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The Gossip Painting, Albert Edelfelt

If there's a tough discipline in listening well, there's an even more rigorous discipline in speaking well. No, not diction and articulation; not rhetorical power and verbal agility; not virtuoso semantics and linguistic improvisation. Speaking well is a different word game. I mean an ethic of speaking; the moral control and relational healthiness of our conversation; knowing when to speak and what to say, and when to be silent; and therefore a self-imposed quality control on our use of words.

Every year I choose a couple of Bible books to live with and engage with through the year, in the hope that deep and faithful engagement with the text will lead to a deep and faithful living of the text. This year it's the letter of James and the book of Ruth. More of Ruth later. But having just read James for the umpteenth time, it's hard to miss the fact that he has quite a lot to say about an ethical and spiritual underpinning of our use of words. In Chapter 3 James gets to the point, bluntly:         

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.

Let everyone be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger (1.19)

No I can't claim to be never at fault in what I say. In fact most of the time, being realistic, I'd settle for being a bit less at fault in what I say. A major study of James is titled Speech Ethics in the Epistle of James, near 400 pages of careful and penetrating exegesis of a text which has 32 ethical imperatives, and 28 of them are to do with speech.

Probably just as well James didn't have to contend with Facebook, Twitter and Emails in first Century Palestine. It's a cultural commonplace that these three modern media formats give a freedom of speech that has enormous potential for good and for harm. An agreed and supported ethic of speaking, writing, and social communication is hard to achieve, and yet the audience for what we say is larger than ever, and more immediate across distance, than even we might have imagined twenty years ago. So it's an interesting piece of speculation, "What would the Wisdom writers of Proverbs and James have advised would be Tweeters and image constructing Facebook users, about the use and abuse of social media?" That I need to think about a bit more.

Which raised the idea that each Wednesday for a while I'll do a post on the wisdom of James. The letter that is, not yours truly.

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Listen. If someone says that one word to us it's a summons to pay attention. Listen. Whatever else you're thinking about stop it. Whatever you're doing drop it. And the way the word is said can often be a clue as well. Is it a conspiratorial, "Listen", with the promise of gossip. Is it in imperative mood because what is going to be said is important, significant, "Listen". Is it confidentiality, something sensitive and not to be said too loudly is about to be spoken.

There's a self- help and personal development industry out there training and teaching us to listen well, to listen carefully, to listen effectively by paying attention, silencing our inner chatter and stilling the instinctive urge to compete in the word games we  sometimes call conversation. Recently I've been thinking of the power implications of good listening, and of non listening. To listen to another is to be silent and to receive this other person;s presence rather than project my own. Not that listening is passive, far from it. It is an active form of being present, but in a self-effacing way. P T Forsyth says that in prayer "our egoism retires, and into the clearance there comes with our Father, our brother". I think that's also a good description of genuine listening, when our ego retires, leaves room, and into the space we invite our sister and brother, friend and colleague, enemy or stranger.

Listening is a disciplined and generous form of hospitality. To waste precious self-promoting time being silent, present and aware of this other person is one of the true gifts of the hospitable heart. By listening I affirm the reality, the significance and the sheer human thereness of this other person. I used the word 'waste' intentionally. To listen to another person is to relinquish my self-interest in this encounter, and to seek instead to spend time, to give attention and to offer care to this person who has, just this minute, walked into this time and this space in my life.

I read the Gospels not just to hear what Jesus says, but to hear what he doesn't say. Jesus listening is as impressive and redemptive as Jesus speaking. Time and time again, Jesus hears the heart, listens to the emotions, is attentive to the needs, is utterly and at times exhaustingly present to all kinds of folk; this woman at the well, that curiously pedantic Scribe Nicodemus, this heartbroken Roman soldier desperate to save his lassie, that woman flung like rubbish on the ground in front of him while they all picked up stones. And I want to be a better listener. Listening is a pre-requisite of compassion, understanding, love, kindness. Listening, paying attention, being present and available, requiring my ego to retire to make room for this other person, learning the key Christian discipline of shutting up – who would have thought Christian discipleship could soar or sink on the basis of intentional listening. But it does. To be Christlike is to listen, because through the Incarnation, the Passion and Death of Christ, God has listened to the profoundest depths and furthest reaches of our broken and beautiful humanity. When we listen, we love and give ourselves for the blessing, healing and wholeness of this person whose place in the world, right now, is beside me. 

I love Vermeer's Jesus in the Home of Martha and Mary. It's an interesting question who is speaking and who is listening; who is present to whom, paying attention to whom; whose inner voices are so loud they can't hear what's going on around them, or what's going on within the hearts of the others.

Over Christmas I've been reading C S Lewis. I haven't had one of his books off the shelves for a while, and his space trilogy I read long ago. I've just finished Out of the Silent Planet, and found it a strange and attractive story, old fashioned in its narrative structure, political incorrectness at times off the scale, characters nearer caricature than convincing weight bearers of the story. But the imagination to write what is effectively a moral fable, and to draw the reader into an alternative reality where Lewis persuades us to believe the frankly unbelieveable is why his books remain in print. We are persuaded to conceive the possibility of disembodied personality, counter intuitive affective responses to creatures normally repulsive to our tastes and aesthetics, and to do all this with a background mythology resonating with Christian theological themes of sin and evil, judgement and redemption, creation and uncreation and new creation.

Sometimes questions which haunted Lewis himself are evident in the telling of the story and the conversation of the characters. In a discussion of time and memory, pleasure and sorrow, one of the creatures is puzzled by the human propensity to possess, repeat, hold on to whatever briongs pleasure, thereby reducing the significance and joy by diluting it with repetition. The creature asks, "How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back – if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?" As a way of welcoming each day gratefully as gift and being content to live in the joy or pain of the moment and thr reality that is now, there are few more telling and moving questions. Wisdom sometimes exudes almost unconsciously from lewis when he is at his best.

The book was written in 1938. Reading it reminded me of the dated and contrived production of the 1960 film the Time Machine. Our contemporary familiarity with advanced technologies such as AI, nuclear science, genetic science, IT and the now ubiquitous electronic devices which reconfigure the very nature of communication, are so far ahead of Lewis's science fiction range that there is an inevitable naivete about his portrayals of human technology, scientific theory and cosmology. However the core of the story as fable and construal of human ethical failures and dilemmas remains as a moral narrative which still delivers. In any case I'm glad to have read it again.

There are moments in life when sadness descends beyond our usual register of pain, and we begin, but only begin, to feel the reality of Isaiah’s words throbbing with unexpected and personal disorienting anguish, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” The news from Peshawar is such a moment, slicing into our lives with savage disregard for our usual screening mechanisms, and exposing our hearts to the unassuageable suffering of those other people, who belong to our human family, whose times in history we share, and whose children have been massacred.

According to a Taliban statement this was a revenge attack on a school for children of the military, carried out by men whose own children and families were killed in the military action against militant militias in Pakistan. So it is claimed. Is that some kind of attempt at explanation? How do we follow the savage logic that offers such an inane and insane justification for murdering 132 children and 9 adults, numbers likely to rise further? The slaughter of the innocents, for whatever reason, is an evil born of fear, hate and despair. Fear of the enemy, hatred of those who are ‘other’, and despair of life itself – hence the calculated rage and essential evil of those whose greatest joy is the destruction of life in an obscene gesture of defiant despair.

As a Christian my tears flow from a heart unable at present to interpret itself. Baffled sadness, hard to acknowledge rage, hope confronting despair, desolation overwhelming any sense of consolation, streams of emotion and thought and prayer coalescing into a river of grief. I recall Paul’s use of Isaiah, when that same prophet looked on desolation and told it to God, “For your sake we face death all day long, we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered…” The killing of defenceless children by heavily armed parents of other dead children is as tragic now as ever or anywhere. Tonight, prayer seems such a feeble retort to such tragedy. But nevertheless. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….we are ministers of reconciliation….Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

So for those who have died, for bereaved parents, for a region in shock and anger and grief, I pray that were the earth is once more without form and void, and darkness is upon the face of the deep, may the Spirit of God move, and once more may God say, “Let there be light.” Kyrie eleison.

For those who plan and plot murder as the language of hate and fear translated into violence, who seek vengeance through the murder of children and unarmed teachers, I pray that minds and souls covered by such darkness upon the face of the deep, may be turned towards mercy and peace and the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all. Kyrie eleison.