Waiting for Whispers: Learning When to Listen, and When to Tune Out
Almost 4400 years ago, there was a powerful ruler in Egypt named Ptahhotep who wrote an instruction manual filled with cultural wisdom — like the Book of Proverbs, but way older. In it, he says things like the following :
“Do not gossip in your neighbourhood, because people respect the silent.”
“Listening benefits the listener.”
“If he who listens listens fully, then he who listens becomes he who understands.”
“He who listens becomes the master of what is profitable.”
“To listen is better than anything, thus is born perfect love.”
“God loves him who listens. He hates those who do not listen.”
“As for the ignorant man who does not listen, he accomplishes nothing. He equates knowledge with ignorance, the useless with the harmful. He does everything which is detestable, so people get angry with him each day.”
“Only speak when you have something worth saying.”
This, clearly, is cultural wisdom that places a lot of value on the act of listening. It is indicative of a culture that values “homo auditor” — the person who listens — over “homo dialogicus” — the person who speaks. Ancient Greek culture is an example of a society that valued the art and practice of speaking. Whereas ancient Egypt didn’t even have a word for “dialogue,” Greek culture handed down its ideas to the world in the form of dialogues in which people learn not by listening and taking in new ideas in silence, but by engaging — presenting their ideas, responding to questions, and generally thinking out loud and externalizing their thoughts.
Speaking without Listening
The description of the Greek way of being may sound familiar; our society is another example of one that values speaking far more highly than listening…but we can’t even manage the degree of listening required for the Greek practice of dialogue. During the 2020 meeting of the electoral college and the impeachment hearings, I found myself, for the first time ever, spending hours watching the proceedings of Congress. I was struck by the old-timey formalities that lend dignity to it and keep it from descending into chaos, but I was also struck by how those same formalities seem to exacerbate the lack of actual communication that occurred in all those hours of supposed “debate”. In fact, it was almost the opposite of debate; I would characterize it more as formal grandstanding. I’m not sure who the intended audience was for most of the snatches of oratory afforded the members of Congress — often around thirty seconds, though I think one person managed to speak for three minutes — but it wasn’t “Madame Speaker,” who they were technically addressing.
It also didn’t really seem to be the members of the opposite party, even when a member would go against protocol (and invite a stern rebuke) by speaking directly to them. Or, at least, when the latter situation happened, it didn’t appear that the representatives were trying to persuade those on the other side, but, rather, rebuke them. It is possible they thought the rebuke would force the other side to take notice and listen, but I didn’t ever really get the sense that they thought the other side was listening, or that they had really attentively, actively listened to what the other side was saying.
In general, the speeches seemed aimed at signaling the individual’s own vote to such persons as would already be inclined to agree with them and wouldn’t be listening for their reasons as much as for the code words indicating they were on the right team. It was all very curious. Why spend so much time on self-congratulation for having made the right choice, rather than attempting to hear what the opposition is saying in order to engage and even persuade them to change their votes? Do both sides honestly believe history will reward them for their lofty but useless blather?
It struck me at some point that our entire society is doing this right now. We preach to the choir and only directly address the other side when we want to rebuke them — a form of speech that often results in reaction, but seldom in actual listening, learning, and revision of opinion. In Congress, the forms that govern speech are partly to blame. In the rest of society, the forms that govern speech are partly to blame. Social media spaces function best as declarative spaces — places where one can post one’s opinion, either through one’s own words or through a meme or an article. Once one has posted, comments are in theory welcomed, but the reality is that the commenter has to have a thought ready-at-hand, because if he or she waits to ponder the claims or his or her response too long, the post will have become obsolete, and something new and equally interesting will have replaced it. This means that the commenter is really also a fellow declarer, most of the time, rather than a person thoughtfully hearing and interacting with the ideas.
That takes time. And, like the thirty seconds-bound congressmen and women, time is not what we are given. When a culture prioritizes speaking over listening, and then makes everyone feel continually pressed for time, it’s no wonder that the listening part of dialogue is cut out altogether. We tend not to question the feeling of not having enough time, but perhaps we should. Do we really not have enough time to think deeply and to really engage with those with whom we disagree? We are all aware, we pandemic-exhausted souls, that we cannot count on tomorrow. But does that mean that the best solution is just to frantically regurgitate all the propaganda held by “my side”? If I die tomorrow, will the world be bettered by my brief bits of grandstanding, my self-congratulatory shots fired into the foggy ether of the internet?
It’s doubtful. For one thing, whatever we might feel so pressed to say is likely not even the most relevant thing to which we ought to be paying attention. One of my aunts recently sent me an article in which the author pointed out that even with all the conspiracy theories floating around, decade after decade, we never seem to notice the actual nefarious things going on. And when I say ‘we’, I don’t just mean the conspiracy theorists. When we engage in pushing back against crazy ideas, just as much as when we engage in pushing crazy ideas, our attention gets completely absorbed by those crazy ideas. They become our horizon of attention.
I’ve always heard that if you see someone drowning in a pool or at the beach and they are flailing around in a panic, do not try and go out to rescue them, because they will push you under as they frantically try to get on top of you and use you for flotation, and you will end up drowning too. (Pro tip: Wait until they are too exhausted to flail, or have been convinced to calm down, and then go rescue them.) The internet convinces us that if we don’t dive in immediately, our chance will have passed to do anything, and so we do dive in, and we get pulled under by the frantic people we were intent on saving.
Often it would be better to pull back, and place things in perspective, taking the time to think deeply and truly listen, and then to step back and ask bigger questions, and think deeply and listen about them, and so on. It may be hard for most people to ignore the cries of people who are wrong and seem desperate to be saved from their own ideas. However, Christians have a leg up, believing that our short time on earth is not the end of our lives, and that the meaning we contribute to the universe ends when we die. We believe that any meaning we can offer is through our participation in an eternal kingdom, and we believe that we only live when we are buried with Christ through baptism and then risen with Christ to live in him. This should relativize the urgent cries of “Seize the day” that seem to come from all around. We best seize the day when we have our eyes set on The Day (of the Lord) and keep that horizon always before us.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments when it is our duty to act or speak up then and there. Pulling back and trying to gain perspective doesn’t mean assuming that nothing on earth matters because we’ll get our pie in the sky by and by — that is, to use another trope, it doesn’t mean being so heavenly-minded that we’re no earthly good. Instead, it means that being heavenly minded allows us to do earthly good by speaking into situations rather than just spitting out our opinions about them. This means paying attention, even when it doesn’t look like it. The lifeguard who waits and watches the drowning person may appear passive, but is in fact watching very closely for the right moment to intervene. When those moments arrive, we need to have been paying enough attention to recognize them and act.
But those moments are not constantly occurring. In fact, they are probably rare. Placing things in perspective, and asking questions, will probably lead to far more time watching and preparing to speak than spent speaking; our interjections will be infrequent, but worth the wait. Perhaps my response might be a massive piece of art that takes a year to build. Or perhaps it will be a novel. Or a piece of music (John Adams’ ‘Become Ocean’ comes to mind).
The cultural moment will likely seem to have passed on by then. But will it have passed on to another conversation? No, because it wasn’t a conversation to begin with; it will be different points being yelled into the ether, using different trendy language, but without substantive change having occurred. And the massive artwork will sneak up, like a whisper, because that’s what art does, even massive art. It will sneak up and whisper, and most people won’t even turn their heads — firstly, because they’re already yelling, but also, because there just isn’t time.
Learning to Listen
But what if someone did hear, did turn, did see? What would cause this? As has already been pointed out, listening is fundamental to learning to speak in a helpful and truly engaged way. But it also valuable for its own sake. In 1 Kings 19, Elijah has run from a murderous king to Mount Moriah, “the mountain of the Lord,” and God promises to pass by the emotionally exhausted prophet — but he needs to pay attention. A hurricane ripped through, but that wasn’t God passing by. Then an earthquake. But God wasn’t in the earthquake. Then fire. God wasn’t in the fire. Then a whisper, gentle and quiet. And a conversation ensues. The ancient Sumerians, who scholars think may have invented writing, used a cuneiform symbol that represented the ear. This was the way they indicated the ideas of intelligence and understanding. Intelligence was given by the divine — was, in fact, divine inspiration. And it came from listening.
In order to turn one’s head at a whisper, one must be trained to expect mighty things from whispers, and to always have one ear cocked expectantly for them, even when that means ignoring hurricanes and bluster. Knowing that the cultural “conversation” (which is to say, battle of the blusterers) going on at any given moment is probably simply a distraction by unreality from the things that we should be paying attention to is a start. However, just knowing with our minds usually isn’t enough to break us from the habit of having our attention captured by whatever news item yells the loudest and most frantically. We must learn how to set our minds on things above while not tripping over curbs or falling into potholes or forgetting to wash our hands.
In the olden days, entire communities would take generations to build, together, a cathedral. No one would see the beginning and the end. The statement you stood up and made with your life was always, “Madame Speaker: Glory to God.” You said it for as long as you could, and when your time was up, others went on saying it. Cathedrals were designed in such a way as to echo the construction of the cosmos. Their proportions were the proportions, it was believed, of the heavenly spheres; the shape was that of the Cross, literally bringing people into the crucifixion; all the imagery brought the biblical story into three-dimensional reality through light, color, texture, and the substantiality of stone. People weren’t surprised to find meaning in some aspect of the cathedral’s architecture or design or furnishings; they expected it. And if they were one of the builders, they were contributing to it.
In order to see past heavy stone through to the heavenly cosmos, in order to see the heavenly cosmos in the heavy stone, one must be trained to read stone. Moreover, one must be trained to read stone while not bumping into other parishioners, while aware of the social expectations of the spaces, while aware of the requirements of that moment in the liturgy. Cathedrals, with their echoing of the cosmos, represent a kind of building that has been existed for many millennia.
Temples, including the ancient Jerusalem temple, have always been intended to be incarnated allegories, incarnated representations, of the cosmic realm as it situates itself vis a vis the earth. Most of us are familiar with the phrase “the pillars of the earth”; this phrase connects to ways of thinking about the earth as a building designed by God or the gods. Humans for millennia have been taught from birth to look at the world from two perspectives at once — from the perspective of not stepping in potholes, and from the perspective of seeing how earthly things are connected to cosmic-level realities.
Modern and postmodern humans and largely ceased to be able to do this. But the lack of that dual perspective is being felt all through the culture, and some even believe they have managed to recover it. Believers in QAnon, for instance, might have argued that that’s exactly what they were doing on January 6th — that they saw the big, big picture, but were also prepared to act in the moment in response to that big picture, that they were looking through the architecture of mundane reality to the real Real…and that’s why they want violent upheaval.
They represent the danger of trying to always read everything as potentially revealing some deeper, hidden reality. Conspiracy theorists have always existed, though they used to go by names such as Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Manichean, etc. What they reveal is that that movement of always trying to look up while looking down has a proper directionality to it that can unintentionally be reversed, with disastrous consequences. It might be easier to think of it in terms of a spiral. A spiral can start at the middle and work outwards, opening itself up like a blossom, unfolding meaning as it unfurls and reaches toward the sky…or it can start big and slowly circle the drain as it rotates inwards, starting out two-dimensional and ending in a one-dimensional point, the whole thing having collapsed in on itself.
On paper, the two look the same.
The question to those attempting a dual perspective, then, is: When all is said and done, what word did you listen to? What turned your head — the bluster, or the whisper? When you start at the center, then you can open up to the universe and find yourself widened and expanded without being disintegrated. When you start with a bunch of swirling theories or an inchoate sense of grievance and attempt to pin it onto something concrete, you end up in the sort of downward spiral that G.K. Chesterton equated with madness.
“Plan and plot all you want — nothing will come of it. / All your talk is mere talk, empty words, / Because when all is said and done, / The last word is Immanuel…God-With-Us. …
If you’re going to worry, / Worry about The Holy. Fear God-of-the-Angel-Armies. / The Holy can be either a Hiding Place / Or a Boulder blocking your way. …
Many of them are going to run into that Rock / and get their bones broken, / Get tangled up in that barbed wire / and not get free of it.” (From Is. 8, The Message)
When all is said and done, the last word, the thing that will either free you or trip you up and cripple you, is Immanuel. If you use the Christian religion as a background mythos that provides the launching point for a different agenda, you’ll end up circling the drain as your world gets smaller and smaller and everything flattens to a single point — a point that makes you feel frantic and panicked, as if, if you don’t latch onto it, everything will vanish into thin air and you’ll drown. If you instead center yourself on the whisper of God-With-Us, it will open your mind, not to take you beyond Immanuel, but to see how everything coheres in Immanuel, to the very last.
You will feel the dull earth and its possibilities expanding and getting more three-dimensional and more full of color and texture, forming itself into a cathedral of light that blossoms skyward and allows you to feel the immensity of the eternal. This eternal exists, solid as a rock, within The Holy, and is defended not primarily by you, but by God-of-the-Angel-Armies, in whom you can hide and breath and look around and listen. If Immanuel is your lens, you’ll actually have the ability to see things from a grounded perspective, rooted in reality, but not chained to earthly perspectives and momentary hysterias.
Small steps
Again, all this takes training and formation. It takes time and patience. It takes a commitment to training and formation through time and patience — something that can only happen when one is not afraid of missing out on a cultural moment or two. And not being afraid of missing out on a cultural moment or two is an attitude that we can only adopt if we think of ourselves as cathedral-manifesters, part of a team — part of, dare I say, a Body. And if we are a Body building a cathedral, or a kingdom, we can expect it to be slow-going work that will require attention to the small stuff, often the same small stuff, day after day, even as we learn the dual perspective of always seeing the cathedral that isn’t yet quite visible in our mind’s eye.
If I up and croak tomorrow, my contribution — which, truth be told, needn’t be a literal piece of art, but could be a season of investing in relationships with college kids, or a season of digging into the theological implications of investment banking, or the creation of a garden in one’s backyard — will become a thread in the grand mosaic. This mosaic is being woven together by a master weaver, a master architect, a master designer, firstborn of all creation, through whom and in whom it all coheres and expands.
In the United States capitol building, which many refer to as a “temple of democracy,” speakers pontificate past each other and end up communicating nothing. In the heavenly throne room, depicted in Isaiah 6, the congress of the angelic beings is a volley of praise in which they echo back at one another the same joyous refrain, as if preparing for an everlasting dialogue of praise:
“Madame Speaker: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The entire world is chock full of his glory. I cede to my colleague, the seraphim to my right.”
They are building a cathedral of sound, an angelic symphony, with their back and forth. And from this, Isaiah learns to think about his speech — that he comes from a people of unclean lips. And he is told to tell the people that their ears are dull, that they hear but don’t understand, and so they don’t really hear, don’t really see. “Turn,” says the prophet, “and be healed.”
