What Listening Does

Today we explore listening as a spiritual practice and as a liberal religious practice. What is it to listen? What does listening do for someone? What does listening do to us?

 

Sermon audio

Sermon

Rev. Joe looking like the dictionary illustration of a clean-cut white guy.
The Rev. Joe Cleveland and his banjo.

What Listening Does

Rev. Joe Cleveland
October 13, 2024

 

On one of his walks, the poet William Wordsworth happens upon a woman by herself in a field.  She is at work harvesting grain and she is singing.  The sound of her singing is filling up the valley.  I imagine the gold of grain she is harvesting.  I imagine the swing of her arm as she cuts the grain, the movement of her hands as she binds the grain into bundles.  There is so much visual detail that William Wordsworth could have given us in his poem “The Solitary Reaper,” but we don’t much in the way of any visuals at all, really, in the poem.

What captivates the poet is her singing.  I assume he is not close to the singer.  He can’t make out the words to her song.  He can just hear her song filling up the valley.  He wonders at her singing.  He praises the quality of her singing in the second of the poem’s four stanzas.  And then he wonders what it could be that she is singing about.  Is it a happy song or a sad song, a song of victory or a song of sorrow?  He stands still for a while, a long while, perhaps, listening.  When he finally does resume his walk and leave the valley, even though he is now out of earshot, he hears her still.  Her song stays with him.

The poet has been changed.  His experience of the world is different now from what it was before he stood and listened to this woman singing while working in the field.  

This story of listening was put in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal.  As far as I can tell, it is included as a hymn in exactly no one else’s hymnal.  No other faith claims this as a hymn.  There must be something to learn about Unitarian Universalism here.

Unitarian Universalism gets described as a covenantal faith rather than a doctrinal one.  We aren’t a faith community that is defined by a set of doctrinal beliefs that everyone holds to.  Instead, we are defined by joining in together in a covenant, a kind of promise that we strive to live into.  Unitarian Universalism is about being in relationship.  The UU minister Nancy McDonald Ladd describes a Unitarian Universalist theology as “about who I’m in covenant with, what that covenant asks of me, and how I am held by that covenant in relationship to that force which is and will always be so much larger than myself alone.”

Unitarian Universalists recently gathered together and had a big vote to say explicitly that love is at the center of our faith.  Love isn’t a belief.  Love isn’t a feeling that someone has.  Love is about relationship.  For there to be love, there must be a beloved.  Love describes a way of being in relationship.  

The hymn based on Wordsworth’s poem tells a story about someone listening to another.  The hymn is an occasion to contemplate an act of listening.  And listening is about relationship.  And when we engage in listening, things happen.

We can only listen to something.  So part of listening is about who and what we decide to listen to.  In Wordsworth’s poem, he is listening to a woman singing.  She’s not on a concert stage, though.  She’s just a woman at work.  There’s nothing special about her, necessarily.  But in listening to her the way he does, the poet treats her as special.  You don’t have to be special to be listened to.  Being listened to creates an opportunity to discover and honor specialness in whoever, whatever is being listened to.  And listening so well that you take in another’s song, that changes the listener.

To really, deeply listen is to put oneself in orbit around another.  It is a conscious effort to recognize that whatever it is that may be going on, it is not about me.  It is about someone else and my relationship to them.  For the moment at least, deeply listening, I know I am not the center of the universe.  You are. In her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, the writer and physician Rachel Naomi Remen says,

Listening is the oldest and perhaps the most powerful tool of healing. It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us. When we listen, we offer with our attention an opportunity for wholeness. Our listening creates sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person. That which has been denied, unloved, devalued by themselves and by others. That which is hidden. [219-220]

Many of the Aboriginal peoples of what is called Australia have at the heart of their culture, a practice of what has come to be called deep listening.  The researcher and consultant Laura Brearley writes that

“The Indigenous concept of Deep Listening describes a way of learning, working, and togetherness that is informed by the concepts of community and reciprocity.” 

She writes,

“It involves getting out of the way in order to open up a space in which genuine contact can be made.” 

It is about respect, time, trust, and care.  Dr. Brearley quotes the elder and educator Miriam Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, a Ngangikurungkurr elder from the Daly River in the Northern Territory in Australia.  ‘Aunty’ Miriam describes what in her home language is called Dadirri: 

“In our Aboriginal way, we learn to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened.  This was the normal way for us to learn—not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.  Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years. …”

Learning from this indigenous wisdom, it is clear that deep listening is a spiritual practice.  Miriam Rose shares that

“Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.  Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us.  We call on it and it calls to us. … It is something like what you call ‘contemplation.’”

Miriam Rose says that

“Dadirri is also used as a prayer, a prayer in the sense of you just feel the presence of the Great Creator.” 

For those of us for whom prayer is a difficult or even foreign concept, maybe this is a way to imagine a kind of prayer practice: you can just listen, and listen deeply.  

Imagine listening deeply.  To practice deep listening, you can’t be focused on what you are going to say next.  You got to get yourself out of the way.  We need to be open.  And we also need to be willing to be changed.  To listen is to acknowledge that one does not know everything.  There is more knowledge yet to be discovered, and my notion now of what is true and my experience of the world—I must be willing to allow them to change.  If I am unwilling to change my notion of what is true, I am not listening.  The poet walking away from the woman at work carries her song with him, and his experience of the world is different now than it was before he heard her.  There is a new beauty, new truth, a new awareness of something larger, vaster, than just oneself.  

To end with a little how-to, here is the poet Joyce Sutphen and her poem “How to Listen”:

Tilt your head slightly to one side and lift
your eyebrows expectantly. Ask questions.

Delve into the subject at hand or let
things come randomly. Don’t expect answers.

Forget everything you’ve ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

Listen with your eyes, as if the story
you are hearing is happening right now.

Listen without blinking, as if a move
might frighten the truth away forever.

Don’t attempt to copy anything down.
Don’t bring a camera or a recorder.

This is your chance to listen carefully.
Your whole life might depend on what you hear.

My friends, my good companions on this Unitarian Universalist path,

May we be a people of deep listening, committed listening, 

a listening that leads to healing 

a listening that leads to whole-heartedness

a listening that helps us grow in compassion and wisdom

a listening that creates sanctuary and helps another feel at home

a listening that helps us discern ways to act for justice and equity

a listening grounded in generosity and the honoring of interdependence

a listening open to transformation and a growing sense of the many and the one

a listening that is loving

 

may you find your practice of listening to be a blessing for yourself

may your listening be a blessing to others

 

Listen.

 

References/Resources

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