Listen Generously
You Will Give a Gift Even Greater Than Your Attention
In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, physician and bestselling author Rachel Naomi Remen makes a comment about silence and listening that Thomas Keating or Evelyn Underhill (or any other contemplative teacher) couldn’t have said any better:
Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually, you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
Our culture has a bias against listening. If you don’t believe me, just turn on your favorite cable news channel and notice how often the journalists and pundits talk over one another. I personally find that kind of behavior rude, but I must be in the minority: if it truly offended people to the point that they stopped watching the news, we can rest assured that the owners and stockholders of the news organizations would put a stop to it. The fact that they don’t do this is an indictment of them, of course, but it’s even more of an indictment of all of us.
Why don’t we like listening? I only have a hunch here but that hunch is that we associate listening with being passive, if not weak. We’d rather talk than listen because we think it’s one way for us to assert dominance and control.
But Dr. Remen turns that line of thinking on its head. When we listen — truly listen — we are not being submissive; we are being generous. Listening is an act of hospitality. And in a turn of phrase that could make any mystical heart sing, she acknowledges that our generosity is as much a gift to ourselves as it is a gift to others: “in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone.” If we are all truly one (as the mystics have been telling us for generations now), then what better way to discover that foundational spiritual truth than by discerning it in the silence found in one another’s heart?
We listen to find truth, to hear “the unseen,” and to know ourselves in every person. If this doesn’t ring true to you, accept it as a challenge: listen, truly listen, and see for yourelf.
Quotation source: Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, 10th Anniversary Edition. Penguin, 2006, p. 112.