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Chapter 2

Listening to Others

It’s very early morning, the sun just beginning to glint gold over the mountaintops, shadows of the night still covering the garden, lush with palms, cypress, and desert succulents. Mary Magdalene enters through the garden’s low archway, her heart aching with desolation, eyes still red with weeping. To her astonishment, she finds the stone removed from the tomb, and she runs back to tell Simon Peter and John. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him,” she cries.

Upon returning to the tomb, they find it empty. And she remains there, weeping, while Peter and John go into the tomb to investigate. A man she at first takes to be the gardener asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

“Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away,” she tells the man.

Jesus says to her, “Mary.”

At this very moment, she recognizes him, calls him “Rabboni” (Teacher) and falls at his feet, grasping his clothing (John 20:2, 15,16).

Notice that she did not recognize him with her eyes, despite the fact that he bore the wounds of his crucifixion even in his glorified body. Rather, she recognized the sound of his voice as he spoke her name. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

Jesus speaks to each of us, calling our name.

He knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. When he calls our name, it resonates within the very depths of our soul. Indeed, this is because he is the God who formed us in the womb: “For you formed my inward parts; / you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

He calls our names, each one of us personally, to love and to share that love. Listen to Love. Listen, to love.

When we listen to others, we show that we love them. Listening puts the other person first. Listening allows the other to flower. Listening creates a space in which love can grow.

The Apostolate of the Ear

Pope Francis tells us that one of the main reasons he decided to proclaim a Holy Year of Mercy is that people today are in desperate need of mercy, and they are turning to many other — often ungodly — things in their search for it. He tells the interviewer, “Mostly, people are looking for someone to listen to them. Someone willing to grant them time, to listen to their dramas and difficulties. This is what I call the ‘apostolate of the ear,’ and it is important. Very important.”¹

Those who are in the front lines of evangelization will attest to the fact that so often, argumentation and reason — traditional apologetics — and even catechesis fail to bring their ex-Catholic or “none” family members and friends to the Faith. Sherry Weddell’s influential book Forming Intentional Disciples addresses the fundamental reasons why our evangelization efforts are failing. A major problem is that we do not make the necessary personal connection at the outset. We can argue, quote Scripture, or cite dogma till we’re blue in the face, and we will not win anyone over. She describes how, prior to any catechesis, there are thresholds of conversion that must occur within the future disciple of Jesus: trust, curiosity, openness, and seeking. The second threshold of conversion is “curiosity.” “One of the best ways to rouse curiosity is to ask questions, not answer them.”²

When we wish to draw our fallen-away sons and daughters or our spiritual-but-not-religious friends and relatives back to the Faith, it will not work to lecture, cajole, harass, or argue. Rather, it is when we truly listen to them, allow them to share the issues they are struggling with, that we become able to better answer their questions and hopefully meet their needs. “Often it is better simply to slow down,” says Pope Francis, “to put aside our eagerness in order to see and listen to others, to stop rushing from one thing to another and to remain with someone who has faltered along the way.”³ We must practice the apostolate of the ear.

But not just with evangelization! It doesn’t work to lecture, cajole, harass, or argue with our spouse and kids, either. And listening becomes primary when we are trying to have better connections with our co-workers, neighbors, and estranged family members. Listening carefully to each other is the key to finding meaning, building solid friendships, and creating harmony in our close personal relationships. This is a true mercy.

Improving Our Relationships Through Listening

Austin^* was a high-powered, successful lawyer who came to Art seeking counseling for his teenage son, whose mediocre grades and lack of interest in academics were becoming a source of daily conflict. The frustrated dad dragged the recalcitrant teen to the session. Dad was angry; son was sullen. Art listened while the dad vented. “I set everything up for James to succeed,” he began. “All he has to do is his part. Show up. Pay attention in class, go to his tutoring session. He is never going to be successful in life with this attitude.”

James was silent, withdrawn. Art requested separate sessions so that the son could feel free to speak his mind as well. It turned out that James had very different talents and aspirations — talents he felt his dad never acknowledged. He didn’t want to be a lawyer like his dad. He was musically gifted, but his father had never heard him play. Instead, because Austin was so convinced that his son would follow in his footsteps, as he himself had done with his own father, he saw only his son’s lack of motivation and success.

As long as Austin kept hammering away on the single theme of becoming a success (in the way he considered “success”), he would never discover where his son’s passion and talents were. The more apathetic James got, the more his dad pressured him. Art’s intervention was to reassure the father that the way to help his son begin to take charge of his life was not for the dad to do more, talk more, yell more, or pressure more but rather to take a step back, to give the son some space in which to share with his dad his own thoughts and feelings. Austin needed to give his son undivided attention and interest instead of constant commands for success. And then, he needed to listen. To listen empathically, which means that James was able to confirm that his dad had, indeed, understood what he was saying.

It may seem obvious to a third party, but we all do this from time to time. We are so focused on our own way of doing things or our own perspective on a situation that we actually miss what is really going on. In this case, the dad was so convinced that his son had to follow in his footsteps that he failed to perceive the reality his own son was facing. We may have the one child who, growing up, was always the class clown and the life of the party. We can’t even imagine him growing serious and studying literature and philosophy. Yet, that is what happens when he goes away to college. Or we keep arguing with our spouse about finances, but he is feeling really pressured at work — and we aren’t listening. We have to listen to understand who people are today and — most importantly — to love.

As Pope Francis wisely says,

Instead of offering an opinion or advice, we need to be sure that we have heard everything the other person has to say. … Often the other spouse does not need a solution to his or her problems, but simply to be heard, to feel that someone has acknowledged their pain, their disappointment, their fear, their anger, their hopes and their dreams.⁴

Preparing a Listening Heart

Before we give some practical suggestions about how to become a better listener, we want to talk about having a heart that is open to the other. Saint Teresa of Ávila used to say that before you pray, you have to remember to whom you are praying. This puts our heart in the right disposition. How many times have we rushed to Mass, speeding perhaps because we were running late, dashing in to find a seat, then quickly making the Sign of the Cross and automatically saying the prayers of the liturgy? And our minds were still whirling with all the things on our agenda that day or with that phone call we took as we were driving to church. Our hearts hadn’t even begun to be in the proper place of reverence and openness to the Lord. When Moses caught sight of the burning bush, he turned to look. Once his attention was turned toward God, God called out to him from the bush; Moses took off his shoes, for it was holy ground.

When we engage in a conversation with someone, or prepare to really listen to a loved one, we ought, as Pope Francis says, to “remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Ex 3:5).”⁵

Listening is how we get to know another person. It’s more than “straining to hear voices; it’s about preparing the conditions of our hearts, cultivating an openness inside us. In this way, listening is a posture, one of availability and surrender.”⁶ Listening is more than a matter of technique. It is being open, interested, and radically available to the other. It is not a transaction, but an opportunity for transformation. So, first, let us open our hearts, clear our minds of presumptions, and turn toward the other with reverence.

The Fruit of Listening Is Joy

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch priest and author of more than forty books on the spiritual life, a beloved professor who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard Divinity School. Yet, he never felt satisfied — in fact, he sometimes felt depressed — when working in the high-pressure, success-oriented environments of prestigious universities. He ultimately found himself at home at L’Arche, a community where able-bodied people live together with the disabled. Here he discovered profound lessons in the spiritual life. Instead of speaking all the time, instructing others, he grew by attending deeply to a severely disabled man named Adam. Every day he would bathe, dress, feed, and care for Adam for several hours. The time he spent with Adam became his most precious time of day. One day, a colleague of Nouwen’s asked him: Is this what you got all that education for? And Nouwen realized that he experienced a greater joy in caring for Adam than he had ever experienced in his academic career.

Despite all his “upward mobility” — his speaking engagements, his teaching at prestigious universities, his successful career — he felt alone and depressed, anxious that someone might challenge his credentials. Then he realized that Christ’s way is the way of “downward mobility” — the first shall be last; just as “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20:28). Finally, at L’Arche, where he lived and served many with disabilities, he found joy and peace. “The joy that compassion brings is one of the best-kept secrets of humanity.”⁷

This “secret” is what Father Nouwen discovered, and what many of us discover — whether through a gradual process of trial and error or through a trial by fire, in which we are thrown into a situation demanding much more compassionate self-giving than we had ever thought ourselves capable of. And we realize that what the world holds up as a successful and fulfilling life — power, money, prestige — paradoxically brings us less joy than the simple acts of humble self-giving. There is joy in listening.

Saint Paul, writing to the Galatians, compares the “works of the flesh” to the “fruit of the spirit.” The latter are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (see Galatians 5:19–23).

Works of the flesh cause division, frustration, and lack of understanding. We participate in these works when we are competing with others to be first, wanting to have the last word or make the winning argument — and when we refuse to apologize or stubbornly insist on our own way of doing things. Or you may have erupted in anger when your spouse forgot to pick up that half-gallon of milk you requested. (“And now,” you might have stormed, “there isn’t any milk in the house!”) Or maybe it was that time you had the brand-new daughter-in-law over for dinner and you couldn’t resist arguing furiously with one of your adult children over whether psychological studies contain implicit biases and therefore cannot be trusted.

Listening, by contrast, brings joy.

Listening Is a Mercy

Kindness, patience, and listening lead to peace and joy, intimacy and love. You gain much more when you lose yourself. Lose yourself to silence, understanding, compassion. When the space between you and your loved ones is not filled with you, it can be filled with mercy and healing. Simply attending to the other, looking him or her in the eye, allows for this healing space.

This is love: Letting go of one’s self in order to allow the other to bloom, to reveal himself or herself. As Pope Francis says in Amoris Laeticia: “Those who love not only refrain from speaking too much about themselves, but are focused on others; they do not need to be the center of attention.”⁸ Love is self-gift and also self-surrender. We willingly abandon ourselves to the other, to be gift as Jesus gave himself in abandonment to the Father.

— Practical Application —

We are going to build on our practical application from the last chapter. In that exercise, our task was to remain silent in a situation in which we really wanted to respond: instead of jumping in with a comment, correction, or solution, we paused in silence. We compared this time of silence to the three days that Christ spent in the tomb.

In this exercise, we are going to practice empathy.

Can empathy be taught?

You may think that empathy is something you have or you don’t, like a natural talent. Some people seem to be naturally empathic. But recent studies have shown that empathy can be taught. Researchers asked whether teaching empathy could help decrease school bullying, improve medical professionals’ bedside manner, or help engineering students relate to others. In one study at the University of Georgia,⁹ students who came from upper-middle-class families role-played living in an impoverished family — having to find shelter, provide food and clothing, and take care of their children while dealing with constraints such as language barriers and lack of transportation. At the end of the study, it was found that the students did show an increase in empathy. So, in this exercise, we are going to improve our empathy!

Before the exercise, let’s look at an example. In the following, which response is empathic to this statement?

“I am sick and tired of everyone at work complaining all the time!”

a. “Me, too! I’m surrounded by cranky kids all day!”

b. “You’re probably responsible for the attitude at work.”

c. “Why don’t you try having a team-building activity offsite?”

d. “You must be so frustrated!” (Response “d” is empathic, but the best response will be not only empathic but also encouraging further discussion.)

e. “You must be so frustrated! Why do you think that is?”

We are so often tempted to provide a solution, responding with our own similar struggles or stories. This is well intentioned, an attempt to find common ground and to be empathic. However, it only shifts the attention to ourselves and can result in the other person feeling discounted.

Another common error is to think that what is needed is an immediate solution to the problem. Men are often accused of being advice-givers; it is possibly related to their wanting to protect and defend, and not really knowing how to respond other than suggesting a solution. But often this only serves to stifle the conversation. The other person may not want advice or a solution; she may need to “vent.” She doesn’t feel understood. And, even if she does want advice, she first wants to feel understood.

Finally, some responses are blaming; perhaps by temperament we are the sort of people who like to solve our own problems, thinking that complaining is “whining.” So we project that onto the ones we are listening to, blaming them for their own problems. This is the least empathic response.

Empathy does not require agreement or feeling the same way as the other person. It does entail understanding how the other feels and conveying that understanding. And it makes it more likely that the other person will respond empathically as well.

Exercise