a spiritual practice of deep listening and sharing, designed to be done in intentional conversations. Find details and instructions for using the program at www.episcopalchurch.org/From-Many-One.

The questions are:

▪ What do you love, value, would struggle to protect?

▪ What have you lost, what keeps you up at night, what’s missing from your community?

▪ Where have you been hurt, wounded by life; what makes you angry?

▪ What do you dream and hope for your life, your family, your community?

As important as it is to answer the questions, it’s equally important to listen prayerfully, carefully, without comment or breaking in with our own stories. It’s amazing how healing it is for people to know they have been truly heard.

Deep listening doesn’t mean that you agree with what’s being said, but shows that you acknowledge what is true for another person.

How can we connect with other people if we don’t know that we share many of the same hopes and fears? How can we act with compassion towards others if we don’t know their struggles and their pain?

And yet, the deep listening process is also about acknowledging differences, and accepting the fact that people disagree with our own ideas and interpretations of events. People in the same families, the same communities have different experiences, points of view, values.

One of the great challenges God puts before us is how to live together in peace when there is little harmony, how to love the neighbor whose ideas we cannot support, how to have some humility about our own sense of being right.

When we learn how to listen to each other about things that deeply matter, then perhaps we can sit down together and share grandmother’s pie.