Pop 89: Listening in

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

I recently received a phone call from an old school friend. We’d lost touch. We went to art school together and were housemates. We spent many a morning at her kitchen table, drinking coffee, whining (mostly me) and wondering and reading tarot cards and watching the clouds roll by. She always had a way of summing up our problems with humorous wisdom. She perfected the art of self-reflection bordering on deprecation. “Men”, she once sighed after ending a relationship with a boyfriend too young for her, “teach them to eat liver and then they leave.”

Since we last spoke, she got married. (“ Met a man who eats liver. Hell, he cooks it! Sautés it in red wine!”) They built a home somewhere in the woods of Ontario. They’re doing well, the yard has a lily pond and a hot tub and they own motorbikes.

“You always had a way of making things work out,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I’m kinda struggling now,” she admitted. “In fact, I just need to talk.”

Hers is a growing need amongst all of us, these days. She isn’t having marriage, health, or work problems. She’s struggling with making a certain choice that friends and family do not understand or wish to entertain and certainly are not about to listen to her reasoning. They just want to talk her out of it. And so, we talked. And this time, I tried my best just to listen.

I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with my brother about listening. By the time we were done we were both silently weeping. “We just need to listen. To everybody. But especially to those everyone is trying to shut down, as if they aren’t really, actually feeling what they feel,” he said.

“Everyone’s afraid,” I said.

“Yes. And fear divides. And then it’s all over, for all of us. What is the harm in listening? There’s more harm in not.”

We live in a time of confusion, of misinformation, of people desperate to be heard. We also live in a time of enforced isolation. Not a good combination. So how do we talk to others without trying to convince them, or debate with them, or invalidate them? And how do we listen without having to agree, concur, validate, or even relate? By dropping down to the deeper level of love that exists in us all.

But, does it? I secretly ask. I find it, (with effort sometimes, but I find it) when it comes to my family, even with our spectrum of opinions and lifestyles and life goals. Family, after all, are the people who, when you show up on their doorstep, have to take you in. And love’s there for my friend, even though we haven’t spoken in ages. It’s there for the old farmers and ranchers who hobble into the Val Marie Hotel after another season of herding cattle, still in love with the wide-open range and still eternally suspicious of Ottawa.

But what about the people who frighten me, the ones my profession has made a career out of vilifying and hammering into cartoon characters? The heroes or villains ranging from Republican Americans and Liberal Canadians; stupid-rich magnates and age-fearing celebrities. I’m talking about the ones we’ve secretly wished, more than once, someone else would stuff into leaky boats and shove off to sea to drown.

Apparently, some of us are disposable. Especially those who do not share our opinion.

It’s hard to see the fear in the faces of cursing and raging protesters. They’re idiots, we say. We ridicule them from the safe distance of the tv, the humanity edited from the event. It takes too much time to listen to the whole story. We lose sense of genuine concerns, (Whether they are ours are not, they are genuine.)

The motto of tv has always been “if it bleeds it leads”. Screens – tv, computer, cell – are all about image, whether it’s bleeding, ranting, exploding or exposing. The voice of reason takes a back seat to animation. Ours is a watching culture, not a listening culture. Like babies in a crib, we must have our toys in front of faces, constantly in motion. God forbid we’d have to listen. Maybe even hear.

To what degree do we feel compelled, obliged to listen. Are we practiced at listening? Not if we live in isolation.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the many forms of group isolation, now and throughout history: religious sects hiding out of fear of arrest or death, monastics living in prayer and silence, sufferers of plagues and infectious diseases, poor people living in shanty towns and the other side of the tracks, malformed people on leper colonies, prostitutes in lock hospitals, old people in homes, women in huts, slaves and labourers, princes in towers and prisoners in jails. Every single one of them needed someone to listen to them.

Of all those listed above, the monks are the only ones who chose isolation. But they are not entirely alone. As one Franciscan put it, “it’s like being married to twelve other men! Believe me, we still have to live with others. We still have to listen. And thank God, we’ve got God to listen to us!”

The monk’s life is more about a life of silence than it is of isolation. Because it is in silence where one hears the voice of Love. The deeper voice. The voice that makes tolerating others easier. The voice that helps us discern and decide to side not with a fleeting argument, but with eternal compassion for other struggling, fumbling, run-of-the-mill slobs like us.

Writer John O’Donohue wrote: “Something within each of us cries out for belonging.” Can we listen to the cries of others? Can we stay, silently listening, moving past the biting-our-tongue or squirming-in-our-seats? Can we lean in and really listen, so that the speaker feels heard? Can we move past this year’s details and headlines into the eternal longing for belonging and human love?