Recovering the Lost Art of Listening
Plus: A Peaches' Pick Book Review of Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation
Dear Friends,
August was a combination of refreshingly cool temperatures (during the State Fair, no less!) and oven-like humidity the latter part of the month (yes, corn sweat is a real thing). We made the most of both, and are glad to glimpse (and feel) fall’s beginning now in September.
One highlight was having Millie in town for almost a full week in August, as she was in transit from her summer in Bozeman to her junior year at Covenant College in Chattanooga.
Another summer highlight was Megan being able to enjoy the visit with Millie and more of what Springfield has to offer, as she spent good time between Montana trips prepping for her second year at Springfield Christian School. This made for a smooth(er) start for 2nd grade.
Personally, I prepared and preached eight out of 12 Sundays at Exodus Church and four other PCA churches in our presbytery. Below is my take on the heart being the wellspring of life, preached at Exodus on July 28 and at Covenant Fellowship in Champaign on August 4.
I’m not on the preaching schedule for September, but will be preaching three times in October (twice in Springfield and once again in Forreston Grove; see dates and links below). It was a privilege being able to study and bring God’s Word to God’s people this summer.
This Fall
With fall in full swing, we’re sticking close to home this month. Megan is starting an embroidery club for women looking to learn the skill, and I’ll be busy with the launch of Exodus’ fall discipleship offerings this Sunday and evangelism training throughout October. Here’s a video I filmed yesterday with Pastor Stephen Lawrence to launch the series.
September
7: Megan’s continuing Children’s Dyslexia Centers day-long training
8: Official launch of new fall discipleship opportunities at Exodus
14: Fall Presbytery meeting at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Paxton, IL
14-16: Chloe and Brian in Springfield as part of their move from Roanoke, VA, to Nephi, UT
21: Embroidery Club
26: First Step Women’s Center Fundraising Banquet
28: Monthly Men’s Breakfast
29: Launch of Evangelism Training (5 weeks of Sunday evenings) at Exodus
October
6: Craig preaches at Exodus (10 a.m.)/Evangelism Training (5:30 p.m.)
12: Megan’s continuing Children’s Dyslexia Centers day-long training
13: Evangelism Training (5:30 p.m.)
20: Craig preaches at Forreston Grove Church (10:30 a.m)/Evangelism Training (5:30 p.m.)
24-25: Parent/Teacher Conferences at Springfield Christian School
27: Craig preaches at Exodus (10 a.m.)/Evangelism Training (5:30 p.m.)
Enjoy our favorite time of the year! And thanks (as always) for reading Second Drafts,
Craig (for Megan)
P.S.: Since some have asked, I’ve begun studying anew in preparation for another go at my ordination examinations, this time in January. If all goes well, I’ll preach before Presbytery at the February meeting and be ordained sometime in the spring. More details to come.
Recovering the Lost Art of Listening
“Try to see it my way, only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong
While you see it your way, there’s a chance that we might fall apart before too long
We can work it out, we can work it out”
—John Lennon and Paul McCartney
“Who are you?
Who, who, who, who?”
—Pete Townshend
Watching the Republican National Convention in July and the Democratic National Convention in August, I found myself asking one question: Who are these people?
My inquiry was not in reference to the candidates. If American politics has taught me anything, it’s that who we think a candidate (regardless of party) is can change at a moment’s notice depending on voter polling, so that seems an exercise in futility.
No, my question was in reference to those in attendance—the delegates who (again, regardless of party) seemed on the verge of losing their ever-loving minds in adoration of their particular presidential hopeful.
To be sure, raw-dogging hours of political convention coverage takes a hearty constitution to stomach both sides’ attempts to persuade the American people that their politician knows what’s best for us. But equal-opportunity masochism aside, I couldn’t shake the “Who are these people?” question. The itch required a scratch.
How to Know a Person
In How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, cultural commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks gets at a possible answer:
“The crisis in our personal lives eventually shows up in our politics. According to research by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute, lonely people are seven times more likely than non-lonely people to say they are active in politics. For people who feel disrespected and unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy.
Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape: ‘We, the children of light, are facing off against them, the children of darkness.’ Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging: ‘I am on the barricades with the other members of my tribe.’ Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action: ‘To be moral in this world, you don't have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.’” (p. 101)
Brooks then perfectly describes the dramatic shift of both parties to the cult-of-personality populism of the past two decades:
“Unhappy societies produce the politics of recognition. Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment, by a person or a group's feelings that society does not respect or recognize them. The goal of political and media personalities is to produce episodes in which their side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed.” (p. 102)
And then the punchline (which is no less true with feminine pronouns):
“The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to formulate domestic policies or to address this or that social ill; he is trying to affirm his identity, to gain status and visibility, to find a way to admire himself.” (p. 102)
Brooks’ explanation provided the best and most succinct explanation of American politics (including our upcoming election) I’ve read in twenty years. But I found his observations and applications meaningful beyond the political realms.
This month’s essay is not about politics; it’s about people—specifically, how to learn about the ones around us, or better yet, how to love the ones around us by learning about and listening to them.
Are You Lonely Tonight? (Spoiler: 1 in 5 Will Be)
According to this Gallup Poll from July 2024, “over 1 in 5 people worldwide feel lonely a lot.” That’s over 20% of people not just in the United States, but in the world. The world’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau Population Clock, is 8+ billion, 20% of which would be 1.6 billion, which is roughly the population of China.
But it’s not just 1.6 billion people around the world who periodically feel lonely. Read that summary again: “over 1 in 5 people worldwide feel lonely a lot.” 1.6 billion people consistently feeling lonely is a lot of lonely people roaming the earth. And, as the article further (and sadly) explains, loneliness makes other negative feelings worse.
That this constant loneliness is possible for so many at a time when the planet holds the most people ever at one time may seem counter-intuitive, but we’ve all felt that feeling of being lost in a crowd. Just because someone—or a lot of someones—is next to you doesn’t mean you won’t feel alone. Presence does not guarantee connection.
Neither does the seeming omnipresence of digital “friends” on social media guarantee actual friendship. Repeatedly, studies keep coming out reinforcing the fact that “friending” or “following” others online is a poor replacement for actually knowing them in a deeper and personal way. Stimulation is a far cry from intimacy.
Maybe We Need a Refresher Course
So what are we missing? Brooks thinks he knows, and I can’t say I disagree with him:
“The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everybody feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.” (p. 8)
The skills Brooks writes of here are not rocket science, nor are they even new or original. But they are ones that have fallen out of favor and largely been forgotten in our culture, and Brooks (and I) think we could all benefit from a refresher course.
“I’m not sure Western societies were ever great at teaching these skills, but over the past several decades, in particular, there’s been a loss of moral knowledge. Our schools and other institutions have focused more and more on preparing people for their careers, but not on the skills of being considerate toward the person next to you. The humanities, which teach us what goes on in the minds of other people, have become marginalized.” (p. 8)
A solution?
“All these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.” (p. 9)
Empathy Much?
The word that may come to mind here is “empathy,” but landing on a solid definition of that term is like nailing Jello-O to a wall (do your own Google search to see what I mean). As it’s so misunderstood, Brooks devotes an entire chapter to the concept:
“The problem is that a lot of people don’t know what empathy really is. They think it’s an easy emotion: You open up your heart and you experience this gush of fellow feeling with another person. By this definition, empathy feels simple, natural, and automatic: I feel for you.
But that’s not quite right. Empathy is a set of social and emotional skills. These skills are a bit like athletic skills: Some people are more naturally talented at empathy than others; everybody improves with training.” (p. 143-144)
Brooks then lists and discusses at some length three skills that make up this holy but hard-to-get trinity comprising empathy (I’ve tried to summarize them below):
Mirroring—accurately catching the emotion of the person in front of you
Mentalizing—finding his or her experience of a situation in a memory of your own
Caring—getting out of your own experiences enough to understand that what he or she may need may be very different from what you would need in that situation
With rare exception, few of these skills (and the eventual execution of them) come natural to most, nor is the possession and development of any of them automatic; empaths, Brooks would say, seem at least as much made as they are born:
“People vary widely in their ability to project empathy. The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the leading scholars in this field, argues that there’s an empathy spectrum and that people tend to fall within one of seven categories on it, depending on their genetic inheritance, the way life has treated them, and how hard they’ve worked to become empathetic.” (p. 149)
In other words, while some of us may relate to and resonate with others more easily, all of us can improve with a little practice at drawing people out of their loneliness.
Listening as Loving
So how do we come to know people well? For starters, it requires love for a person. It’s easiest, of course, when this love is received and reciprocated (and we all have those friends and family members who make this harder than it needs to be), but sometimes love for another demands a tenacity that says, “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” (Note: the grace of the Gospel helps a lot with this.)
With tenacious love as motivation, listening then becomes a means. As my friend Mike Card says, “If you want to show someone you love them, you listen to them.”
I remember the first time I heard Mike say that. We were leading a conference on creativity and part of the time was dedicated to helping the 150 artists in attendance trace God’s hand within their story. We made time in the schedule (rare for a conference that size) and set aside rooms for groups to work in silently. We then came back together so they could share with each other and us what they were discovering.
Having anticipated hearing more highs than lows, I remember how surprised and exhausted I felt listening to so many people recount so many heartaches that had shaped their lives. Being 29 at the time, I felt a strong temptation to want to spin and put a bow on these people’s painful memories in an attempt to offer some premature or false resolution. Thankfully (and following Mike’s lead), I resisted doing so, often just sitting in periods of awkward silence as some struggled to even finish sentences due to being overwhelmed by emotions of hurt, anger, doubt, and shame.
The experience of being trusted with their sorrows was a precious one for me. We knew at the end of the conference we’d done something right, as people hugged and thanked us not for what we had taught, but for listening to what they had learned.
Loving Reconnaissance
Brooks offers several tangible ideas of what loving reconnaissance (my term) might look like in the context of our personal relationships, but none is particularly easy.
“To know a person well, you have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them…To know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared?” (p. 162-163)
How does this practically work? Brooks offers several ideas to try:
“First, friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods. Psychologists recommend that you ask your friend to fill in the blanks to these two statements: ‘In our family, the one thing you must never do is ___________’ and ‘In our family, the one thing you must do above all else is ___________.’ That’s a way to help a person see more clearly the deep values that were embedded in the way they were raised.” (p. 167)
Another option is what Brooks calls “filling out a calendar,” which is really just having someone chart his or her life’s timeline and walk through the different ups and downs with you. I’ve done this with multiple people and it is always a powerful exercise.
If you don’t have time for a timeline (ironic), change the way you ask questions about someone’s past. Instead of asking, “Why did you become __________?” ask instead, “How did you decide to become __________?” The shift is subtle, but the change in the telling trajectory is huge (as I found out twice with two different people last week). What’s the difference? In response to “why?” questions, people tend to feel the need to defend their choices, but “how?” questions invite them to simply tell their stories.
Previous engagement suggestions notwithstanding, Brooks’ favorite recommendation is mine as well: serious conversations.
“Put aside all the self-conscious exercises and just have serious conversations with friends. If you’ve lost someone dear to you, tell each other stories about that person. Reflect on the strange journey that is grief; tell new stories about what life will look like in the years ahead. By sharing their stories and reinterpreting what they mean, people create new mental models they can use to construct a new reality and new future. They are able to stand in the rubble of the life they thought they would live and construct from those stones a radically different life.” (p. 169)
“If you want to show someone you love them, you listen to them.”
No Replacement
Thinking back to my conventioner curiosity earlier this summer (as well as the accompanying protests before, during, and since), I recognize there are times and places more conducive to listening and getting to know someone than others.
Political rallies and picket lines? Nah. More civilized social gatherings? Possibly, I guess, depending how civilized we’re talking (food and beverages are always a plus).
What about social media? After years and years of experience, I’ll give a (very) qualified…maybe. The qualification? In my idealism, I have three:
You know and have met in person everyone on the thread and are already friends.
Everyone shares a recognition of the limitations of the medium and their use of it.
Everyone has enough of a developed conscience to not want to make a repeated and rephrehensible ass of themselves for all the Internet to see.
Even with all three social media qualifications in play, I still only say…maybe.
That’s because, for my money, there’s still no replacement for sitting down (or going for a walk, or taking a trip, or grabbing some porch time, or as a last resort Facetiming and talking—not texting!) with someone, asking them good and genuine questions, and then…listening to them.
You don’t have to agree on everything and you don’t have to pretend you do. You don’t have to stay on one topic if it gets boring and you don’t have to move on if it doesn’t. Just listen for what’s behind and beneath the words, practice empathizing (and work to get better at it), and love the other person whether he or she wants you to or not.
Who knows? You might just mess around and get to know someone.
“Jesus called the crowd to him and said, ‘Listen and understand.’” Matthew 15:10
Peaches’ Pick: Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen
Variation on a theme, I suppose, but when it comes to knowing one’s audience and connecting them to God, few did it better than late pastor and author Tim Keller.
For those not familiar with Keller, he and his wife, Kathy, planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in downtown Manhattan in 1989, a place and time when few had faith New York City would be open to a biblically orthodox church. But Keller, who died just last year from pancreatic cancer, was an influential and effective minister of the Gospel, not to mention one of the most thoughtful and respected voices often looked to and asked to speak on behalf of Protestant Christendom around the globe.
While a seminary education is not a prerequisite to read this biography, the more that one is familiar with (and enjoys) evangelical and Reformed discussions on a myriad of topics, the more that one will enjoy this book. Well-researched and deftly written by Collin Hansen, editor-in-chief of The Gospel Coalition, the tracking and tracing of Keller’s theological and philosophical development is as far-reaching as it is fascinating, but it takes work to keep up. Here’s why:
“We can trace the rings on Keller’s tree only because he’s so quick to credit his influences, with a prodigious gift for recall. By citing so many others, Keller leaves the impression that he’s not an original thinker. Rarely will you find an idea in Keller that you can’t trace back to someone else. To understand Keller is to read his books’ footnotes, where he shows the work of processing and wrestling with sources. He shows more continuity than discontinuity - in his theology, in his relationships, in his personality…Keller’s originality comes in his synthesis, how he pulls the sources together for unexpected insights. Having one hero would be derivative; having one hundred heroes means you’ve drunk deeply by scouring the world for the purest wells. This God-given ability to integrate disparate sources and then share insights with others has been observed by just about anyone who has known Keller, going back to his college days. He’s the guide to the gurus. You get their best conclusions, with Keller’s unique twist.” (p. 265-266)
One of the things I most appreciated about this biography was, as its subtitle reads, its “spiritual and intellectual formation” focus. While there are plenty of details of people, places, and stories included from Keller’s life, this is one of the more unique biographies (of anyone) that I’ve read as Hansen “explored the influences on, more than the influence of, our subject, Tim Keller.”
The list is extensive: Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Owen, Jonathan Edwards, Soren Kirkegaard, Herman Bavinck, C.S. Lewis, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jack Miller, Francis Schaeffer, R.C. Sproul, Elizabeth Elliot, Barbara Boyd, Richard Lovelace, Harvie Cohn, John Stott, Edmund Clowney, William Lane. I’m grateful God gave and gifted Keller the heart and mind to read, comprehend, and share these “top-shelf” saints with us who are desperate to confiscate what we can from the cookie jar.
Highly recommended.
Fresh Linkage
Here are some Peaches-suggested articles without commentary for additional reading:
“Kathy Keller’s Heroic Feminine: An Exemplary Role Model for Christian Women Today” (Aaron Renn)
“No, Socialism Is Not Neighborliness” (Acton Institute)
“Students Praise School Cell Phone Ban: ‘I’ve Been Hanging Out with My Family, Actually’” (The Midwesterner)
“‘We Can't Let These Things Fade’: Biden Designates 1908 Springfield Race Riot as National Monument (Springfield Journal-Register)
Until next month…
Craig and Megan Dunham live in Springfield, IL, where Craig serves as Ministry Coordinator at Exodus Church while pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church in America. Megan teaches 2nd grade at Springfield Christian School and is an occasional newsletter contributor.
Know someone interested in the Dunhams’ ministry in Springfield? Share this newsletter!
Want to contact the Dunhams? Email either or both: Craig and Megan.