The Lost Art of Listening

For a culture so intensely focused on results…

In a culture that worships activity and productivity…

In a culture that measures a person’s worth by what we make… what we produce… what we’ve accomplished…

… it’s difficult to appreciate Mary’s seemingly passive posture.

She sits. At Jesus' feet.

And she listens. She just sits there and listens.

To listen in a culture of constant chatter might be even more revolutionary than sitting in a culture of constant movement.

With the dawn of internet and the explosion of social media, everybody (including the yours truly) thinks they have something to say.  We are surrounded by incessant clamor of the countless talking heads, everyone carrying  a very important message.

With so much talking going on, one has to ask if anybody ever listens.  Truly listens.

I wonder if we all have grown a bit deaf, a tad hard of hearing just to protect our souls from the onslaught of verbiage flooding our senses each day? And how does one separate what's worth listening and what's just mental and verbal static?

Few years ago, our child’s Kindergarten teacher brought the importance of listening to our sharp attention during our first parent-teacher’s conferences.

It’s quite admirable that your child is not shy and has so much to say, she said, but in a classroom with 18 students,  I simply can’t afford all those interruptions...

I remember that night sitting at our dinner table, wearing the invisible Interruption Radar Hat while a typical evening unfolded. I was absolutely astonished by the volume of words that naturally flowed out of our mouths even as we were all shoveling food in, every third or fourth word interrupted by a comment which would turn into a tangent which would be interrupted by another tangent-inducing comment... 

Needless to say, the experience was quite eye – or rather, ear -  opening. For all these years, we were so focused on teaching our children to talk and express themselves using words that we forgot about listening!