“Listening is the first duty of Love” July 23, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
(Listening) can adequately be described through three functions of creative justice, namely, listening, giving, forgiving. In none of them does love do more than justice demands, but in each of them love recognizes what justice demands. In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening. All things and all men, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens. “Tracing Paul Tillich’s Words on Listening and Love via Welcome to Clearing Customs, by Craig Thompson.
https://clearingcustoms.net/2015/06/20/tracing-paul-tillichs-words-on-listening-and-love/
For three years prior to the pandemic, I made annual trips to Scotland and England to speak at conferences and in churches, always with my friend, John Churcher, as host. In a recent conversation with John, I was informed that I had lost a lot of my audience in England when I made a conscious decision to stop talking about Donald Trump. It seems that a lot of my popularity in Great Britain was predicated on our mutual disgust for America’s “clementine Caligula.” Although I hate losing listeners and I would certainly welcome another invitation to go on a lecture tour in with John, I have to admit that I hate having to think about Trump a bit more. I hate how I feel when I have to read too much or hear too much about him, either of his past administration or his hope of returning to the White House.
I still think that the treat of fascism is real. I am worried about the health of democracy all over the world as right wing, sometimes fascist, and sometimes neo-Nazi political candidates gain popularity in countries which, frankly, should know better.
I understand that fear is a huge factor in politics which often drives voters in the direction of a strong-man leader, even if they may despise dictators or a loss of personal freedoms, they crave a feeling of security even more. But there is something more at work in the world than the usual, more predictable, political influences.
For our entire lives, western democracies and gone back and forth between more conservative or more liberal parties and leaders, but those changes didn’t often break up marriages! The change of presidents from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Regan in 1980 was very upsetting to me, but it didn’t affect church attendance. In fact, it rarely affected preaching.
Talk about politics and religion has always been hazardous at family gathers, making many holidays a time to dread but over the past decade, the fractures around politics have become so deep and so wide that many families just don’t even plan to get together at the holidays. Something is different now and I have spent way too much time as an armchair sociologist trying to understand what has happened to my people, my friends, and my family.
America and the world have a lot of problems right now. Some of the most serious and most dangerous of those problems are problems with obvious and fairly easy remedies but, in most cases, we seem incapable of doing even the most simple and effective things because we are so divided. Americans are so split down the middle by politics that we can almost never reach a majority decision to do anything meaningful.
Clearly, it is imperative that we find some way to bridge this gap. We have to love America more than we love our own partisan views. In my next sermon, to be released on August 2, I’m going to open a whole new can of “whoop-ass” on the corruption in our Congress and Supreme Court. The problems in our nation are too serious to mince words, and too important for us to just call in “sick of it all” and drop out.
But before I vent my spleen fully, I want to say a pastoral word about trying to heal the divisions among us that make every problem so much more complicated and so difficult to resolve. I have long believed that if we can take the time to fully understand another person that we will find ourselves capable of forgiving them. That doesn’t mean that understanding is justification or agreement, you can listen to a person who has hurt you or disappointed you until you fully understand how and why they did what they did and it may still be true that this person really sucks, but understanding at least gives you the opportunity to approach forgiveness.
I hope that the name “Paul Tillich” is familiar to you. He was one of the early 20th century’s most profound and important thinkers but he is often over looked, frankly, because, most of the time, he is very hard to understand. But he was a theologian who lived through the moral crisis that was WWII and the Holocaust and his attempts at plumbing the depth of what went wrong with the world is important to listen to in this time of our own moral crisis.
Tillich writes, the: three functions of creative justice, namely (are), listening, giving, forgiving. He says that the first duty of love is to listen.
We cannot understand the moral divide between progressives and conservatives, we cannot understand how almost half of this country’s voters still want to re-elect Donald Trump even after his moral failings, his dishonesty, greed, philandering, his contempt for democracy and his fascist inclinations, and narcissism have been clearly revealed both in the media and in courtrooms, we’ll never understand the chasm between Trump voters and the rest of us if we refuse to listen long enough to understand them. We cannot forgive them if we don’t first understand them.
Agreement is not the goal here. Unity is probably entirely impossible, but if listening can lead us to understand one another, to the point that we can turn down the hateful rhetoric and mutual rejection, maybe we can find some common ground where we can work on solutions that will help everyone.
M. Scott Peck writes in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled,
Since true listening involves a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the others. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable, and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the dance of love is begun again. (M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled)
Peck speaks at length about the fact that there are different kinds and types of listening. Some people just talk all of the time; sometimes that is a compulsive behavior and sometimes it is just a bad social habit.
But you don’t listen intently all the time. You couldn’t. But there are times when loving someone means that you will give them your undivided attention and listen with the intent to understand them.
We have all been in conversations, to call them that, they are really conversations at all, when people are constantly interrupting one another to object or to contradict the other person. They are not listening to understand, they are just pretending to listen while they compose their response in their own minds. When someone keeps interrupting you to offer either advice or a contradiction, you know that they are not listening to you, and you feel it, right? You don’t feel loved when someone is way too quick to presume that you are wrong or that they are so brilliant that they can tell you what you should do or think. The first duty of love is to listen, listen to understand.
Most therapists who work with pre-teens or adolescents keep a few games in their office, chess or checkers. I’ve done this myself when I have found myself needing to help a young person through a rough spot. They usually cannot put their feelings into words. They don’t know why they are depressed, or angry, or even violent. They don’t know why, in spite of warnings from their parents and classes at school, that they start using drugs the instant that drugs are offered to them.
I have sat in my office suffering through long awkward silences staring at a teenager who was just looking at the floor. The parents don’t always think that they are getting their money’s worth when we do it, but therapists will often spend the whole session playing chess, rarely saying a word, but paying very close attention to what is said, even to noting body language and paying attention to their ability to concentrate and be patient enough to find a good move.
You would be surprised what a teenager will reveal about themselves when they are focused on beating their counselor in chess. In grad school, all through the years of my training in counseling, we had to write what is called a “verbatim” to turn in and discuss with our supervisor ever week.
A verbatim is an account of a counseling appointment in which you give a paragraph about the patient and their reason for coming in for an appointment, and then you write about 25 pages of an account of “I said, then he said, then I said,” description of the session. Of course, we didn’t tape record our sessions and we wrote our verbatims to both be confidential and, consciously or unconsciously, to make ourselves look really good to our supervisor.
I don’t know where they found this picture of the late professor Mills, because in the 5 years that he was my supervisor, I don’t remember him actually smiling. However, the one time that he got really angry at me was when, in the verbatim, Dr. Mills thought that I was forcing my client to come to terms with a past trauma that they were not emotionally really to discuss. He shouted at me, “It is not your job to force a person to open up, it is your job to shut up and patiently listen until they are ready to open themselves up.”
Until he passed away, I sent him one or two letters a year, thanking him for how hard he was on us and how he demanded excellence from us. When I remembered to shut up and listen, and a very troubled client managed to work their way through to a real break through, I knew that I had managed to keep my mouth shut only because Mills had stressed how important it was to allow a person to talk until I could understand them and until they could understand themselves.
You may think that you know your father or your mother, your children or your best friends, but I guarantee you, there is a thousand times more about them that you do not know, than what you do know. You will never improve on your meager understanding, of even the people in your own family, if you do not give them the loving gift of listening to them intently.
Our national divisions may be more severe right now than ever before. That’s hard to believe since we have lived through a Civil War and all of the riots related to organized labor and civil rights, but we have some unique things at play in our world that are truly unprecedented.
For years now I have attended every opera performed by our local opera and I have done that only because our music director is also the director of our local opera. He knows that I am there to support him but he also knows that almost every opera bores me to death. It is almost impossible to get 21st century audiences to sit through two and a half hours of classic opera, even when there is a translation projected above the stage and even when you already know the story line.
No matter how impressive the score, no matter how amazing the voices of the performers are, it is just too long and it moves too slowly to hold your attention. Generations in the past loved going to the opera. There was an opera house in every tiny town in America because people couldn’t get enough of it, two hours, three hours, or more; at the end people would stand and cheer for more.
Our opera company has resorted to all kinds of fund raising efforts to get people to attend, we have opera stars singing Beatles songs with a local rock band. We pull out the most famous arias from a dozen operas and just perform them as free-standing solos, to raise enough money to put on a classic opera which inevitably loses money because very few of us are willing to go. I buy two tickets and always end up having to beg someone to go with me. We have become a short attention span culture.
A local mega church has started incorporating mixed-martial arts, monster trucks, and recently even a tank, to try to keep people’s attention in church. I blame MTV for hypnotizing kids into staring at a rapidly changing series of images that flash between guitar players and things blowing up, burning buildings, and scantily clad models. Then we invented cell phones that become so addictive, you can’t go to the rest room without it, you have to be staring at short videos or games all of the time lest you get bored for 30 seconds.
Is it any wonder then that in the time that elapses between when the McDonalds employee asks, “Is this order to go?” and when you reply, “No, I’m going to eat it in your lovely dining room,” they have already stopped listening to you and they hand you your order, all bagged up for travel. Somehow, having the information superhighway in the palm of our hands 24 hours a day is making us dumber, or at least, it is teaching us to never really pay attention to anyone.
It may seem like a stretch to you, but I blame, not the division itself, but the degree and severity of the division in our country on the short attention span we have inherited from our phones and the internet in general with all of the tick tock videos and face book memes that take only seconds to digest before moving onto the next stimulating, though probably entirely false, video or image.
Isn’t there someone in your life that you used to love but you no longer speak to one another because voted for Donald Trump, or they refused to get a Covid vaccine, or they tried to get you to invest in imaginary bitcoin? Don’t you miss them, if even just a little? Do you remember when you could fill your house to capacity for a holiday dinner or party? Remember when you might get 200 Christmas cards in December? Now, do you ever, as I certainly do, have difficulty in finding someone, anyone, just one person to go see a movie with?
The division that has pulled apart churches, families, corporations, and friendships is killing us but the solution is not that hard. It isn’t easy, but you can do it. Pick a time and a place, pick a person you have neglected for years, and give them your undivided attention. Listen to them until they feel like they have been heard. Don’t argue, explain, or correct, just listen and see if you can find room in your heart to love them again.
If you do it, write me an abbreviated verbatim and send it to me. I want to see how it went:
