Listening to Know
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Chris Edwards
June 22, 2025
Good morning, friends and welcome to Light Reflections. Today’s sermon is given by our guest speaker Chris Edwards. Chris is a listening professional who helps people find meaning in the stories and rhythms of life, holding space for the mystery of the big questions that don’t have easy answers. His work centers on helping people reclaim their spiritual narratives, especially in seasons of disorientation, doubt, or deconstruction. He maintains a private practice as a spiritual director, Narrative Enneagram Practitioner, supervisor, and teaches the art of spiritual direction at Fall Creek Abbey. Chris also serves as an affiliate professor at Kairos University and is on staff at Christian Theological Seminary. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Theology degree with a focus on spiritual direction and soul care. Before coming to the Western Yearly Meeting, Chris served as a priest in the Celtic Christian Church, and he has over 20 years of experience leading faith communities and guiding spiritual formation. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Fountain Square and is a member of First Friends.
Our scripture reading is from Luke 24:13-35.
Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see him.” Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem, and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Quakers have a superpower and I am not sure they know it. In waiting worship we learn a skill that is deeply needed—yet neglected—by our culture. Jesus modeled this skill for us over and over, but a particularly clear example can be found in Luke 24:13-35 on the road to Emmaus.
For context, just before these verses, Jesus was crucified, died, and he has just risen from the grave. He has not yet appeared to many—or any— of the disciples, depending on the account you read. Rumors are spreading that the tomb was empty, that death did not hold the Christ. But this truth is too much to hope for. Their grief demanded a protective reflex against any hope bubbling to the surface.
Two disciples travel the road, gossiping about the rumors and all that has been happening. A “stranger” comes alongside them, asking questions. Aghast that the stranger does not know the talk of the town—”You must be the only one in all the land who has not heard!”—they, like schoolchildren, recount all that has happened.
The stranger kept asking questions, getting them to talk more. When he went to travel on, they invited him to dinner. At the meal, he broke bread, blessed it, and as he served them, they suddenly saw… it was Jesus.
As the truth of his presence dawned on them, in their growing awareness, he disappeared. As they talked about this new happening they realized they had known the whole time, “were not our hearts burning within while talking and traveling with him?” Somewhere within, they knew something that they did not seem to know on the surface.
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Did you know that you know things that you don’t know you know? You may be thinking to yourself that you couldn’t know, since you indeed can’t know what you don’t know—by definition. On the other hand, you may be thinking that you don’t know what I am talking about, or that I don’t know what I am talking about, but bear with me.
The other day, my wife, Jill, and I had an encounter that is not all that unusual in the Edwards household. We are both thinkers and introverts, prone to getting lost in our heads. She asked me a question, and I didn’t know what she said. I don’t have the best of hearing, so with a confused look on my face, I looked at her and asked her to repeat herself with a perfunctory “Huh?”. When she turned to respond to me with a glare that scolded my inattentiveness, I suddenly knew what I had not known a moment before. Her question was there in my memory, clear as day, without a bit of ambiguity. Before a word left her mouth, I answered—naming our nightly uncertainty around dinner with, “I dunno, what do you want for dinner?”. And from there, our nightly dialogue continued in a routine manner.
I didn’t know that I knew what she said. Have you ever thought you had not heard someone, only to find that somehow a moment later you knew exactly what they said? If so, then you too know that you know things that you did not know that you knew.
There is this scholar I love, Esther Meek, who studies knowing. She helps us to see where this unknown knowing lives. She tells a story about when she was a child and her father was teaching her to ride a bike. He took her to the top of a hill and he pointed the bike down the hill. He placed her on the seat and pushed the bike. As she was flailing, she remembers his voice behind her calling out “BALANCE!”. She describes her little brain wrestling with that word. What does that mean? If you know how to ride a bike, you know exactly what it means. But I could give you the whole day to describe it to that little girl, none of your words would get her any closer to knowing what to do to keep the bike upright. Your body knows something that you could never quite put into words.
I didn’t know I could do this (gesture). I was a new youth pastor—19 years of age and had never preached a sermon— when I was invited to speak at a revival. Not only was I inexperienced in the art of homiletics, but somehow I had managed to make it through my entire education without even once speaking in front of the class. I did my best to prepare, but when I saw the crowd of hundreds of strangers, I didn’t know if any words or sounds would come out of my mouth. My palms were sweaty, my stomach was churning, and I wanted to run away. When I got behind the podium, everything settled. Words came out, the people responded with grunts of approval and Amens. To be fair, these were not Quakers. But I was in awe. God had done through me what I could not have done on my own. I had not known—as Phil 4:13 says—that I could do all things through God who strengthens me, I had only heard it. But my body knew what my mind could not. It settled in and acted when my understanding came up empty.
Research in neuroscience explains that all of the information from our nervous system travels up the brainstem and into the right side of the brain, the home of our subconscious. The same part of our brain that pumps our heart and regulates our temperature then decides which bits of that information to feed to the left side of your brain. It is here where our conscious mind and the language centers live. The subconscious part of our brain samples the environment 6 times per second, processing 11 million bits of data; while our conscious mind only samples the environment 5 times per second, registering a measly 16-40 bits of data (Wilder & Hendricks, 19; Peterson; Storr, Loc. 652). The body knows so much more than it could ever tell you.
Somewhere in my body, God placed the knowing of how to settle into a podium to preach despite my social anxiety the moment I step away from it. And like me knowing that Jill asked what I wanted for dinner, the disciples had a knowing that this “stranger” was Jesus. In each case, the knowing needed to travel from one side of the brain to the other
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Before we talk about how Jesus shows us how to help that journey along, we need to examine another knowing danger. First we talked about when I don’t have knowing and then I realize that I do. But sometimes I have knowing and then I realize I don’t.
I learned to play the Cello as an adult. “Learned” may be a generous description for my hacking away at Mary Had a Little Lamb for 5 years, but let’s go with it. Part of my education included learning how to read music. Each note is given the name of a letter A-G and placed at a certain location on a series of lines to represent a given sound. We are taught to translate the symbol on the lines into a letter and then the letter into a particular motion on the musical instrument.
As I was learning, this translation was all happening very consciously, with a great deal of effort. You might understand my surprise when my teacher, who had just played a note from the page as a demonstration, could not answer my simple question about which note that was. I gestured and pointed to the note on the page, trying to be more clear because I thought she had not understood my question. Then I watched her count the lines, using the same GBDFA mnemonic that I often had to use. What was going on here? How could she not know?
I understood her dilemma later in my musical journey. The more I learned about music, the more my subconscious took over. The translation from letter to note and note to motion became automatic and less and less conscious. Eventually I too started to forget the letter connected to the note on the page. A little later, I noticed that the letter connected to the place on the fretboard also started to fade away. I had less and less use for the letter.
You may have heard the saying: “If you don’t use it, you lose it”. This is Hebb’s Law, an idea passed around neuroscience circles to explain the pruning our brains do to be as efficient as possible (Barrett, 51). In the case of learning music, my brain thought it was more efficient to skip the intermediary letter and just translate image to motion. Later, during COVID, I stopped playing altogether and my brain started pruning even my most basic musical memories. Ones I had rather had kept.
If this can happen with my musical memories, can it also happen with knowing God? How is it that the disciples forgot the face of their friend Jesus? Had their brains began pruning away the image of a man they thought dead? I’ve caught myself forgetting God’s work in my life. Our world offers so few places to tell our God stories. How many of them get pruned away as they atrophy for lack of integration in our larger narratives?
Any solution from Jesus to our knowing problems needs to include not just how to get my knowing from my subconscious right brain to my concision left brain, but also how to keep from forgetting the knowing I don’t even know I know.
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Jesus’ example offers a couple of ideas for healthy knowing that fit well within the Quaker milieu.
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First, he listens. When Jesus first encountered the two disciples on the road he listened to their gossip. There was nothing they had to speculate on that he did not already know, and know more fully then they did, yet he listened. He was not listening so that he might hear, but so that they might be heard. In being heard they found their knowing. When we think of Jesus in the scriptures we might imagine him mostly preaching or talking, but in a study of Mark that I just finished for school I found that Jesus listened in 94.1% of the dialogues. 64.7% of his conversations started with him listening before saying a single word.
Quakers are no strangers to listening. In waiting worship we listen for the light within. In clearness committees we listen for the fingerprints of God in the narrative of the person before us. Listening is a natural part of our contemplative ethos. Quaker Douglas Steer is often quoted as saying, “to listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another. One can listen someone into existence” .
I completed a training in listening once. Our first assignment was to write our spiritual narrative. Each week for the first six months of class we heard one of our peers deliver their story in front of the group. We held space for each other’s stories and we learned about sacred listening by practicing being fully present for each sacred story. After each one, we sang together as a way to honor the sacred tale we had just heard. It was a song developed during a workshop with Carrie Newcomer, a Quaker singer-songwriter. The first few times it felt a little silly, but the words started to work on something inside of me.
“It’s or - di - nar - y, ex -traor - di - nar -y.
It’s a true soul sto - ry, and it’s ho -ly,
it is ho - ly.”
I had completed exercises like this before. For seminary, men’s groups, ordination, etc. I was used to sharing my testimony. I had even shared parts of it weekly in front of my church as a pastor. On paper, this was nothing new, but when I shared my spiritual narrative with this group of people who were intentionally practicing the art of listening, something shifted. Tears formed in my eyes as I told familiar stories in what would seem on the surface to be a familiar setting. When I finished there was a pregnant pause and it felt like my whole being was sinking deeper, zooming in. The first person started singing “It’s a true soul story…”. Their voice cut the silence with a sacred truth. Other voices joined in and I shuffled back to my seat with tears flowing freely. All sorts of connections started to form in my mind, weaving the narrative of my life into a new and beautiful tapestry of meaning. There I was, listened into having a spiritual experience. “It is holy”.
These people had listened me into what Steere called “a condition of disclosure and discovery”. It really was a great service to me. The knowing journey from subconscious to conscious was aided by the open and receptive space to speak my thoughts out loud. Listening addresses our first problem, creating the reflective space needed for knowing to take that long 10 cm journey from right to left brain.
What if we took this listening with us, outside these walls? Out into the busy world that moves too fast for listening? Knowing that listening can help another find their own knowing, that you can listen them into an awareness of that of God, might you consider your next encounter an invitation to ministry?
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On the road to Emmaus, Jesus also asked questions. He asked about what he already knew. He did not need their knowing. He was not asking for information. His queries were a speech act of service. His questions brought them back to their inner knowing when they paused on the surface or turned away from the light within to find answers in another. Questions probed at the knowing that they did not yet know they had. In the research project I mentioned earlier I found that over 20% of Jesus’ sentences were questions or queries. Given the monologues and sermons recorded in the gospel of Mark, this shows an affinity for that particular conversational tool.
Quakers too, have a fondness for a good query. At First Friends, Pastor Bob ends every sermon with a series of queries for us to take into waiting worship. Another Quaker author, Charity Sandstrom, published a book of nothing but questions in “Quaker Queries for All Seasons”.
Narrative therapists and practitioners are listening professionals that help us to integrate forgotten and underprivileged stories that are risk of being purged from our memory. These marginalized tales might be isolated experiences that have never been fully processed or integrated with our larger life stories. Narrative Practitioners use questions to encourage us to “thicken” the story. My colleague at Christian Theological Seminary, Dr. Suzanne Coyle is a well known leader in the practice and she says, “By thickening stories … people are better able to identify which life stories are enriching, which stories they would like to develop further, and which stories they want to deemphasize...new directions and possibilities for our life stories emerge. She add that this is how “our lives gain meaning”.
Carefully crafted questions help us address the second problem, to tap into and stay with the knowing we already have, to “thicken” the knowing, so that we don’t forget it.
What would it be like for you engage your curiosity? For you to find the inner child who knew how to ask question after question until your parents and siblings were exasperated with you? I am not encouraging you to annoy people, but instead of offering answers this week, what would it feel like to turn those looking to you for answers back to their own knowing?
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Finally, lest you only take these as task for you to perform as a service to others, I want to ensure that you pause to consider how you too might find receptive spaces where you are heard and queried so that you might both know and remember what you know.
Sharing testimonies is a great example of such a receptive space. While visiting Hadley Friends recently, I was pleased to discover that each week they take turns giving space for a member or regular attender to share their story—their knowing—so that they might know it more fully. Alternatively, those with something they would like to explore in more depth might decide to seek a clearness committee. How long has it been since you have had intentional listening space held for you?
Maybe those spaces feel too public for you and you need a more private or individual space to explore your stories. There are people who create intentional space for individuals for the sort of listening and queries that we have been talking about. The training I mentioned earlier was part of my training as a spiritual director, a practice that focuses on this sort of individualized listening. I know there are several of us within WYM, like Rachel Doll O’Mahoney, and Dela Stanely-Green both come to mind.
What I have learned as a spiritual director is that the world is desperate for more listening. We are in the middle of a mental health crisis and our therapists are overwhelmed. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
Quakers have refined these skills over many lifetimes. Friends are MADE for this!
In monastic circles, each order has what they call a “charism”. It’s their special gift to the world. Among the Benedictines, its their hospitality; the Franciscans, simplicity; and the Jesuits, teaching. I wonder if listening is the Quaker charism. In other words, it’s our superpower.
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As we enter waiting worship today, I encourage you to practice listening by listening to that of God within; curiosity by focusing on the queries from the message; and receptivity by being receptive to what God might be saying to you or may want to say through you.
What would it be like for you engage your curiosity? For you to find the inner child who knew how to ask question after question until your parents and siblings were exasperated with you? I am not encouraging you to annoy people, but instead of offering answers this week, what would it feel like to turn those looking to you for answers back to their own knowing?