First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - from The Sacred Journey - Frederick Buechner

God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say. Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many years and many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is. Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.

Sermon

My sermon title today is taken from a children¹s book. It is the story of a beaver who lived alone and was quite lonely because he had no friends. One day he sat next to a pond, and was crying as he thought about his life. But he stopped crying immediately when the boo hoo he uttered was followed by a voice from across the pond which also sounded strangely like, "boo hoo." After they exchanged hellos, the voice from the other side responded to little beaver¹s confession that he was alone and needed a friend with the exact same dilemma. The beaver decided to go in search of this other animal who was sad and needed a companion. Slowly the beaver paddled around the pond searching for the certain someone who needed a friend. First, he found a duck who said he was not the voice, but also confessed that he needed a friend. He joined the beaver. Next they found an otter who was not the voice, but like the duck needed a friend. Next they met a turtle who again was not the crying voice, but joined their group of new friends. Finally they met an old beaver who in his wisdom said the voice was the Echo. He said the Echo was sad because the beaver was sad; and, in fact, always reflects what you feel. The little beaver still wanted to know how he could find the echo, and be his friend because neither of them had any friends. The beaver soon found he was mistaken when all his new friends spoke up. He was so happy he shouted, "I have lots of friends now." And the voice across the pond shouted back, "I have lots of friends, now!"

Our story based on the book Little Beaver and the Echo has a simple theme; when we meet and listen to others we find they are lonely and in need of friends, in need of people who will hear what they have to say. Even though it started with an echo, beaver listened to all the animals, and heard their need for emotional attachments. We all want someone to tell our story to. We want to tell someone what we have discovered. We want to be accepted by others for all we are and yearn to be. It seems we feel better about ourselves, and develop our minds for thinking and our hearts for caring to the fullest extent when we have been listened to. We develop and flower as people because someone, often someone we love, took the time and effort to listen to us. I have been thinking about this a good deal in the context of education. As a child, I rejected the Bible as science when my Sunday School teacher refused to listen to me tell her about my discoveries about dinosaurs. All fabrications she told me. She would tell me what I needed to know. I got the message that she would not listen to me.

I became a Unitarian Universalist because I found people in other faith communities would not listen to my discoveries or my questions. They would tell or drill their perceived truths into me. Bronson Alcott, the great Transcendentalist educator was a pioneer in listening to children in the classroom. He said we must teach through the give and take of conversation, and that people will primarily learn through their own experiences. There were two things Alcott believed. First, he said we think too lowly of human nature and we do not trust that children can perceive the truth or tell the truth. Second, he believed that children are less defiled in regards to perceiving divinity in the world. As a result he published a record of conversation on the Gospels, believing that children might have fresher, more astute perceptions about Jesus than their elders. In my class on Transcendentalism three weeks ago, I characterized conversations as one of the four spiritual disciplines of the Transcendentalists , along with journal keeping, reading and reflecting, and walking.

It is often said that we are a wordy people who like to talk, but do we listen? Margaret Fuller used what she had learned with Alcott to bring together groups of women in her famous Conversations. For the first time in history women were free to articulate their need to be heard as people. Fuller encouraged these women to express their own thoughts and beliefs without having them censored by the culture or by men. Their lives, their experiences, and their minds were considered important and needed to be expressed for their own development, and not as a reflection of someone else's.

Fuller and Alcott were not the only ones who believed we needed to develop a faith whereby we listened to everyone, including those like women and children who were traditionally suppose to be seen, but not heard, and certainly not taken seriously.

William Ellery Channing articulated a Unitarian philosophy of religious education in the 1800's that we have followed ever since. In that much quoted passage, which you will find in our hymnal, he wrote that we must not stamp our minds upon the young, but stir up their own. But in his own personal life Channing showed how difficult it is to balance expressed desire with behavior. When the young Louisa May Alcott moved to Boston, Channing was the first preacher she heard. Although she was impressed with his sermons, she became disappointed after visiting him. She wrote: "the conversation, if you could call it conversation, was always on some high theme. But in truth it was not conversation; it was simply a monologue by Dr. Channing himself. " Alcott said this made her very dissatisfied when she left. She wrote, "He did not pay the slightest attention to anything you said. If you asked a question, he very probably did not answer it; he went on talking on the thing which interested him." This is the great personal challenge we all feel. When can we put aside our personal agendas and truly listen to the other person?
It pays to listen. Consider the case of famous explorer Henry Hudson. He was so focused on his own agenda, so focused on finding the Northwest Passage that he never noticed that his poor sailors were starving and freezing, and needed to stop their unending quest. Hudson was shocked when the weary, frustrated sailors set him and his son to drift away in a small boat to die at sea. Hudson kept yelling back at them , "what do you mean by this?" They could have easily answered, you never listened! And so they drifted out of sight to die in the bay that would one day bear the name Hudson.

Well, hopefully most of us listen a little better than that. Or do we? How often are we engaged in conversations, and we experience one of the following: Perhaps the person we are talking to is looking around the room to see who else is there to talk to because they obviously do not want to listen to us, and there might be someone more important there. Or perhaps they simply want to tell us all the wonderful things they can about themselves or their child so that we will think how wonderful they are. But what about hearing from you? Perhaps they disapprove of what you are wearing or who you are with or where you have been, and they cannot listen to a single word you have to say because they are busy listening to their own thoughts or beliefs about people who are somehow different from what they perceive as being right. My father had an awful time listening to me in college because he couldn¹t get beyond my long hair. But I didn¹t hear him either, probably because he had no hair. Teachers have a difficult time listening to my son because they believe that someone who cannot get his thoughts down on paper or complete an assigned task is lazy, and so they don¹t hear him when he says he cannot do it, or it is too hard. There are many different ways in which we fail to listen to each other.

I would suggest that we tend to forego our ability to listen to each other in three ways. The first way prevents us from even getting to a conversational level. We judge before the conversation takes place. Let¹s call this listening to the culture. In their book Proverbs of Ashes, Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker hypothesize that the Christian church¹s understanding of the passion of Christ, especially when it is interpreted like Mel Gibson, glorifies suffering and teaches that the suffering servant, who in this case is a victim of terrible violence receives redemption for his suffering. One might say that the focusing on suffering and violence as redemptive things, as spiritually positive experiences to endure, have led to a tacit approval of suffering in the belief structure of the church. One could even go so far to say that the interpretation is that this beating as modeled by Christ, mean your own sufferings are ultimately good for you. We interpret this in the popular culture as suffering will make you a better person, but we also know it could just as easily make you a more bitter person or a more fearful person. So we truly need to hear each person¹s experience of a particular time in our lives. Every woman, for example, does not experience birth as the most spiritual experience in her life. Some find it a terribly painful ordeal, and some who don¹t experience it at all, or lose a baby feel ignored or feel like failures. We need to hear all the stories. Too often other people want to tell how how we should feel, or react to certain situations when they have not even heard our story. Pain may not be redemptive, but it certainly is lessened when it is listened to and not judged or silenced.

The cultural view we bring to each conversation is conditioned by what is important or meaningful to us. What do we hear from each other once the conversation begins? Did you ever have someone tell you something like their recent experience of going to a restaurant, and you quickly lose track of what they are saying because all you can think about is the experience you had some time in some place. Let¹s call this listening to express your own agenda. It is remotely possible that someone else has something to say, or even a question to ask about a subject of which you have some knowledge. In some instances the conversation may drift to the movies. Remember the scene in Woody Allen¹s film Annie Hall where some know-it-all is boring his date with his stuffed shirt knowledge about Marshall McLuhan (the media is the message guy), and lo and behold, Marshall McLuhan himself is there to get the ultimate revenge against this guy who can only hear himself go on and on about how much he knows or how smart he is. Whatever the subject might be, you¹ve got something to say, and very little to hear. This is what frustrated Louisa May Alcott about Channing. He just wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, and didn't¹ even have time for her question. Perhaps it was that cultural listening gap, too, as she was a young woman who in his mind perhaps did not have a question worthy of the great man, and therefore could be dismissed. Who do we easily dismiss in our conversations as having nothing worthy to say because our agenda is what counts?

The other problem here is that we may intend to try to listen to the other, but their agenda becomes a hot button for an issue of ours, which soon supersedes what they have to say. Let¹s say for instance I have a child who is a high school junior, as I once did, and my friend who I am conversing with also has a child who is in high school. She is telling me how worried she is about how many parties her child is going to and how much sex and alcohol are involved. My response to her might be a launching pad for my own agenda rather than an open ear to hers. Rather than helping her express her worries by listening to her with an empathetic ear, I can only focus on my own child, and what his behavior is. I may begin to obsess about my own parental role, and completely ignore the fact that I have a friend who needs to be heard. Every story or experience that someone else tells becomes a reflection of my experience that I then want to tell them about. We begin to be listening partners when we don¹t let our agendas or our needs become the sole focus for our place in the conversation. We are there for the other, as much as they are there for us.
My beliefs and my agenda all play a role in my ability to hear what you have to say, but there is a third way of preventing true listening that we must be aware of. I suspect we typically see this with parents and their children, which is how it is depicted in today¹s reading from Jules Feiffer¹s play Grown Ups. So far we have seen our agenda impinging on hearing the others concerns, and we have seen our cultural view predetermining what we expect to hear from the other. The third kind of listening is making up an agenda for the other, and expecting it to apply to their lives. We may see this when we are having a conversation with someone and they say to us, "you look worn out. I think you need some rest. Go take care of yourself." In this context we might want to wonder why they don¹t ask the very question that they seem to have already determined. Are you feeling worn out?, and then actually letting you answer it, before they judge whether you are worn out or not. Like the predetermined cultural listening this kind of listening has the judgment of this is who you should be, and this is how you should act. But rather than simply judging what they hear or expect to hear, what the other wants to accomplish here is to set our agenda.

In the reading from Grown Ups, Marilyn tries to tell her parents about her experience, but what do they hear? First, what they hear is selective. She mentions Philadelphia, and they stop listening to question what she was doing there. Maybe they feel a young woman should not be in Philadelphia. Helen is also thinking about something else, the chicken. So there is a distraction, too. Still trying to tell a story, her father wants to continue to focus on her being in Philadelphia, and so tries to strike up another conversation. Then he wonders about the grandchildren. Mom continues to be distracted, and asks when she is going out of town. And Dad is focused on how dangerous it is to take a bus. Never mind what happened on the way back from Philly. So they won¹t listen to her. Dad wants her to be thinking about safety and the kids. Marilyn has an experience but she never gets to tell it. The parents also have a preconceived notion of her not being able to tell stories, and as a young woman she has been socially conditioned to listen to others, while her brother tells stories so that he will not have to listen. As a young man he is conditioned to have people listen to him. Bronson Alcott long ago said, give each other the chance to tell your experiences, your stories, your lives. He knew this is what connects us to each other, how well we listen. He wanted children to do it. Fuller wanted women to do it. In her book You Just Don¹t Understand, Deborah Tannen used the Feiffer selection to show that men have long tried to command attention, but she and our UU forebears both have said, let everyone have a chance to be heard. We need to understand that all need to be listened to.

Many years ago the theologian Martin Buber wrote that he believed that a god event happened when two people truly listened to one another. He called it an I thou experience as opposed to an I - it, where we treat the other as an object. The object may be someone we mold in our image or who we use as a reflection of our own beliefs or agenda. I think he was right when he told us how important true listening is. We all have distractions in our lives, but we also have the opportunity to create times when those distractions are put aside, or at least put to bed. And then we can truly be with another and not worry about what¹s next or what else I should be doing, or what¹s on my mind, but truly open ourselves to a kind of divine listening where it is not about me, but about you, and what happens between us. Buber once wrote about a dispute between another thinker and himself over the use of the word God. At the end the other man came over to him and place his hand on Buber¹s shoulder. He said, "Lets be friends." This was the sign that both had been heard, and that the word God mattered little, for the hearing of each other had been the experience of what one called God and the other did not. The true listening was the divine event.

Closing Words - "Winter Into Spring" by Lynn Ungar

The trees, along their bare limbs,
contemplate green.
A flicker, rising, flashes rust and white
before vanishing into stillness,
and raked leaves
crumble imperceptibly
to dirt.

On all sides life opens and closes
around you like a mouth.
Will you pretend you are not
caught between its teeth?

The kestrel in its swift dive
and the mouse below,
the first green shoots that
will not wait for spring
are a language constantly forming.

Quiet your pride and listen.
There- beneath the rainfall
and the ravens calling you can hear it --
the great tongue constantly enunciating
something that rings through the world
as grace.