The Listening Community

Rob Moore                   2/25/07

Pathways Church

The real miracle of the Biblical speaking in tongues story is not everyone speaking in different languages they do not know. It is the miracle of the crowd hearing in their own language and being bewildered. Nelle Morton said it is the miracle of authentic narrative, made possible by listening that holds still long enough to let the truth be told. Think about that for a moment…made possible by listening that holds still long enough for the truth to be told. That is a statement full of juicy goodness. I think church is the natural place for this kind of listening to happen. It is obviously not the only place, not by far. But it is a natural place and if any church wants to be of service to its members, friends, and surrounding community, it must create this kind of listening community.

     My life since leaving Pathways Church as a staff member has been lived in some sort of customer service. You could make a case that my life within Pathways was about customer service as well, call it radical hospitality, but that’s another story all together. Since, though, I have taught customer service at Everest College. I have taken workshops in customer service for my current job at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company and I have tried to deliver customer service in all those places. The one key ingredient that is presented in all customer service classes, workshops, and presentations is the act and art of listening. It is the cornerstone of customer service and the one skill that sets apart excellent customer service and merely adequate.

     One key distinction made in these classes is the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is merely the physical process of sound entering our ears and being registered by our brains. It is a passive process. Listening, on the other hand, is active. We have to be intentional about listening. We have all experienced the difference. We have both been on the receiving end of someone only half listening to us and we know that doesn’t feel that great. We have also done the half-listening. It is inevitable. There is so much information and input that comes to us each and every minute and so many distractions that we cannot help but give only fleeting attention at various times.

     We have also been in situations where we have been fully listened to. Perhaps it doesn’t happen too often in your life, but when it does, when someone gives you their full and undivided attention, you feel loved, cared for, important, and worthy. The more we feel listened to, the more we are willing to share, the more silences we feel safe in breaking. At church, we hope to create the kind of place where we are listened to like this all the time. Of course, even in church this does not always happen. We still have many people that we meet and greet on an average Sunday and there just isn’t enough time to sit with someone and be fully present to them and their lives. Even in church, perhaps especially in church, there are too many silences left to be broken, too many stories needing to be heard into speech.

     Rebecca Parker in her book, Proverbs of Ashes, which our reading came from, tells this story: She met regularly with the Women’s Alliance of her church. They met for Bible study every Wednesday and the pastor regularly joined them. This group of women had been together for years, doing all the usual Women’s Alliance things that those of you who have been in Protestant churches, especially southern ones, will readily recall. They raised money, had bake sales, made food for the homeless, sung in the choir, taught Sunday School. They talked together, ate together, laughed and cried together. Now it happens that Rev. Parker had been preaching a series of rather difficult sermons leading up to Lent and Easter. She spoke of violence in women’s lives, about her struggles with a theology that raises death and torture to the level of salvation and how that theology has been the cause of much suffering through the years.

     After a few of these sermons, she met as usual with this women’s Bible group and they proceeded to tell her that they thought she should not talk about this stuff anymore. It was just too depressing and too difficult. She pressed them however and didn’t let it end there. She wanted to know why it was difficult for them. All at once they burst into tears. One woman spoke of the violence she grew up with between her grandparents and when she tried to put herself as a child between her grandparents, she was beaten too. One spoke of being raped every day in her marriage. When asked to explain, she says she is not allowed to make decisions. Her thoughts, her opinions, her wishes are never honored. “He acts against my will, I have no will of my own. That is what I mean by rape.” Another says her husband doesn’t talk to her when he is angry. She has no idea why. She says that, “right now, he is mad at me. I cook him breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day and sleep with him at night, but he won’t speak to me and hasn’t in three months.” When Rev. Parker asks them how they have lived with these things, they admit they have never said these things to one another. After 40 years together, that was the first time they had ever told each other the pain and difficulty in their lives. Rev. Parker for her part had broken the silence by preaching about these struggles and then, by listening, allowed them to speak of their lives to each other. She asked finally if they still wanted her to stop preaching about the struggles in women’s lives and keep the silence. They, of course, said she should keep preaching.

     Later, she mentions that the deepest silences she encountered in church were around men’s experiences of war. She tells of men who have suffered their scars of war, physical, mental, and emotional, in silence and of the women and children who have also suffered through these silences. The same group of elderly women mentioned above when struggling with whether the church should take a stand on nuclear arms stockpiles finally agreed to support the mission when one person in the group spoke, “Every one of us here knows that our men came home from World War II broken. We’ve spent our lives holding together the pieces that war broke. We did our best to take care of them as well as our children. And never speaking of it, always saying it was a good war. We know there is no such thing as a good war.” These silences and so many more are what is at stake for a church community. Creating a listening community is not just some exercise in church because it seems the right thing to do. It is vital for the care and healing of a broken and hurting world. When we can “hear each other into speech,” we create a space for people’s lives to come out; for their pains to be shared and healed, for their joys and successes to be celebrated. This is what church can be and I think should be. If we wish to live out the Unitarian Universalist principle of affirming the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we must create space where we can meet people where they are and listen to their stories, to allow them to share the joys and sorrows of their lives and know that they are safe and cared for.

     When we try to do this, though, things can get messy in a hurry. How do we deal with all the stuff that comes out? When people are free to break their silences, contradictions, disagreements, hurts, pains, accusations, missions are created. If we are to create a listening community, we must also create healthy space. Here at Pathways we have a Healthy Dialogue Team. I know this team has already been helpful in a few specific situations when feelings were hurt, disagreements raged. Then there is the simple fact of the atmosphere created by just having a Healthy Dialogue Team. I think just having it in place speaks to an ethic in this church that we are here to come together in all our complicated wholeness and we are committed to doing it as safely and healthily as possible. This doesn’t mean that you will never have your feelings hurt here or in any human institution. It means that we will try our best to live out our DNA of creating and sustaining radical hospitality and healthy relationships, of affirming, honoring and accepting all who come our way. When we do fall short we will make amends as best we can and forgive ourselves and each other in humility and move on, stronger for the experience.

     And how does the Healthy Dialogue Team do its work? Of course by listening. We come full circle. By listening each other into speech, we can uncover deep truths, deep hurts, deep joys. These can cause disagreements and other messy situations. But then we sit still and listen some more in order for people to feel heard in their experiences so healing can happen all over. This is the joy of listening. It keeps going and going, feeding upon its own energy. This creates the community of life that Nelle Morton spoke of. When this type of community is created the church takes on a level of vitality that is hard to stop or slow. In his December newsletter column, Rev. David mentioned hearing from folks about various service mission ideas and desires. This is what comes from a listening community. When stories are told, missions are created, churches become alive and communities are healed.

     In Rev. Parker’s church, as silences began to be broken around many issues and difficulties, the church started to want to do something about these issues. Sometimes individuals or small groups would take something on, sometimes the whole church. Rev. Parker puts it this way, “Violence, I was beginning to understand, is assisted by silences. To stop violence, silences have to be broken. I’d begun by breaking silences around the abuse of women and children. My sermons stirred up resistance, but the resistance yielded when women began to experience greater connection with one another and less isolation around their own struggles. When the church took a stand in support of lesbian and gay people, the transformation began with silences being broken. First, [one member] ended an internal silence and overcame the divide in himself created by internalized homophobia. Then the church members began to speak more honestly with one another about their memories and experiences. It was just as Nelle Morton had said. Hearing one another into speech gave rise to a new community, a community of life.”

     Similar things are going on here now. I see that you are starting to look into becoming a Welcoming Congregation, a designation to intentionally welcome gay, lesbian, and transgender folk. As this process goes forward you may discover many things about people in this congregation, some compelling and inspiring, some perhaps distressing and disturbing to you. You will have to fully listen to one another to unravel the complicated memories and experiences of others and try to come to a place of justice for yourselves and your community.

     Which brings us to how to begin becoming a listening community. Actually, you are well on your way and I think in many ways are way ahead of many other churches I have been involved with. Anyway, we begin by coming together to listen. We do this in small groups, in one-on-one meetings, over lunch or coffee. As we mentioned before we cannot do it much on Sunday morning during this worship service, so we need other ways to sit still long enough for truth to be told. Pathways Church has intentionally been set up with small groups from the beginning. I think this is the best way to create the listening community. In small groups, we are able to try to create that kind of group like the women’s alliance spoken of before, where you can share your story and listen intently to others. Evensong has been going on for a few weeks now. We are in the fifth week of an eight-week series of basic worship services with the central act being a time of sharing and listening. One person speaks while everyone else listens fully and intently. In my experience when people are given this much attention and actually listened to, they are surprised by how much they end up sharing with the group. Some folks take longer to open up, but just about everyone eventually shares deep, personal stories about some aspect of their lives.

     The set up here is for this to be an on-going offering for Pathways. I already have two people lined up as apprentices to share leadership and take over future groups. What it ultimately accomplishes is to train people to really listen to one another; to allow them to experience what that feels like on both sides, and to encourage them to take that experience into the world of the larger church community and the rest of their lives as well.

     Then today we start the Dreamcatcher process. You have heard a little about this already this morning. We have a series of meetings set up to capture your dreams and visions for this church community. As you share your dreams with the group you are a part of, make sure you also listen intently, fully, with open minds and open hearts to the dreams of others. Listen more than you talk. If you get nothing else out of this morning, hear this, listen more than you talk.

     I have no doubt that with a group as large as Pathways Church has become, we will have dreams that contradict one another. This person wants Pathways to grow big, full of staff and programming. That person wants Pathways to remain small and intimate. These and other seemingly contradicting dreams and visions require great listening skills of all of us. Only through listening, and perhaps a little help from the Healthy Dialogue team, can we work through these difficulties, create consensus, build our dreams for Pathways and this community we serve. It is my hope that through Dreamcatchers, Evensong, the Healthy Dialogue team, and all the small groups that already listen intently, we can create and sustain a healthy listening community here at Pathways; a community of life and vitality that breaks the silences that exist among us and within us. In this way, Pathways can be the church that we all envision and hope it will be; a church that exists for justice and to truly change the lives of everyone here and in this community. Amen.