My Own “Mortal Blessing”

I’ve been reading Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Mortal Blessing: A Sacramental Farewell, about the death of her mother and what she learned about family, the nature of the sacred, dying, and herself. During the 48 days of her mother’s final decline, small, commonplace things became sacramental.

Like O’Donnell’s mother, my own mother fell and broke her hip. She had surgery to repair, and although she was in her late 80s, the surgery was successful.

As she recuperated and started physical therapy at a nursing home, I flew to New Orleans and spent a long weekend visiting. And we talked, for hours each day. The talking didn’t seem to tire her. I’m not sure what prompted it, but it was important for her to tell me what she did, most of which I had never heard before.

O’Donnell might call this the sacrament of listening.

My mother had been a wartime bride (World War II) and like so many others had gotten divorced. Her first husband had been her childhood sweetheart and joined the army, fighting in Europe. In 1945, she and their not-quite-two-year-old son lived with his family in Gary, Indiana, and then with his sister in Chicago. When the war ended, her husband chose not to return home. He wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of a family. And so they were divorced in 1947. It was important for her to tell me he did pay $42 a month in child support; she repeated it several times.

She was dating my father when her former husband called her one day at work, asking her to reconsider and get remarried. After work that day, she said, she walked slowly to the streetcar stop to ride from downtown New Orleans to where she lived with my grandmother in the Ninth Ward. She stopped at St. Patrick’s Church on Camp Street (not far the present-day D-Day and World War II Museum). She was not Catholic, but she sat in a pew and prayed. And clarity came.

When she got home, she wrote her first husband a letter, telling him it wouldn’t work. As she prayed, she said, she realized she would never be able to trust him.

She married my father in 1950. I was born a year later.

Mother, May 2013

At first their marriage was happy, but once he started his own business, she saw very little of him, except late at night and an occasional Sunday. (The same went for me and my older brother; I didn’t really see much of my father until I was in junior high school.)

She said that there would be days when she would sit on our back breezeway and cry for sheer loneliness. She’d see me play in the backyard and knew my older brother was with friends in the neighborhood. No one would see her cry.

“I couldn’t believe how lonely I was,” she said, talking to me while she lay in her nursing home bed.

It was not an easy story to tell or hear. But I listened. And in those few hours my mother became a much more complex person than I had ever realized, with her own joys and sorrows, with her own stories of a life lived.

Sacraments work two ways, as O’Donnell explains in Mortal Blessings. They work for both the giver and the receiver, for the object of the sacrament and the participant.

That weekend in New Orleans, my mother was blessed by the sacrament of listening, and I was blessed by the sacrament of her story.

Tomorrow, I’ll complete this meditation.

Photograph: Interior of St. Patrick’s Church, New Orleans.

Advent: Listening to the wind

Look at what I did,

not at why I did it.

I may not know why,

and the reason why

is unimportant, a single note

(a G? a C? I can’t hear it)

in a wind storm. No one

bothers to ask why, didn’t

you know?

Now I can’t recall

what I did. It seemed

to matter at the time

but no longer. All

that’s left is to climb

the trail to the top,

and consider the vista

set before me, purposely

set before me, to provide

the silence so I can hear

the symphony in the wind.

Photograph by Consuelo Suarez via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Lost Art of Listening

For some time, I’ve been noticing an increasingly common characteristic of meetings – and that is that listening is in decline. I can’t say exactly when this started, but I do know when I noticed it. I was in a regularly scheduled meeting at work – one of those weekly meetings where you talk about what’s going on, nothing particularly unusual, and people could barely wait before speaking. I was struck by what I hadn’t realized before – no one was really listening to what others were saying.

I began to pay more attention at other meetings, watching to see if this has been an anomaly or was more common than I thought. I kept a running tally in my head, and it was more than clear. People were focused on speaking out. Virtually no one was focused on listening.  In some cases it was so bad that people would interrupt or jump in as another person was almost, but not quite, finished.

And it was happening at meetings at all levels. People were more circumspect and kept their tongues more in check when a senior executive was sitting at the table, but barely. Sometimes it appeared that the presence of the senior executive was actually encouraging the behavior.

Sometimes I found myself doing it. Sometimes meetings sounded more like a gaggle of geese squawking at each other than a meeting of adults supposed talking about serious subjects.

I’m not the first person to make this observation. It’s actually been studied, and in depth, and causes identified for the problem (and, yes, it’s a problem): we’re not interested in the topic; we find the speaker unattractive; prejudice and bias; trying to listen to more than one conversation at a time (or thinking we can listen while we send emails on our cell phones); we’re preoccupied; we’ve already judged the topic (or the speaker). The web site Skills You Need has a whole laundry list of barriers to effective listening.

And then I wondered, how are my listening skills when it comes to God? Am I guilty of jabbering away, telling God all of my problems, and not really listening to any kind of response?

Sometimes, God uses circumstances to teach us to listen. In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge describes being led through valley experiences so as to learn how to listen, really listen. “One of the reasons,” he says, “we can’t hear from God, when the darkness descends, is that God wants to retrain the way in which we hear from Him.”

Is this what we sound like to God, like we’re jabbering away at a meeting, more than ready to force our way into the conversation and almost totally unwilling to listen? Is this what I sound like?

Am I so busy talking that I ignore the cry for help, the desperate call for support, the obvious need staring me in the face? Do I have to be taken through the darkness of a valley experience to learn how to listen?

I hope not; I pray not. And yet I shudder.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “When the Lights Go Out,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Quiet Listener

 Thirty years ago, I was a 20-something speechwriter for a large manufacturing company, and part of a three-person speechwriting team. One day, the vice president of our staff function called me to his office to talk about me writing speeches for his boss.

In the middle of our conversation, the CEO barged into the office and started screaming at the VP. Who didn’t say a word but quickly took up his pen to take notes as the CEO’s tirade continued. The CEO didn’t know me, even though I wrote speeches for him. He didn’t even glance at me. And I thought to myself, what if I had been a job candidate, or a reporter?

The screaming stopped; the CEO left. And then the VP resumed our conversation exactly where we had stopped, as if nothing had happened. I was so shook my hands were trembling.

That’s one kind of quiet listener – the executive who works for a screaming CEO. Luci Shaw, in Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, writes about another kind, in the context of talking about poetry: “…poetry enriches; it forces us to take time, slow down, and reflect what might otherwise escape our notice. It helps us to view life metaphorically instead of in terms of mere fact or information. Poetry helps us to become whole-brain people, teaching us to be thoughtful and creative in many areas of our lives. Most books that Christians read don’t push them in this direction, where they can be quiet listeners. We’re often pushed by the books we read toward busy-ness, efficiency and self-ism. Poetry can counter that. It opens up the windows to the whole universe, takes our eyes off ourselves, and often helps us to focus on Creator and creation.”

Substitute the words “business people” for “Christians,” in that paragraph, and it would be just as true. If you want to see how the business world usually defines career success, you’re going to be hard put to find the words “quiet listener” as Shaw describes it. “Listening skills” are often considered critically important for managing people, but they tend to be narrowly defined, as in understanding what a subordinate is concerned about or how to help a team function better. It’s about efficiency and effectiveness.

Business has never been known for promoting quiet people, no matter how good they are. No, we want hard-driving, results-oriented, shareowner-value focused A-type personalities who can “get the job done.”

What Shaw is describing is on a different plane altogether. A quiet listener thinks with both sides of his or her brain, in an integrated, big-picture kind of way. But in management reviews, they’re going to be overlooked or considered “not aggressive enough.”

Sometimes these quiet listeners are the prophets, the ones (to quote Shaw quoting Flannery O’Connor) who not only see clearly but also see what’s distant and often hidden. And if quiet listeners are at a career disadvantage in business, you can imagine what can happen to prophets, especially when they’re right.

Quiet listeners and prophets are needed in the business world. Somehow we have to get over this combined disdain and fear we have of them (and the fear is the fear that they may be right). Otherwise, the workplace can become a very nasty, toxic kind of place.

This is the last of our High calling discussions of Luci Shaw’s Breath for the Bones. I started this discussion weeks ago making the claim that what she says is as applicable to business as it is to art and writing and music. Now that  I’ve finished the book, I’m more convinced than ever. Instead of Who Moved My Cheese? or The 7-Minute Manager, we might do much better with Breath for the Bones.

To see more posts on the last two chapters of the book, “The Shadow Side of Creativity” and “Tracing the Creative Process of Poets and Poems,” please visit The High Calling.