Listening, or waiting to speak?
Peggy Heeks reflects on the importance of listening, as part of a hospital chaplaincy team
Come and share with me four different scenarios. In the first I’m at a seminar, here by invitation because the subject is relevant to our research interests. As we proceed through the Powerpoint presentation, I notice that the man on one side of me is checking his emails: the one opposite flicking through a journal. How to account for this? Maybe we’ve grown used to phasing in and out of TV programmes; maybe we’re coasting because the secretary will later send us a summary. Now I’m having coffee with a long-established friend. There are lots of things I want to discuss with her. However, someone else has been invited who caps each of the hostess’s stories with one of her own, not even allowing a pause to absorb what has been said. In conversation a subject is discussed, teased out, but here the two minds never meet.
In the third scene someone is asking about my health problem. Without taking note of its complexity, back comes the advice. ‘You should go and see X who did wonders for me’: ‘You need to take a course of Y which will sort you out in no time’. However, a hospital consultant is already treating me: what I probably need is a little sympathy. The listener isn’t obliged to fix the problem; just to hear it.
The fourth scene is very different. I’m one of a hospice chaplaincy team meeting with deacons from a local church. The three of us talk briefly about one aspect of our work, and then we move to groups of two, taking it in turns to talk about an experience of loss. As we entered into another’s situation, it became a precious time. Afterwards my partner said ‘I’ve never talked about this before, but I’m glad to have shared it with you’. Later the minister said to me ‘I’m glad you mentioned listening for it’s one of the most important things we can do’.
Awareness of this need is growing, witness the Methodist publication Crying in the wilderness and the Quaker This is who I am: listening with older Friends. We need to put their ideas into practice in our daily encounters. As Kurt Strauss put it in the Friend last year (21 October): ‘When people are really listened to, they may hear themselves for the first time’.
