Assume They Might Know Something - Part 1

This blog is designed to give people an inner look at a devotional life. Taking time each day to spend time with the Lord. The hope is if you travel on this journey with Rev. Jacob Shaw, you may be more inclined to spend time with the Lord as well. I encourage the use of a devotional, a scripture reading and prayer, then finally some form of artistic mark to tie it all together. 

Today's devotional is taken from: Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos. Great Britain: Penguin Random House, 2018. Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t, pp. 233-243

Opening Thought: As I write my first response to this Rule 9, it is at an appropriate time in my province’s context. Ontarians are about to vote in their provincial election, and it should be a time to listen, but inevitably, the political debate seems to be the time people dig in their heels. People are willing to put up their political party sign as a representation of their party’s platforms, but I would be surprised to find out that many take an equal time to listen and consider the other sides’ platform (beyond a mere list of the highlights).

Political tensions aside, listening is a hard skill to learn. As a seminarian, we practiced “active listening” as part of our pastoral care courses. When we first entered the class, we all had a desire to put out theological training to good use, so when we were presented with a role-playing assignment to simulate pastoral care situations, we all inevitability went from listening in to advice-giving. Our professor would pull us back and remind us that pastoral care isn’t about advice-giving, rather it is about being an active listener. One of the tips that were given to us to avoid jumping on the temptation of advice-giving was every time we felt the urge to offer advice, we were to offer the words, “tell me more”. You don’t always say those words per se, but you do encourage the conversation to continue and to parse through the details. “Tell me more,” gives the person you’re listening to an invitation to work through the struggles they are wrestling with in more detail, which may be very difficult to do if they were alone in their head with those thoughts. It also tells them that you care enough to ask, and in that caring, they feel valuable enough to be heard.

I think we can all say if we happened to be going through an emotional, spiritual, or mental rollercoaster, having an invitation to be cared for and listened to would be an ideal start to healing. Unfortunately, people are so prone to wanting to give advice, that rather than encouraging the conversation to continue, many people avoid the healthy practice of conversation altogether, much quicker to bottle it up inside. Quicker, not wiser.

Opening Prayer: Lord, Your Son Jesus told us to go to a private room and to pray to You, as both our King and our Father. So, it tells us that in Your divine nature is a listener. Which is amazing to reflect prayerfully on, because You know us better than we know ourselves, You know what we think and feel before we experience it, so that willingness to listen is for our benefit, it allows us to work through our struggles with Your presence, mercy, and wisdom in our lives as an anchor, and we thank You for those blessings. Amen.  

Scripture: Proverbs 18:13 If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.

Reflection: At the same time I was taking my pastoral care course, I was also taking a course on feminist theology. It was interesting enough, but during one class I found myself at the end of some hostility, which I was genuinely surprised to encounter. We had been discussing the week’s readings which had focused on violence against women, particularly focused around rape and sexual assault. In the discussion, there was a case study offered, a real-life story of a man who knowingly scaled a home to enter through a window to sexually assault a woman. After the professor shared some background to the readings, she opened the class to discussion. Many comments were thrown out, almost all of them directed at human failure, toxic masculinity, or systemic misogyny: each comment spoke to the speaker's context, concern, and even curiosity about the horrors of such an action. Now I was one to two men in the course, and after some time of silent reflection and listening to the others in the room, I offered my thoughts. I said something along these lines, (though I’m paraphrasing to the best of my memory), “as a man, who would never consider doing something like this, I am curious what happened in the assailant’s life that could possess him to go to such length to do something so horrendous. Was he abused or tormented as a child so his moral compass was forever skewed, did he have a chemical imbalance in his hormones that made sexual desire like an unquenchable thirst, was he a straight-up sociopath and narcissist, and if so were those conditions of his psyche a result of nature or nurture, or could it be possible for a person in the post-modern era to grow to adulthood without a moral education even at the most basic level?” At the heart of what I was asking was, what was the villain’s story; how does a baby boy, born into our world become a premeditated rapist. Further, you can ask, how any child grows up to become a violent criminal or become a prison guard in Auschwitz, or any of the other many horrible things people have done to each other throughout history.

When posing this curiosity in the class, I suddenly was under a bombardment of angry responses. I believe most of the responses were due to a misunderstanding, thinking I was defending the man’s actions. Rather I was hoping to understand his actions and his motivations more fully, in part to ask the following question: could we prevent more boys from going into this violent behavior?

In response to the bombardment, I explained my curiosity was rooted in prevention but oddly enough this did not quell the upset, and suddenly the class turned a bit extreme, with my peers demanding the only right critique of this case and other cases like this was harsher punishment for men with no question or backstories needed. An extreme sentiment that I was surprised the professor did not challenge. It is possible the professor was just trying to keep the peace or perhaps she agreed with the class, I am unsure. In the end, she chose to skate over the tensions and my curiosities were disregarded as a foolish misogynistic blunder.

The thing that stuck with me all these years since then was the professor who taught us pastoral care and active listening was the same person who taught the feminist theology course. The potency of active listening was appreciated in one context but not the other. This is really a shame because God teaches us to love everyone even our enemies. That is not the same as defending them, or not holding them accountable. If anything, you must hold them accountable to love them because you need to hold them accountable to what is right and good. That is really the only chance a sinner might feel remorse, repent, and submit themselves to justice. However, that doesn’t mean you treat them less than human, even if they act that way themselves.

We all want to have active listening when it helps us; when people hear our stories and just recognize us as struggling embodied spirits. It is a bit harder to listen than to be listened to, but we can still recognize the value in that. But the hardest thing is to listen to something we don’t like, disagree with, or even assault us in a personal or collective way.  Obviously, this is not a recommendation that victims must sit down and hear the history of their attackers, rather society and humanity as a whole need to listen to the nuances of the sins which inflict us, because if we don’t listen, we will never learn from the mistakes and sins of the past, we cannot have empathy for the fallen people who were twisted into monsters, and we may not notice when we become monsters ourselves.    

Whenever I see a criminal in the news who has done something terrible, I always wonder if they have someone to listen to their pain and struggles when they were growing up. Maybe if they felt heard the darkness and sin would not have taken them, and one less tragedy would be published in the headlines. Or it is quite possible that the only ones who stopped to listen to them were people with intentions to twist them into darkness too. 

Challenge for the Week: Think about a time when you have not felt heard. How did that make you feel? Did your situation suffer because of that isolation? Remember that feeling when it is your turn to listen,

Prayer for your week: Lord, we pray for the still calm and welcoming spirit it takes to be a good listener. We also pray for those who haven’t been listened to. Help us to be a people who hear others, no matter if they are struggling with sin, or they have become a victim of someone’s sinful ways. We pray everyone should have a place to go and to be heard, and ultimately find healing, healing from their fallen natures, or healing from the harshness of the world. Amen.

Final Thought and Picture: As a father of two boys, I try my best to listen to them. They mostly babble at this stage, as they are very young, but I am doing my best to get in the habit of listening to them. I want them to feel like they can tell me anything and that I will be interested and focused on them. I want to do this so that no matter what side of darkness they may find themselves on, they will always have someone to turn to a share with. Listening is a prayerful exercise and a step in the right direction for positive change in both the hearts of people and in the systemic structures of our world.