LIFE WITH A CAPITAL 'L' Chapter Two, section TWO

PERIPHERAL SILENCE—The Place of a Listener

I did some minor manuscript editing for a friend. She writes of a young couple that anticipated adoption of a foster child they cared for since its birth. By a cruel twist of judiciary processes, they lost the child and any hope of adoption. Their sorrow was beyond consolation. Consolation was poor. My friend asked the woman, “How do you wish people had responded to you in this crisis?

She wished, she said, that people had listened. That they might have held back advice and “let me say what I needed to say.” Instead, she was repeatedly told how to react. 

A good listener gets out of the center of things. Listeners must hear others accurately without immediately fixing, judging, correcting, or as I read somewhere, “making good the inadequacies.” Listening is a noble activity that honors the voice of another. It is not a space in which we stitch together our responses. Listening requires our being peripheral people, being quiet while another speaks. It does not require agreement, only an active ear. 

What seems like billions of years ago, I studied for a few weeks at L’Abri, a center for the investigation of Christianity located in the Swiss Alps. I was a young adult, and I was seriously questioning my faith. To wrap up study periods, evening discussions occurred around a crackling, warm fireplace. The particular night I remember, Udo Middelmann was taking questions. I asked one. It was unwieldy and involved a collection of clauses. Udo let me finish. He restated my question, confirming accurate comprehension, and then he paused. I mean, paused.

There was a silence so significant I felt I could hear it. Well before his answer began, I learned something about people who listen; they enter the edge of a speaker’s space. They allow silence. Listeners need it. I do not remember that particular question or its answer. I do remember hearing the pause, and experiencing it in the midst of conversation. He suspended his own ideas and made room for the arrival of a message. Listeners work much like a baseball team’s catcher. The pitcher is the absolute center of things. Heaven help the team if the catcher grows bored by his own moment of inactivity and decides to practice signals while the pitch is sent.

I think of the majestic catch Jesus supplied when his opponents attempted to “catch him in his words.” Should they pay taxes to Caesar, they wanted to know. Having listened well, Jesus put them to work and then fired back a question. 

They brought him the requested coin and acknowledged that Caesar’s image was pressed on it. Well then, he suggested, the answer is easy. Give to Caesar what belongs to him. By the way, he added, give to God the things that are God’s. “They marveled at him,” I read in the Gospel of Mark, chapter twelve. Well, so do I. A coin bears the Caesar’s image but the image of God is pressed onto humanity. For anyone listening, the message is profound: give to God that which bears his image—ourselves. By listening well, Jesus left the conversation where it belonged. Not with the victory in a battle of words but with the power of a proper response.

I am still moved by the memory of Udo solidly catching my question and sending back an appropriate response. Good listening is a powerful skill and a gift to any who receive it. It is also a discipline of noble character. It is rare, excellent, and responsible. Respect for the opinions and thoughts of others comes from inside a person whose values stretch beyond themselves, whose attitudes and behaviors demonstrate concern.

PITCHER’S MOUND MENTALITY

I am convinced that most people fail to listen for one simple reason: they are busy talking to themselves. If a catcher stands on the pitcher’s mound, even if he is shaping brilliant, powerful signals there, he is working from the wrong place. A “listener” who stands on a speaker’s story, working in their own heard on personal and powerful responses, is like that. No outside voice can be pitched to them. They are in the wrong place. They hear but do not listen. They are mentally pitching their own thoughts rather than catching the thoughts of another. In either instance, the game is not worth attending. 

In chapter one I suggested that we are not nearly so self-indulgent as we are sufferers of self-doubt, and now I propose that we are not nearly so selfishly self-centered in conversation as we are insecurely so. Insecurity accounts for a vast amount of personal preoccupation. It constantly fidgets over the shape and seams of our appearance. An insecure person never feels quite properly suited up. Everyone else looks comfortably outfitted in what we wear poorly: esteem, confidence, right answers, popularity, impressionability. I do not know if impressionability is a word but I know that it says what I mean. Insecurity encourages us to worry about an impression of presence rather than to be authentically present. People living real lives have finished fidgeting; they are authentic. Not faultless, not perfect, not of superior intelligence, just unself-consciously aware of who they are.

Like Shirley. I met her in Okinawa where our husbands were based as fighter pilots. Together we played bridge, sang in a wives club choir, attended Bible study, endured pregnancies, and tried to learn what it meant to be an Air Force officer’s wife. We learned quickly that it meant different things to different women. I can tell you what it meant to Shirley.

One Sunday she and her husband, Dick, invited a few couples to their house for dinner after church. When we walked in Shirley said, with a musical voice, “Take your shoes off, make yourselves comfortable. I am a preacher’s kid, and Lord knows we at least need Sunday as a day of relaxation. Besides, I wouldn’t even know how to work up an air of formality.” She served up a wonderful day.

I marveled at this woman’s self-confidence and genuine ease, which of course, she immediately passed on to her guests. When Shirley listens, she listens like Jesus, like Udo. She grabs contact with your eyes, stays in the catcher’s box, remains silent while you pitch from the mound, and considers it her job to catch whatever you send to her. 

Coming up: SELF-CHECK

Why is it so hard to listen to others? What is it we are doing while others speak? We are talking to ourselves  . . . 

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