2023.06.18 | The Power of Listening
“The Power of Listening”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring, Senior Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Third Sunday after Pentecost
June 18, 2023
Ps. 116:1-2, 12-19 | Español
Psalm 116 is a psalm of praise. The author and singers are praising God for listening to them. In particular, they are praising God for hearing and responding to their prayers for healing. In verses 1 and 2, we hear them singing:
I love God because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because she inclined her ear to me,…I will call on her as long as I live.
Clearly the psalmist is pleased to have recovered from illness, but that is not all. The psalmist is deeply grateful that God has heard their voice, and their supplications--their pleas for healing.
Have you ever prayed for something so fervently that you would describe your prayers as supplications? More importantly, have you felt that those prayers were heard by God, or by anyone?
If you have, then you understand the power of listening. You understand how important it is to find your voice and say what needs to be said, and know that someone heard and comprehended your message.
You know that it’s not enough to speak. It’s not enough for your words to flow into someone’s ear. Meaningful communication requires listening. An AV technologist nailed this truth for me years ago when we were installing a new sanctuary sound system for my church in New York.
Like many churches, the deciders in my congregation were reluctant to spend money on replacing systems until they completely failed. So we limped through my first year of ministry at Park Church with a “Rube Goldberg” type of sound system that generally amplified the scratchy sound that annoyed those with good hearing and further frustrated the hard of hearing. Eventually, we accumulated sufficient resources in the Memorial Fund to replace our broken-down sound system.
After two or three months of working through the committee process, a vendor was selected, equipment was ordered, and an AV technician arrived on site to install the new system. The last step with the installation involved setting the mixer to appropriate levels for our associate minister, Skip, and me.
The two of us hustled into the sanctuary when summoned. After we had completed the sound check, I thanked the technician profusely for his help, and told him that I was sure that everyone was going to be thrilled with the new system.
His response was memorable. He said, “I don’t want to oversell you on this new system. You should know that I can only improve the sound. I can’t fix hearing, and I make no guarantees about listening.”
Touché, I said.
Audio technicians can run sound systems. Audiologists can improve hearing. But whether and how well someone listens--that depends on the listener.
II
Listening requires that the listener pays attention to the speaker. This is no small feat in our culture. There is so much competition for everyone’s attention. In fact, we live in an attention economy. We are surrounded by babble. Communicators are constantly vying for our attention.
We have some control over the number of messages that come our way, but most of us play into the popular cultural expectations that we set ourselves up to receive them like we are the subjects of 52-card Pick Up.
We have multiple media devices at hand for much of every day. We carry our smart phones and iPads everywhere we go. We get emails and text messages 24/7. We are drowning in communiques. We cannot possibly pay attention to every message that is addressed to us. Given this context, how much listening can possibly be going on?
Not so much, I suspect.
Science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, writing in the New York Times last March, summarizes a study on teen use of technology. Between 2019 and 2021, there was a 17% uptick in the daily use of technology, so that our kids were more “connected” than ever, yet only 20 minutes or less of their day was being spent in a 1-1 conversation with anyone.
Given these findings, perhaps we should not be surprise that a report released in February 2023 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that 42% of U.S. high schoolers responded affirmatively in a 2021 study that they had experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and that 22% percent of these students seriously considered attempting suicide.
Even more concerning is the fact that boys and teens in every racial and ethnic group reported worsening symptoms, and that adolescent girls as a whole, and lesbian, gay and bisexual youth reported struggling the most.
To avoid panicking about this data, it’s helpful to take into account the guidance of adolescent psychologist and NYT best selling author, Dr. Lisa Damour. She writes the following in her book titled The Emotional Lives of Teenagers:
Too often, ‘mental health’ is equated with feeling good, happy, calm or relaxed. But it’s about having feelings that fit the moment — even if those feelings are unwanted or painful — and managing them in effective ways.
What does it mean to have feelings that fit the moment?
I’ll share an example from my own experience as a pastoral care provider. Folks often talk with me about unpleasant feelings that they’re experiencing when going through a difficult time in their lives. Some want to know if there is something wrong with them that they are feeling these feelings so deeply, or persistently, because they/we naturally want the difficult feelings to go away.
In most cases, I explain that there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re simply having a normal reaction to a crappy situation.
As a follow up, some want me to predict how long they are going to feel poorly or ask for the fastest route through the pain.
Here again, I typically advise that the only way through these feelings is through them. We have to name them, feel them, and explore them, before we are able to release them. And, in truth, from time to time, we may find ourselves revisiting painful feelings. This is normal.
Going back to Dr. Damour’s guidance for a moment, I think one of the most helpful points that she makes in her book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, is that the best thing a parent or youth advisor can do is acknowledge a teenager’s feelings, assure them that we will accompany them through these challenges, and avoid the temptation to rescue them.
Training wheels, for example, are appropriate for a first-time bicycle rider, but eventually a parent needs to take off the training wheels, and stand back and allow a child space to master bicycle riding through their own trial and error process. Being present without rather than doing for our youth can be challenging for most of us, but it is necessary for their healthy development.
A further insight that Dr. Damour offers is that teenagers are necessarily in the process of self-differentiating from parents, and that they need to learn to do certain things their own way and on their own schedules.
So asking a teenager how school was the second they walk in the door, or calling on them for a report at the supper table may not be the best timing. Instead, she recommends that parents and other caring adults demonstrate to our youth that we’re ready to listen by setting down our own technology and turning away from our work, so that our youth experience us as ready and open to a conversation with them.
Youth who struggle a bit more to find their words than others are less likely to ask for a conversation or to take the lead. This is why setting aside time to engage in shared activities that you both enjoy, or trying something new together that neither of you has ever done before can provide a climate and context for our youth to share what’s important to them, and for us to listen in a way that assures them that they are being heard.
III
The type of approach that Dr. Damour describes is not only an approach that is helpful for psychological healing, it is an approach that is critical to the work of social justice. This is so because every social justice movement is rooted in the hearts of individuals with their own unique stories of oppression and need for liberation and justice.
Nelle Morton, a 20th century Christian education professional and Protestant theologian famously wrote about this phenomenon in her 1977 essay titled, “Hearing to Speech.” In her essay, Morton described how her understanding of hearing and speaking was transformed by being part of a small group of women who came together to tell their stories as they related to the women’s movement. Morton wrote:
Hearing of this sort is equivalent to empowerment. We empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider, as we are able to hear them name in their own way their own oppression and suffering.
In turn, we are empowered as we can put ourselves in a position to be heard by the disinherited….to [be] speaking our own feeling of being caught and trapped. Hearing in this sense can break through political and social structures and imagine a new system. A great ear at the heart of the universe–at the heart of our common life—hearing human beings to speech—to our own speech.
Oftentimes the words that oppressed people share are hard for privileged people to hear, because the pain that is articulated is egregious and the truth telling pokes at the hearer’s sense of guilt or shame--or both. Nevertheless, this truth telling and this listening must occur or there will be no authentic singing of Psalm 116 or deep healing in our generation or generations to come.
Today we are on the eve of Juneteenth, the 158th anniversary of the day when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galviston, Texas, and the last enslaved people were released from bondage in the U.S. This day marks the reversal of America’s most egregious sin.
It is tempting to think that the victory is won, when such evil laws are overturned. But the truth is that the work had just begun on June 19th, 1865. The work of justice and liberation won’t be complete until all of the stories of oppression are told and heard, and the social structures that have privileged some over others on account of their skin color are dismantled. And that will take a very long time. “That,” as the sherpas in Tibet say, “is an Everest. But every step is a step up that mountain.”
Please join me in taking some steps up that mountain, by committing yourself to listening and participating in difficult conversations with people of color, and other marginalized persons, as they dare to tell their truths--truths that will set us all free. Amen.