Learning to Listen Below the Surface
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
March 17, 2024
Good morning Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning our scriptures are from James 1: 18-19 from The Voice version.
We have a special role in His plan. He calls us to life by His message of truth so that we will show the rest of His creatures His goodness and love.
Listen, open your ears, harness your desire to speak, and don’t get worked up into a rage so easily, my brothers and sisters.
As this is our last week looking at the Quaker Virtues before entering the Easter Holiday season, let me begin this morning by sharing a story that I came across this week as I was researching my sermon:
Gerry was walking down a sidewalk in Washington D.C., with a Native American friend who worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was lunchtime in Washington. People were husslin’ and busslin’ along the sidewalks, and car honks and hurried engine noises filled the streets. In the middle of all this traffic, Gerry’s friend stopped and said, “hey, a. cricket!”
“What?” said Gerry.
“Yeah, a cricket,” said his friend. “Look here,” and he pulled aside some of the bushes that separated the sidewalk from the government buildings. There in the shade was a cricket chirping away.
“Wow,” said Gerry, “How did you hear that with all this noise and traffic?”
“Oh,” said the Native man. “It was the way I was raised … what I was taught to listen for. Here, I’ll show you something.”
The Native man reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins … nickels, quarters, dimes … and dropped then on the sidewalk. Everyone who was rushing by stopped to … listen.
We with our busy lives, rushing down highways and byways, preoccupied with our own inner thoughts and expectations, what do we hear?
Where is our focus?
What are we paying attention to?
What are we listening to?
For 350 years…the underlying principle of Friends belief and practice is that within every person there is that of God or Spirit leading us to respect the worth and dignity of all.
For 350 years, Friends (or Quakers) have waited in expectant silence, trusting that if we still our thoughts and intentions enough to hear it, the measure of Truth that is given to each of us will become clear.
This is why we must commit ourselves to learning the practices needed for listening deeply (as that opening story illustrated). We must also, as I shared in the last several weeks, learn the practices of speaking and living our truth, respectful differing, and faithful risk-taking so that the Spirit can lead us into deeper and deeper truths and practice as a community.
A while back, I had a sermon series all about Empathy, and we spent several weeks looking at all the different pieces that make up this virtue. Yet, Quaker Rick Ellis when describing empathy from a Quaker perspective described it as “listening beyond words.”
He says,
Friends have developed explicit practices for fostering empathy, because even though humans have a capacity for empathy, that does not mean we necessarily pay attention to it. Quaker practices like “listening beyond words” combine with empathy to open the way for people to develop deep insights into each other. Empathetic interactions build connections between people at levels much deeper than rational judgments and accumulated information.
I think Ellias and the Native man in the opening story are getting at something very important. We are not that good at listening and by not listening we struggle at going deeper with our neighbors, friends, and family.
Instead of connecting at a deeper level with each other, our focus ends up somewhere else, leaving us with “surface relationships.” Some might say the world promotes “surface” and lacks real depth.
Our world even categorizes this in two ways, what they call either surface or deep culture.
Surface Culture is a term that refers to the cultural practices and discourses that are practiced publicly to create the appearance of something being more important than it actually is. Even though, it is essential because it has a significant impact on society. It influences how people think, feel, and behave.
We may give the label of Surface Culture to things like social media, gossip columns, and those wonderful political ads. For that matter, even much of what we call “news” in our world, today, is just Surface Culture. Each of these often are creating an appearance of something being more important than it actually is.
And many churches and their theologies have embraced Surface Culture, as I hinted at last week, when what people of faith should probably be seeking is Deep Culture.
Deep Culture is a term defined as a system of values, beliefs, norms, and practices held in common by a group of people that serve to integrate them into a cohesive social entity. [This is exactly what this entire sermon series on Quaker Virtues is all about.]
The main characteristics of deep culture are that it is often unconscious and can be found in small groups. Deep culture can be found in the way people act and think about things. It becomes a way of life based on the idea that individuals are connected through deep, shared values. It is more than just an organizational culture or company values. Deep culture is a set of beliefs and behaviors in which people believe they can achieve their goals while positively impacting others and society as a whole.
Folks, if you listen carefully, this means The Quaker Way is a Deep Culture.
One of the main differences between surface and deep culture is the depth of listening involved.
Kay Lindahl writing on the importance of listening goes even further and describes this deeper listening as a Spiritual Listening. She says,
Spiritual listening is at the heart of all relationships. It is what we experience when we become a quiet, safe container into which the speaker is able to express his or her most genuine voice. There is a communion of souls. The way we listen to each other sets a tone for everything that follows. We often think that our speaking, the words we use, is the most important part of our communication. Yet it is the quality of our listening that has the greatest impact in any conversation.
Quaker writer Douglas Steere says:
“To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service one human being ever performs for another.”
Spiritual listening leads to new understanding as we connect to each other at the heart level and discover common ground and new possibilities. To listen without judgment, open, expectant, eager to hear, we cannot be thinking about our response, or what we are going to do next. We must learn to become a listening presence for what wants to emerge.
That is exactly what it means for us to be people who listen below the surface in Deep Culture.
Don’t get me wrong - I think we ALL struggle with listening on occasion. Especially, for those married or who have a partner, all we need to do is ask them about how good we are at listening, or if you are not married ask a close friend, and I am sure we will quickly find that we all have some deficiency. Some of that comes from a misunderstanding of what listening really entails.
Listening is much more than simply hearing.
Hearing is about receiving information, while listening is about communication, and calls for closeness and depth.
Listening allows us to get things right, and not simply to be passive onlookers, users, or consumers.
Listening also means being able to share questions and doubts, to journey side by side, to banish all claims to absolute power and to put our abilities and gifts at the service of the common good.
To emphasize the importance of listening let me close with this story:
A man was going to a party where he would be meeting his wife’s coworkers from her new job for the first time. He felt anxious as the time for the party grew near, and wondered whether they would like him or not. He rehearsed various scenarios in his mind in which he tried in different ways to impress them. He grew more and more tense.
But on the way to the party, the man came up with a radically different approach, one which caused all of his anxiety to melt completely away. He decided that, instead of trying to impress anyone, he would spend the evening simply listening to them and summarizing what they had just said.
At the party, he spent the evening listening carefully to everyone, responding with phrases like, “I understand what you’re saying, you feel strongly that. . .” and “Let me see if I understand what you mean. . .” He also avoided voicing his own opinions, even though at times it meant biting his tongue to keep from doing so.
To his amazement, he discovered that no one noticed or remarked on the fact that he was just listening. Each person he talked to during the evening seemed content to be listened to without interruption.
On the way home, his wife (whom he had not talked to about the experiment) told him that a number of people had made a point of telling her what a remarkable person he was. The word “charismatic” was used by one person to describe him, while another said he was one of the most “articulate” people she had ever met.
Hmmm…imagine a world where people actually listen to one another, rather than just waiting for the other people to stop talking so they can give their opinion.
I sense listening is somewhat of a lost art form, today. But, if we, like the man in the story, began to embrace it more often in our relationships, in our families, in our work situations, we might just find the world changing for the better. I sense it would create more empathy – listening without words. It would draw us deeper into one another’s lives and closer as humans and Friends. But most of all, it would set a tone for everything that follows.
So, let’s make our scriptures for this morning our mantra to begin making a change in our world.
Listen, open your ears, harness your desire to speak, and don’t get worked up into a rage so easily, my siblings and Friends.
Now, one of the best ways to begin practicing listening is by entering waiting worship, where we expectantly wait on God to speak to us. And that means we must put ourselves in a position to listen to both the Divine and to our fellow Friends who are nudged to speak out of the silence. To help us consider our own listening habits, let us ponder the following queries:
1. What do I focus on or pay attention to when listening?
2. Where do I find myself embracing Surface Culture and not entering Deep Culture?
3. How might I practice listening, this week?