Tower and Town, February 2017

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Clergy Letter: A Listening World

'Nothing true about God can be said from a posture of defence', wrote Marylinne Robinson in her great novel Gilead.

Reading this once again in the early weeks of 2017, I couldn’t help thinking how apposite it is for people of faith. For 2016 was so full of confounded assumptions and expectations, the world seemingly awash with fear and division, that many of us face 2017 more with trepidation than confidence.

If nothing true about God can be said from a posture of defence, it raises the question whether the same applies to other areas too. The reason for this is that if we feel defensive, our instinct is to speak before we listen.

One of the persistent features of the past year is how difficult people find it to listen to those with whom they disagree. Neither the US Presidential election, nor the referendum campaign in the UK were edifying spectacles, since both too readily demonised the opposition and thereby turned the world into one of ‘Goodies v Baddies’. Terrorism takes this to its extreme, not merely by not listening to, but by seeking to destroy those who hold different opinions.

So one wish for 2017 is that the world might become a better listening place. This is a wish in which we can all play our part and one where people of faith ought to be able to set an example.

People listen better when there is a sense of expectation. When a raffle prize is being drawn, we pay attention when the ticket numbers are being read out. We know we won’t always win, but we know that we might. We have something to gain by listening carefully. That same degree of attentiveness should characterise the way we listen to other people – we have something to gain from their opinions, some way in which we might learn afresh or have our own minds altered. For people of faith, this truth stems from the belief that all humans bear the image of God and that therefore something of God is to be discovered and learnt from all whom we encounter.

It’s not just theory that tells us this, it is also experience. For our scriptures contain so many incidents when people learn about God from unexpected sources – none more so than encounters with Jesus himself, who always seemed to change the way people thought about themselves!

To encourage us to have such confidence in our encounters with others, here are some more words from Marilynne Robinson’s main character in Gilead:

'I would advise you against defensiveness on principle. It precludes the best eventualities along with the worst. At the most basic level, it expresses a lack of faith. As I have said, the worst eventualities can have great value as experience. And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescue.'

Andrew Studdert-Kennedy