Discussion the other day about reflection as a form of listening. Is listening a gift, a skill, an art, a discipline, or a combination of some or all of these? What would reflective listening feel like? A very good friend, of an older school of Evangelical formation, good naturedly pulled my leg about overuse of the word reflect. he felt that too much time reflecting, got in the way of doing. I know what he meant, and as one of the most skilled workers of wood I know, trained as a ship’s carpenter, he knew about the importance of doing, of practical, manual making a difference. Till I pointed out that the good carpenter (and he is one of the best I’ve watched) is a reflective practitioner, thoughtfully working with tools and material to create a solid object that witnesses to his skill and thought. So, I’m yet to be convinced we would ever be in danger of reflecting too much. More likely we have educated ourselves out of reflection as slowed down thought, considered opinion, informed judgement, balancing considerations with evidence. And maybe it isn’t we have educated ourselves out of reflective listening, as that we never really learned it.
Now when it comes to theology, theologising, and theologians, I am entirely persuaded that theological reflection is an important form of listening, reflective listening. And in that conversation we identified two ways of listening that we all practice, and we aren’t often aware of the difference it can make to a conversation, a relationship, an outcome, which one we use. There is receptive listening and there is interceptive listening. Receptive listening is when our attitude is open, our presuppositions and prejudices silenced, our attention is given, and the other is the guide to where the conversation is going. Interceptive listening is when the word clothed thoughts of the Other are intercepted by our own thoughts impatiently waiting to be clothed in words as soon as we get a word in edgeways. The first, receptive listening is interested in what the other thinks, how they think, why what they think is important, and so their words are gifts that make possible communication and understanding. Whereas interceptive listening is a defensive stance, anticipating the earliest moment available for regaining cotrol of the conversation.
The good theologian is a receptive listener – whether to the human voice in discussion, argument, testimony – or to the voice of a text which informs, persuades, challenges, contradicts, affirms, – or to the choral voice of the Christian tradition, recognising the harmonies and movements, the points and counterpoints, and responding to the textured sound of theological music as it is composed, practised and performed. I suppose what I am asking you to be receptive to, is the idea that a receptive mind and heart is one skilled in the art of reflective listening; openness of spirit to what is new and different, humility before the careful thought of others, docility that is the attitude of the teachable ( and reachable) soul, hospitable to the truth that will always be more than we can safely contain. A lot of theological writing, quite a lot of contemporary preaching, and maybe even too much of our usual ways of conversing, lean more towards an interceptive form of listening, when our own presupposed rightness is more important than the off chance that the Other may have something life-enhancing or life-saving to say to us.
Amongst the habits I’ve grown into over the years is reflective reading – a long, slow, meandering walk with someone whose voice, at least during those pre-arranged appointments, is always to be considered more important than mine. It may be that reflective, receptive listening describes those times when we let others get their words in edgeways. One further thought from that discussion – talking of theology and imagination, we moved to the word speculation. Why does speculative theology get such a bad press? As if God’s immensity, mystery and overwhelming mercy were in some sense threatened by our thinking! A far greater threat to the vast mysterious truth of who God is, is that guarded timidity that wants our talk of God to stay within already confirmed parameters, a process of interceptive listening that is in danger of making what we already think, know, or think we know, a final position to be defended.
Theological reflection can only take place if there is a willed vulnerability, a determined openness, a receptive attentiveness, to voices other than our own.
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