In this week’s QuakerSpeak video, O talks about the role of listening in healing our humanity. What happens when we really listen to one another?
[peekaboo]
[peekaboo_content]
Transcript
Based on my limited understanding, we are amazingly powerful, whether we get it or not. We are extremely powerful, and often, we feel powerless. Anywhere from depression to anxiety to whatever, we are “feelers.”
Listening Each Other Into Wholeness
When I listen––when I really listen––I am listening to hear God speak. I am listening for God’s voice, God’s signal. What that means to me is the signal that moves me to alive-ness. The signal that allows me to feel the fullness.
And when I speak I am not frivolous with my words because I recognize that my words are power. “Henceforth Christ was known as the word of God” because my judgment is he truly understood the power of word, the power of speaking. So I listen so that I know where I am, where I don’t want to be. What’s possible. To be touched, called, formed. And when I speak, I speak knowing that I’m working with God’s power. And when I speak I want to speak in a way that facilitates healing, that facilitates blessing, that facilitates wholeness, that facilitates creative possibility for integration.
When We Don’t Listen
My concern is that we don’t listen to each other, and it creates the world we see. It creates the world we experience. People not being heard, not being seen, not being appreciated, not being valued, not being recognized. People not being recognized for that of God that dwells within them. Not seen. Not recognized. Not reclaimed and embraced. Whole-heartedly embraced. And so we fragment. We fragment. We become broken because we are not seen for who we really are. The body breaks. It just breaks.
Listening Each Other Into Wholeness
The positive news… (That’s the sad news. That’s the sad news, how about some happy news?) The happy news is at any point in time we can take our power back, we can fine tune, re-hone, calibrate our capacity to hear and recognize each other. And so my belief is there’s a way of listening, that Quakers have this belief or this sentence: “Listening each other into wholeness.” That we have the capacity to listen each other into wholeness, and we can take that back at any point in time and feel the richness of deep listening, where our heart is actually touched. Deep listening. And deep speaking. It’s exciting.
[/peekaboo_content]