This is a sermon about listening. And yet, I’m not sure I feel quite up to the task of taking more in. Maybe you can relate.
I have been sick, so I began the week trying to listen to my body. Then a snowstorm happened, and school was cancelled for three days. So, like other parents out there, I spent Monday through Wednesday listening to my kids while also trying to listen to my body and my inbox and my to-do list.
By the time Thursday rolled around I heard the latest number of estimated deaths in Gaza that just keeps growing, and the videos by people who lost homes, schools, businesses, entire lives in the wildfires in LA. Then came a string of earnest essays by friends and colleagues outrage-quitting Facebook because Meta is ending fact-checking, but this isn’t really a surprise because we haven’t felt great about the platform for a while anyway.
I feel some kind of way about having to preach about listening when what I find myself craving most lately is some silence. Some space. Do you remember precedented times? Remember when there were slow news days? When we had a chance to catch our breath before the next heart wrenching thing? When there was some space between an event and the political spin machine co-opting it for the benefit of the powerful?
And yet, the world we live in is loud, isn’t it? The news comes at us fast, and so much of it is heavy, and it takes work to listen to ourselves let alone anyone else.
So, before we dig into Valerie Kaur’s wisdom, I want to name that our world is quickly shifting into something different for many of us. The freedom of the press is weakening, it’s becoming difficult to distinguish between factual and fake news, and the people preparing to take power a week from tomorrow have a vested interest in keeping us all guessing. As historian and political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, said in what turned out to be her final interview before her death:
Constant lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but an ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong… With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
When it’s hard to verify a story, when we’ve experienced the sting of believing something that turned out to be a lie, it’s easy to just throw up our hands and decide we can’t trust anything. And that’s why, now more than ever, it’s important to heed today’s Wisdom Story and listen to the wind singing in both ears. As Angus MacLean wrote,
...We wonder about truth, about all the whats and whys and whithers of life. Wondering is very important, but it should bear the fruits of faith and thought, and it should turn our faces to whatever is coming down the winds of time and circumstance…
If we have any hope of finding the winds of truth through all of the political and propagandist hot air, we will need to use all of our senses, along with the wisdom and experience of people we trust, too. Because sometimes it takes another person to help us figure out we’re facing the wrong direction. Sometimes it’s another person that helps us turn to face the way the wind of truth is blowing.
This is why listening is a practice for revolutionary love. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote “Pain that is not transformed is transferred.” People who have no one to listen to them, no one to process their pain with, go on to harm others. And Kaur believes their loneliness and alienation become seedbeds for radicalization. We can help prevent this radicalization by listening to people’s pain, the first step in helping them transform it. We do this by remembering that other people may be our opponents but not our enemies, and we do this not by trying to manufacture empathy but practicing wonder about them, their lives, and why they feel the way they do.
Like most things, this sounds great, but it can be pretty hard to practice in real life. Listening is hard, especially in times of conflict. Even with people we love and trust, listening can be a lot of work. Kaur writes:
In my hardest conversations, I often need to leave the scene in order to process my rage and grief in safe containers — sometimes for days or months or years — and then return to listen again. I am sometimes tempted never to return again. It seems easier to just cut someone out of my life. But returning always takes place anyway, if not in person then in our imagination. We remain linked to the ones we have loved, if only in our minds. The question is how to be in right relationship with them, even if we may never agree with each other, or even see each other again. Right relationship is knowing that we are interconnected and finding a form of connection that allows us peace. Sometimes right relationship means reentering each other’s lives. Sometimes it means staying apart.
And that’s listening to people we care about, relationships that really matter to us. It’s another thing entirely to listen to someone who has or might cause us harm.
Years ago when I still lived in California, a woman called the police on my son John and me when he was about 4 years old. We were at the park, and he had just dropped one of his beloved action figures into a stream beneath a bridge. The toy floated away before I was able to grab it, which caused John to have a tantrum. Even at that age, John was a strong kid, so it was everything I could do to keep him safe and keep myself centered. That’s the moment this woman decided to call the police. “If you can’t control your child he shouldn’t be here at the park” she said. Thankfully, one of the officers who responded took one look at John and said “Your son reminds me of my son. I can help.” Ever since that day I have been haunted by how differently that day could have ended, if different officers had received that call, if John and I didn’t have white skin, if we had an accent.
But my main point in sharing this story with you is this: I’ve had some pretty non ministerial thoughts over the years about the woman who called the cops on me. For a time I hated her, and she felt like my enemy. Children with disabilities are statistically much more likely to be injured and killed by police than abled children. It took me over a year to venture out of the house alone with John again after that. But I’ve come to relate to my memory of that woman not as an enemy but as an opponent. Recently I have been able to begin practicing wonder about her. I wonder why John’s temper tantrum triggered her so strongly. I wonder if she learned anything when the officer told her not to waste their time again with another baseless call. I confess that I still do not feel empathy for her and I don’t believe I owe her any. But I’m glad to be able to shift the way those memories live in my heart. I’m glad they live on inside me no longer as ferocious anger and fear but instead as sad curiosity. I’m glad I’ve been able to let go of the emotional hold that day had on me for so long. Because, as Kaur writes,
I do not owe my opponents my affection, warmth, or regard. But I do owe myself a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate… The more I listen, the less I hate. The less I hate, the more I am free to choose actions that are controlled not by animosity but by wisdom. Laboring to love my opponents is how I love myself. This is not the stuff of saintliness. This is our birthright.
In the book, Kaur tells a story about another lesson she learned about listening. She was in a restaurant and overheard a table of white men saying things about Muslims and Sikhs that were both derogatory and untrue. So, Kaur went over to the table and proceeded to talk and listen to them. It seems like she made some headway getting some of them to see her as fully human, and begin to believe that Islam and the Sikh faith aren’t inherently violent religions. But the experience was draining and dehumanizing. She writes:
I had decided in the restaurant that it was safe enough for me to walk over to the men’s table. In retrospect, I’m not sure that it was. Someone had to listen to them. Someone had to gather information in order to understand them. Someone had to tend to their wound. I’m just not sure it had to be me.
I share these two stories because I believe they offer deep wisdom for the facing of our days. The incoming administration is already hard at work trying to strike down the long-standing policy that prevents ICE agents from making arrests in or near sensitive locations like schools and churches, hospitals and funerals. Workplace raids are being planned on a widespread scale, with at least one planned for right here in the DC area in the administration’s first few days. Incidents of harassment and intimidation of immigrant communities around the country has already begun.
In the coming days, months, years, I fear many of us will have interactions and experiences that make us feel afraid, that trigger our anger and rage, that shake us to our core, that cause us physical and emotional harm. I fear that those of us who hold fast to our values, who take risks to protect the vulnerable will experience more of this harm. I fear it will become increasingly more difficult to know what news is accurate and what is propaganda. I’m afraid it’s going to be hard to know where our efforts, our energy will be most effective, and that many of us with different kinds of privilege are going to need to move forward in the work so those more vulnerable can stay safer. Some of us can stay safer listening to people like the guys in the restaurant than Valerie Kaur ever could, and we need to start stepping into those spaces more. But most of all, I fear that hate will become tempting.
This is why I so value Valerie Kaur’s work. Because she doesn’t invite us into practices like listening just because they align with our values and are the right thing to do. She invites us into these practices because they are a way we can add some weight to bending that moral arc of the universe towards justice. Kaur writes:
The more I listen, the more I understand. I am persuaded that there is no such thing as monsters in this world, only human beings who are wounded. I start to gain critical information about how we can respond to their greed, insecurity, anxiety, or blindness in ways that hold them accountable and fight the institutions that empower them. Listening enables us to fight in smarter ways for justice—not only to remove bad actors from power but to change the cultures that radicalize them. Listening is how we succeed.
This is no time for milquetoast progressivism. This is no time to negotiate with people who deny the humanity of immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. We waste our energy trying to manufacture empathy for such people. We do not owe such people our empathy; liberation has nothing to do with the feelings we feel for people who are hurting us and our friends and neighbors. Mutual liberation, co-creating a world where everyone is more free, where everyone has enough, where the needs of the many outweigh the whims of the few, where our diversity is celebrated as our strength, has everything to do with learning how to listen, to ourselves, our neighbors, and our opponents.
Not just because listening offers others space to change, but because when we listen deeply, we risk being changed by what the other has told us. Not always because we will be swayed to their point of view, but because their perspective, their pain, their experience just might convict us to make a change in our own lives, in the way we behave, in the choices we make. “When the [other person’s] story is done,” Kaur writes “we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?… What will I do differently now?”
How many conversations have I had that have changed me? How many people listened to me share from deep within myself so I could begin to catch a glimpse of another truth? But for this sequence of random encounters, but for these grace-filled moments, we might not be the people we are today. We might never have come this far.
May we, each and all, learn to be better listeners. May we take the time and space we need to listen to ourselves, and offer time and space to others, so they can hear their own inner voice. May we be given courage to use what privilege we have to listen and engage with people with whom our friends and neighbors might experience harm. May we seek always to see the humanity of my opponents, for as Valerie Kaur writes, that “Laboring to love my opponents is how I love myself. This is not the stuff of saintliness. This is our birthright.”
May it be so.