On Listening to Another by Douglas V. Steere

First published: 1955

Edition(s) used:“On Beginning from Within” and “On Listening to Another.” New York: Harper & Row, 1964

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Devotions

Core issue(s): God; listening; prayer; Quakers; silence

Overview

Listening, as Douglas V. Steere understood it, involves far more than hearing. It is nothing less than a disclosure of the inner person, “where words come from,” as the Indian chief Papunehang exclaimed of John Woolman’s prayer delivered in a language he could not understand. All of us have experienced both listening and not listening, being listened to and not being listened to, in this sense. Steere contends that true listening requires discernment not merely of the external sounds but of what the speaker is trying to communicate that is beyond words, what lies beneath the layer of words at the level of the heart. Every conversation involves more than a speaker and a hearer. It has to do also with what each person meant to say, with what each understood the other to say, and with many other levels of listening. More important still, it involves a spectator listener within each speaker who listens as that person speaks and grasps what is going on at all levels.

Yet deep and genuine listening is rare, Steere claims, for the kind of love that is required for it seldom is present. All listeners experience lapses as a consequence of bored inattention, adverse judgments on what is being revealed or on the person revealing it, and the imposition of one’s own subconscious interpretations because of unfaced fears, evaded decisions, repressed longings, or hidden aspirations. Here the inward spectator must never let up on vigilance toward the outward listener.

A good listener will be characterized by vulnerability, acceptance, expectancy, and constancy. The critical factor, Steere insists, is openness in the listener, which can create a climate for self-disclosure “where the deepest longings in the heart of the speaker feel safe to reveal themselves, . . . where nothing needs any longer to be concealed.” This degree of openness will make a listener vulnerable, for the speaker will know that person has been through some testing, too. Father Damien on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, for instance, put a new note of reality into his ministry to lepers there when, after years of service, he began his sermon one Sunday, “We lepers.”

The good listener will also accept the other person just as that person is, Steere suggests. Acceptance does not mean “toleration born of indifference” but “an interest so alive that judgment is withheld.” By expectancy the good listener “reaches through” to partially concealed capacities in the speaker “by something that is almost akin to divination.” Good listening depends too on a fourth quality, Steere writes, namely, constancy, “an infinite patience grounded in faith in what the person may become.” All other qualities, however, circle back to the first: caring enough to risk being involved.

Listening so as to lead another into a condition of disclosure and discovery goes beyond human listening. Over the shoulder of the human listener, as it were, Steere writes, is “the silent presence of the Eternal Listener, the Living God.” Steere asks, in penetrating to the depths of another, “do we not disclose the thinness of the filament that separates [persons] listening openly to one another, and that of God intently listening to each soul?” As Søren Kierkegaard points out in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing (1847), the listener stands alone on the stage with God as the audience while the deliverer of the message prompts from offstage in the wings. Psalm 139 reminds us that we can conceal nothing from the Eternal Listener, and it is the presence of this Listener that clarifies and discloses. Such is the point Fyodor Dostoevski makes in the Grand Inquisitor scene of Bratya Karamazovy (1879-1880; The Brothers Karamazov, 1912) as Jesus stands silent before the accusations of the Inquisitor until his listening “penetrates to the core of the Cardinal and reduces him to silence.”

The Eternal Listener has exemplified the qualities of vulnerability, acceptance, expectancy, and constancy. He entered flesh and blood and went to the cross to demonstrate how much he cared. As Abbé Huvelin once told Friedrich von Hügel, no Sermon on the Mount could ever have secured our redemption; God had to arrange this by dying so as to convince us he cared supremely. Jesus modeled acceptance, expectancy, and constancy. Steere asks, Can one find any starker demonstration of unqualified acceptance than Jesus’ association with tax collectors, prostitutes, and outcasts of Jewish society? Or of expectancy in what his acceptance did to the impetuous, vacillating Peter, Mary Magdalene, or Zacchaeus? Or of constancy as he rallied the dismayed, fearful, scattered, fleeing band of followers to send them out as witnesses?

What really matters, Steere comments, is not what the listener is but what the listener is in what he or she does. In encounter with a human listener, a speaker is never unaware of the judgment upon his or her life by the listener, nor can the listener resist judging the speaker. However, it is encounter with the Eternal Listener that really matters, Steere claims, for this Listener’s very existence, if not ignored, “rebukes and clamps down the evil and calls out and underlines the good, drawing from the visible participants, things they did not know they possessed.” On the Emmaus Road, for instance, Jesus set the hearts of his two companions to glowing. As Bernard of Clairvaux expresses it, the Living Listener “seems able to take fearlessly the speakers’ own diseased irradiations, lethal though they may be, to absorb them, and to transform them.” The more conscious the human listener is of the effect of the Living Listener, the more certain that person becomes “that only the cleansing radiations of an utterly loving and charitable one will do.” The Living Listener’s presence totally alters the situation.

This is especially true of prayer, Steere contends. Prayer may begin as a soliloquy, for human beings must begin where they are. What veterans in prayer counsel is that we persist until we stop talking and start listening. The situation in corporate worship is similar. Worshipers gather with a heavy load, their minds far from worshiping. Worship, after all, is for the weary and heavily laden. What matters is that the Divine Listener changes these cares, reorders them, drops them into the background, and reduces them to silence as worshipers become still enough to hear God. The test of worship or vocal ministry rests in its ability to draw worshipers to an attentive awareness of the Living Listener until they themselves become listeners.

The Quaker (Friends’) form of corporate renewal may appear strange to many but, Steere writes, “the living Listener’s magnetic transforming caring is present and able to meet [the worshipers’] needs and to draw the worshippers into his service.” Quaker worship has its own set of problems, but it does not experience some of those experienced in either Free Protestant or liturgical churches. In laying aside traditional patterns, Quakers place immense responsibility upon the shoulders of each listener to praise, give thanks, confess sins and receive forgiveness, offer petitions or make intercessions, and yield to what God requires. The danger is that this freedom may lead to an abandonment of discipline or cause lapses into artificial reliance on cold psychological devices.

Quaker corporate worship requires both voluntary and involuntary attention to the subject of worship. The more one knows of the subject, the better the concentration, Steere remarks. Concentration upon the Divine Listener is the small part the worshiper can and must perform if the service is to be fruitful. Quakers do not speak much about their voluntary acts of attention because they recognize “the drastic variations in temperament and personal needs in so intimate a matter as coming into the presence of God.” Readying oneself in silence, however, is as natural in preparing to enter the presence of God as it is to prepare oneself to meet a distinguished person. Sitting quietly in the midst of other silent worshipers helps restore attention as inner and outer distractions tug away at the mind. Most Friends know it is futile to fight against distractions or be despondent about them, for all persons, no matter how saintly, experience them. By accepting, acknowledging, and quietly ignoring them, they fade into the background. Some enfold them into a prayer. Others reflect on what the distractions might communicate. Most ignore them and return to the Center.

Thankfulness to God for himself, his love, his constancy, and his caring passes naturally into adoration. Regular contact with the Bible and Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection may supply ample reasons for such thankfulness. Such an experience, however, leads to “no snug coziness.” Adoration, rather, stirs a desire to penetrate further the abyss of being that is the living God.

Quakers enter the service not just as private worshipers but in a company of worshipers. They know something of the needs of their fellow worshipers and of the world and are thus brought into intercession for them. Steere contends that if we do not bring others before God, then the leading of the spirit “has neither sincerity nor deep intent behind it.” In intercession we often realize how little we care and how much God cares and how long he has cared. Thence we offer what we are and what we have to God. “To leave a meeting without this offering is to leave too soon.”

What begins as a voluntary act of guided attention may be lifted up, Steere says, and “drawn irresistibly by the living power of the all tender One whom we confront in worship.” Here the query becomes “Did you finally find the Listener taking over?”

Quaker worship often concludes without a vocal ministry and has demonstrated again and again that a company of worshipers can receive a message without words from the Word, Steere writes. Protestant services suffer from wordiness and a forensic character. Friends have always preferred deeds above words. Nevertheless, words do carry power and authority when they “come up fresh and breathless, come up still moist and glistening from the sea of existence.” What is spoken must come from the source itself. Quakers have wrestled from the beginning with the problem of the relation of words to the Word. Sometimes they have lapsed into conversational-type homilies or ethical counsels, only to rediscover that a prophetic ministry is a listening ministry. The eighteenth century Quaker Quietists such as Job Scott protested the ministry of words not “freshly tempered, hammered out, and reshaped in the powerful forge of the silent listening meeting.” The fire for vocal ministry is laid by reading the Bible and other great literature, prayer, writing, and using the power of reason. Ultimately it is a matter of the worshipers’ own personal commitment to the Inward Guide and the welfare of those for whom they cared. What turns the worshiper into a minister is the disclosure before the Living Listener. Inward caring for others and inward disclosure of their conditions and needs are the most important preparation for speaking. Here one learns to trim away nonessentials. Quaker worship has not fulfilled its purpose until worshipers put themselves at the disposal of the Listener and one’s fellow human beings for whom God cares. It is here that Friends discover “concerns,” “a costly inner leading to some act that in the course of its fulfillment may take the very life of the one it engages.” Friends know the meaning of Meister Eckhart’s remark that “a person can only spend in good works what he/she earns in contemplation.” All depends on openness to the Divine Listener.

Christian Themes

On Listening to Another defines and elevates listening to a fundamental Christian act. Listening is the ground of all true conversation, prayer, worship, vocal ministry, and what Friends call “concerns.” Listening takes place at various levels, but genuine listening exacts a price. Qualities of a good listener are vulnerability, acceptance, expectancy, and constancy. Within every conversation the Eternal Listener is also present to clarify and to confront in an inner encounter; the more conscious a listener is of this Presence, the more disclosure can occur. Listening is a key to private prayer and corporate worship where all gather around the Eternal Listener. Finally, silence enhances the listening process.

Sources for Further Study

Steere, Douglas V. Doors into Life from Five Devotional Classics. New York: Harper & Bros., 1948. Introductions to The Imitation of Christ, Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life, John Woolman’s Journal, Søren Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart, and Friedrich von Hügel’s Selected Letters.

Steere, Douglas V. On Beginning from Within. New York: Harper & Row, 1943. An essay on the need for saints in modern society to effect spiritual renewal.

Steere, Douglas V. Prayer and Worship. New York: Association Press, 1938. An essay on the relationship between private and public prayer.

Steere, Douglas V. Together in Solitude. New York: Crossroad, 1982. A collection of essays, including the remarkably insightful “On Being Present Where You Are.”