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Chapter 1
Listening: The Most Important Thing
We were spending a leisurely evening at a dinner party hosted by acquaintances. As we engaged in spirited conversation with a couple whom we had just met, both of us had the same negative reaction. Whenever we would bring up a potential topic for discussion or put forward a unique fact about ourselves — for example, the fact that we once lived in Germany for more than four years with small children — they would give a perfunctory nod, and then they immediately launched into a passionate monologue about how they, too, had had a similar experience: “Once, we took a cruise down the Rhine….” It was as though they could barely wait for us to finish our sentence before they jumped in with an “I’ll see your Germany, and I will raise you our Rhineland cruise!”
By the end of the evening, we were exhausted and grumpy. We grumbled all the way home about how we felt one-upped by the couple. “They were prideful, disrespectful, and boorish,” we harrumphed.
But God has a way of gently helping us face our own sinfulness, without actually rubbing our noses in it.
Not long after, we hosted our own dinner party. We were magnanimous and gregarious, holding forth on myriad subjects. We told personal stories and embellished upon the shyly proffered attempts at conversation by some of the younger guests. At one point, Laraine caught herself cutting off a comment to rush in with her own, more interesting story. Suddenly, as though the Holy Spirit shined a laser-beam spotlight on the moment, she realized she was exhibiting the very same behavior she (and Art) had recently so deeply resented. Both of us had thought we were being good hosts, moving the conversation forward and bonding through stories with our guests. Alas, we were barely listening at all.
Why listen, anyway? Is it just a matter of etiquette, an Emily Post rule for social interaction? Do we listen to be polite, pausing for a discreet moment while waiting for our turn to speak? Is it, perhaps, simply the first step in acquiring information or a strategic move on the part of a skilled politician or apologist? Is it an effort to learn about people and motivate them?
In fact, it is much more than that: it is the most important thing. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said, “The most important thing for everyone is to listen: to listen to each other, and for everyone to listen to what the Lord wants to say to us.”1 Pope Francis reminds us, “Listening is more than hearing. It’s a mutual listening in which each one has something to learn.”2
A Scarce Commodity
I am standing at the counter in front of my laptop, scrolling through Facebook posts from friends and just-barely-acquaintances, some of whom I’ve never met in person. I am skipping past the “And you will never guess what happened when she did THIS” teasers and the angry political diatribes, drooling over recipe videos, and rolling my eyes over yet another alleged Pope Francis gaffe. Then I gradually become aware of an insistent whine, a plaintive, soft rumble. I drag my eyes away from my laptop to see my little poodle, Ginger, woefully gazing at me with large brown eyes and wet nose. She needs to go out.
I wonder: How many times have I missed something important, something real — or worse, someone real — right here in the room while I zoned out, hypnotized by Facebook? How many times have I neglected morning prayer because of the siren call of the Internet?
Listening is becoming a scarce commodity in our fast-paced, efficiency-minded, technologically driven society. Because we communicate so quickly these days, the lag time between query and response has diminished, sometimes to the point of missing important information or even displaying rudeness.
One writer has likened social media to a mugger; it demands your attention and holds you hostage until you respond. But these responses are not always thoughtful, nor do they require true listening. Rather than fostering communication, they sometimes inhibit it and promote angry stalemates, lines drawn in the sand. In 2015, when the terror attacks in Paris unfolded on November 13, and a few weeks later (on December 2) the tragedy in San Bernardino, our Facebook feeds exploded with angry epithets hurled back and forth in virtual space. And, as a nation, we saw this all too clearly throughout the 2016 election season.
Today, as we are bombarded by noise and our attention is constantly demanded by social media, we have become accustomed to sound bites that glance along the surface of our intellects like pebbles skimming across water. The very texture of our lives has become imbued with the hectic quality of technology, with efficiency and productivity becoming our primary goal while human beings are seen as mere resources.
Things that take time — reading a Dickens novel, baking a pie from scratch, listening to an opera, or sitting at the bedside of someone in the nursing home — these activities get pushed to the back burner.
Drowning in Communication
We have never had more information available at our fingertips — all the world’s knowledge instantly accessible via Google — yet we have never been more impersonal, more isolated. Studies have shown that with increased online activity comes increased depression, loneliness, and alienation; more people are feeling isolated and lonely, even while entertaining hundreds of “friends” in the digital world. And men and women addicted to pornography find themselves unable to maintain true intimate relationships with real people. In a tragic irony, in 2014, a college track star posted happy photos on social media minutes before committing suicide. Being surrounded by digital forms of communication can isolate rather than draw us together.
Pope Benedict XVI identified a serious issue facing contemporary society, one which Pope Francis continues to focus on: “The great communication … that we have today can lead, on the one hand, to complete depersonalization. Then one is just swimming in a sea of communication and no longer encounters persons at all.”3
A single friend of mine recently wrote a series of lovely blog posts on the subject of creating a beautiful Catholic home. She prefaced these posts by carefully explaining that she was not trying to say that women must have a perfectly tidy home at all times, lest they be considered spiritual and moral slackers. She was not suggesting that Catholic moms must be Martha Stewarts. Nonetheless, she found herself facing a whirlwind of angry, tearful comments from insulted mothers. They asked how she dared even discuss the concept of a Catholic home when she didn’t have children. They assumed the worst: the author was trying to shame those mothers with messy homes filled with toddlers and babies and animals — how dare she! The impersonal, instantaneous nature of the blogosphere creates an environment in which misunderstanding and distrust abound.
Are we drowning in communication? Is the constant bombardment made possible by our ubiquitous technology, a surround sound of information, isolating and dividing us?
In January 2017, we took public transportation into our nation’s capital for the annual March for Life. We noticed how many people were shutting out their environment — including people around them — by having earbuds plugged into their ears. They were not attending to the real world — or people — around them, too busy listening to their own music. But were they listening? Or were they only “hearing” their own music?
We should pause here to make a distinction, one that Pope Francis alluded to when he said that “listening is more than hearing.” We can hear something without attending to it, without an intentionality of purpose.
With the rise of technology and the ease with which we can have the entire world available to us at a single keystroke, with the demands on our already fragmented attention spans, and with the fact that people are feeling more and more isolated, we need to attend purposefully to persons. This purposeful
