Strengthening links

When our communities start to fail perhaps the first piece of advice we should give is - talk, truly and truthfully as much as you can to everyone - and listen with your ears, eyes, head, heart and soul.

It must be quite difficult in larger congregations to actually have a word with everybody. I struggle and sometimes it's only 20 of us. When I have energy I try to talk with those that I don't usually talk with but when I am tired I tend to stick with those with whom I feel an easy comfort. We do tend to gravitate towards certain people because of shared interests or complementary personalities.


It is at certain times that we are challenged to live as a community not just as a series of sub-groups. There are simple tests .... Do we know what food preferences everyone has? Who usually has tea and who has coffee? Who has milk and who has sugar? Then there are other little tests - How old are people? When is their birthday? Where do people live? Who do they live with? Do they have a car? What work do they/did they do? Or what about ... Who believes in God? Who is a humanist? Who is an agnostic? Who was born into a Catholic/Atheist/Jewish family?


When I am tired but committed to connecting then I go armed with a few questions to find things out about my fellow travellers. I want to understand them more, to put their current life in a bit of a context. I offer up information about myself as best as I can. Sometimes it can seem like a brief encounter, each Sunday in community with people who perhaps we barely know.


A community is only as strong as its weakest link. We need to work in strengthening those links.

Conversation as the building blocks

Whatever words we hear we must be alive to the life situation which lies behind.


And that really is the crux of the matter, the crux of truly listening. It can be very difficult when we are tired or stressed ourselves to be able to give our full attention to someone else. But in religious community surely this is what we are called to do.


I remember some ten years back sitting whilst a good friend of mine was talking to an elderly aunt and could tell that my friend wasn't really listening. They were doing the right thing by nodding and umming and aaahing every so often. But in the eyes I could see that this person was somewhere else. I remember thinking that this woman who was in a residential home was in the last years and perhaps months of her life. She probably didn't get many visitors, so this was a very precious moment. This was perhaps a really treat. It may have been the last time that they saw each other. This was not just a conversation, this was perhaps a goodbye. 


It is very easy to do. To forget that the person that we are talking to is not 'me'. The person is different, with a different story. As Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner Rogers wrote in their book, A Simpler Way

“… at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be.  Our eyes do not simply pick up information from the outside world and relay it to our brains.  Information relayed for the outside world through the eye accounts for only 20 percent of what we use to create perception.  At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain.”

A simpler way:  By Margaret J. Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers

Trying to understand that part of the conversation's meaning which is not shared, which is the other person's life and perceptions, is the challenge. And not just for us but for the other person too. They need to understand us just as much as we need to understand them.


Can we in religious community make a commitment to listen not just with our ears but with our intuition and our critical faculties which may help us to guess at the other person's personal understanding of our conversation? Can we commit to sharing a bit more about ourselves so that others have a fighting chance to understand what we say when we say it and what we may be hearing when words are spoken?


It is a rich territory, the land of conversation. But in many senses it is the land where we live. Our religious communities are the conversations and the relationships that emerge from those conversations. When our communities start to fail perhaps the first piece of advice we should give is - talk, truly and truthfully as much as you can to everyone - and listen with your ears, eyes, head, heart and soul.