Lie #4 – Talking Beats Listening

from Helena Sorensen Aman:

Lie #4: “Talking is more important than listening.”

(The more I sit with this one, the more I see it as an expression of hierarchy. Within the church, those who talk are more important than those who listen. Outside the church, Christians are called to speak and non-Christians to listen. Listening, it appears, is the lot of the lesser.)

I think I spent half my life preparing for debates, polishing imagined responses to critics and “nonbelievers.” I’d been told that I had to be “ready always to give an answer,” and the attendant unspoken message was that the answers were my protection. That to engage in heavy listening would make me vulnerable, susceptible. Over time my Answer Armor has grown heavy, and some of it’s been shredded to bits, and now it’s sliding down around my knees. And I suppose that does make me vulnerable, but not in the way I was told.

If you have the chance, watch “Hector and the Search for Happiness” on Amazon Prime. Hector (played by Simon Pegg) is a middle-aged psychiatrist who realizes one day that he is very unhappy and only half alive. He sets out to discover what happiness is and how people find it, and along the way he meets a woman who is dying of brain cancer. They’re on a transAtlantic flight together, and the cabin pressure is causing her extreme pain. So Hector makes her comfortable. He holds her hand and smiles while she talks about the people she loves and the time that remains to her. Later, as she’s being wheeled away, she thanks Hector for what he has done and Hector, already conflicted about whether or not there’s any value in his work as a psychiatrist, brushes her thanks aside. “No,” she says, taking *his* hand. “Listening is loving.”

What a contrast to the idea that we love the world best by flooding it with words. When I think of being held by a Love that listens, my body relaxes and my soul sighs in relief. Why should the rest of the world feel differently?