Listening to Hearts

February 19, 2006

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us be willing to listen to our hearts when we are in pain. Not our anger, not our complaints, not our fear or the litany of life’s failings, but the still, small voices of our hearts.

Sometimes, it is the wishes of our hearts that cause our pain, when we expect the world to grant those wishes.

Let us not go through it alone unless we have to. Let us find a safe place, a safe person, and ask them to listen, as we try to listen, to the cries of our hurts and of our hearts.

Whether things around us can be changed, or we’ll have to change our demands and expectations, it often starts with the painful honesty that can say, “This is not what I expected in my life.”

Some times the wisdom we need is just what we don’t want to hear, but what we need to hear – not from others wagging their self-righteous fingers at us, but from ourselves, in our own voice.

Religious miracles aren’t about changing the world around us. Those are social or political endeavors. Religious miracles are about changing our hearts, our expectations, changing what we are willing to accept.

They are among life’s hardest miracles, and they seldom happen alone. When we are in pain, when we need someone just to listen, let us try to find them.

The heart does have reasons that reason does not know. And sometimes, if we will listen carefully, we can hear them. Let us learn to listen.

Amen.

TESTIMONIALS

This service about “listening to the heart” used our own Listening Ministry as an example of church members who have been through nearly six months of training as listeners, and church members who have used these services. For this posting, I’ve removed the last names of our members, but included their comments.

Mike – A Listening Minister:

1. What was the best thing about the listening ministry program?

One of the best things about the Listening Ministry program for me is the training. In the beginning it’s a frustrating and unnatural process, but it gets you thinking. You think about listening, which is unnatural, because most of us listen in order to respond with answers or anecdotes. As a listening minister you learn to respond with questions, to clarify, or by paraphrasing, to comprehend.

The training by itself is good enough. I’d do it again just for that. But, I joined this church for many reasons. One reason is for community, another is for personal salvation. By salvation I mean that I want to live a healthy life in the moment. For me, the two are joined.

A perfect illustration of this for me started in the New UU Covenant group. Everyone in the group gave a talk that summed up their personal spiritual journey. Well, I grew up fairly un-churched. Our family suited-up for Easter or Christmas Eve services at a mild Presbyterian church. I couldn’t tell you anything about it really-other than feeling awkward and stiff in church clothes. So, for this covenant group, I wrote about my life-the emotional ups and downs, the demons, the struggle to forgive myself and others. Before I spilled all of this out in the covenant group, I confessed that I’d written a rather long piece on my spiritual journey. The leader of the group, Nancy G., said quite seriously something to the effect: Take as long as you need, we’re here for you.

We all start coming to church for one reason or the other, but I personally returned to this church for the gentle inclusiveness found in Nancy’s words and in that group’s willingness to listen to my story. This to me embodies one of the listening ministry principles. Bearing witness. Everyone needs a witness to the ups and downs in their lives. At times, friends, family, and co-workers cannot fulfill this role. Sometimes you just need a neutral person to listen respectfully with compassion to your story. You need a witness. I believe that being heard, no matter what you’re suffering, can help with the healing process.

Dana – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

Having someone listen without judgment or “helpful” comments. Simply allowing the words from my pain resonate in the room and echo back to my ears. This echo came back to me with acknowledgement, affirmation and confirmation of my feelings. The listening minister likewise, reiterated my feelings, and somehow my feelings were annotated and enlarged, no longer being fuzzy thoughts are hurts… But a solid that could be seen and managed.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

That managing pain alone is a choice, but not the most effective and beneficial. Sharing pain as in sharing joy, a good meal, a good laugh, brings an expanded dimension and allows space for healing….That being heard by someone who can hear, is sensitive and supportive is the very best to bring about resolution.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

The ease, simplicity, of someone accommodating my time schedule, being available to me, to be with me, and support me in finding positive resolution to my issues.

Caroline – A Listening Minister

I signed up for the LM training soon after joining the church. The training required introspection, openness and sharing among other trainees. This continues throughout one’s participation in the program. Serving as a LM has helped me understand why I respond to situations as I do, what I’m feeling and why, and how to better put it into words – not a forte of mine. So I have learned both from my listenees and my fellow LM”s. Another benefit, I have also come to know quite well a caring, open, diverse group of church members whom I care about greatly. Six of the trainees from my group still get together on a monthly basis. I cherish these get-togethers.

For someone who is hesitant to request a LM, I would say think of it as your time, a time when you give yourself permission to talk about what is on your mind without worrying about whether you are imposing on the listener. The old saying “get it off your chest” works: talking something through in your head is harder. Situations are clarified, emotions may not have the same grip once they are spoken. New perspectives and insights emerge.

The LM is a real win-win situation as far as I’m concerned. I have gained as much from my listenees and the program as they I hope have.

Rebecca – who used our Listening Ministry:

1. What was the best thing about your listener or the listening ministry program?

I liked that my listener had some experience with my specific issue. It made me feel like she would understand my problems from the start.

2. What would you tell someone who was hesitant to call for a listening minister?

I found it to be very effective one on one counseling for a time that was difficult. My listener gave support that I was not able to find in friends or family.

3. What surprised you most about the listening ministry?

How helpful it was. She just listened to me spew out all of my stuff. She never really gave advice or guidance. She just accepted me in the place I was in. It’s a world full of judgments but it’s a very powerful thing to just be accepted.

SERMON:

When I looked for a training program for a listening ministry program after I arrived here in 2000, I chose the one we’re using for two reasons. First, it was the hardest and demanded the most training, and I thought both our members and our volunteers deserve that kind of first-class treatment.

And second, I liked the philosophy of this training, which saw our role not as curing, not as solving, but as listening, in the faith that the wisdom most of us need is the wisdom of our own best selves, and that can happen – sometimes almost magically – just by being able to tell our story. Listening is work, always, and it’s hard work. But when one person can be honest and the other can be attentive, sometimes miracles occur.

I first saw this magic performed twenty-four years ago, and to the end of my days it will remain one of the most miraculous things I have ever witnessed.

I was taking a ten-week chaplaincy training program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, learning how to be a chaplain, which I finally realized meant learning how to listen. I had signed on for the leukemia ward. As soon as I found the ward and told them I was the new chaplain intern, three nurses jumped on me and said “Wonderful! It’s your turn! Go see the woman in room 19!” I asked what this was about, and they said “We have all had all we can take of her. It’s your turn!”

I went in to meet this woman, and a nurse closed the door behind me. The patient was 29, married with two children, dying of leukemia, and furious. I heard her whole story: very loud, punctuated with furious profanity, along with being told that the fact that I dared to be a chaplain was a cheap abomination, because in case I hadn’t heard, there was no God, there was no justice, and there was no love!

I have never been around anyone as deeply furious, or loud, profane and vulgar as this woman, and I had no idea how to help her. I listened to her story. She and her husband had had a stormy beginning to their marriage, with some painful fights and threats of divorce going both ways. Then one day they decided to begin talking through their angers and their differences. They worked hard at it for a year, she said. They were vulnerable, honest, and serious. They were willing to be heard, and willing to listen.

And finally, as they could hear each other’s pain and anger, they began to understand where the resentments were, how the angers had arisen and how they had each nursed them in the dark, where they gained strength until they had nearly destroyed their relationship.

Slowly, painfully, they found each other again, and they found the love they had lost. They fell in love all over again, with each other, with their marriage and their new baby. They recommitted themselves to one another for the rest of their lives, and soon their second child was on the way.

The past three years, she said, had been the happiest either of them had ever imagined. They had worked for it, they had earned it, they deserved it. There was a justice about it – this was a very important phrase for her.

And now, she said, her voice rising again, she was going to die. She was going to die, leaving behind the husband she loved, the two young children they both loved and had so looked forward to spending the rest of their lives raising and loving and watching grow up.

Within seconds, the profanity and vulgarity were back, screamed almost as loud as she could scream from her desperate, hopeless pain. I had absolutely no idea what to do. After she finished, she told me that I was to return at the same time the next day. I asked why. She screamed that I would hear this story every damned day until she died, that’s why, and if I wasn’t there she would have me paged.

I had failed miserably with the very first patient to whom I’d been assigned. I felt awful, and I was in that room at that time for five full days, feeling worse for her and worse for myself every day.

I was depressed all that weekend, and partly because I knew Monday was coming and I’d have to go back into that room again. So Monday morning, in the group when the ten chaplain students met with our supervisor, I confessed. I told the story, said I had completely failed at this, and didn’t know what to do.

Our supervisor was a Lutheran minister named John Serkland – good people deserve to have their names told with their stories. John listened to my miserable story, and said “Do you want me to save you?” I said “Do you honestly think you can?” He said Yes, he thought he probably could. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know what that could mean. I said “John, this woman is going to die, she’s furious and I don’t blame her. What on earth can you possibly do?” He said that tomorrow he would go with me to visit her.

So that day, Monday, I spent another painful and miserable fifteen minutes in her room, hearing the same story, with more volume, more profanity, more vulgarity, more hopeless fury, and that night I didn’t sleep well.

The next day, John wore his chaplain costume, with the Lutheran backward collar. I thought, Man, she’s going to throw the bedstand at you in that costume! That afternoon, we walked into her room. She took one quick look at us, and sized the situation up immediately. “Oh I see,” she yelled, “the little moron is stumped, so he brings the big fat moron!” Her actual words were far more colorful,

John sat down in the chair by the head of her bed. He said, “My name is John. May I hear your story?” That’s all he said for the next ten minutes. She laid into him. She called him names, told him what an abomination his costume was, then told him her story, the story I had already heard six times. It seemed even more angry, more desperate, more hopeless. When she finished, John said just three words. He looked at her and simply said, “You expected more.”

She was prepared to throw whatever he said right back in his face, and she formed her mouth for a response, but nothing came out. She mustered more energy, more anger, and again tried to say something, but again nothing came out. Then tears ran down both her cheeks; she looked at John and simply said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” he repeated. She reached her hand out, and he clasped it for a few seconds, then said “I would like to come back tomorrow.” She nodded. We left.

The next day, we returned, and the spell had been broken. She apologized for her behavior, her anger, her language, and John said she had nothing to apologize for. “I expected more,” she said, “I expected more than this. But there isn’t more. There’s just this. Just 29 years. Just this. I was just so angry! I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right. There was no justice in it. I wanted more. But there isn’t more. There is just this.” She thanked John, then said “You don’t have to come back.” She nodded toward me and said, “He’ll do.” We laughed, and left.

John and I went to the hospital cafeteria for some coffee and conversation. I said “How did you know what to do?” He said, “I have a confession to make. About ten years ago, I was assigned to a patient much like her, in the same condition, and she was also furious. Each day she would scream at me, call me names, tell me chaplains were a disgrace, and the rest of it. I had no idea what to do. I kept wanting to help her, to solve her problem, and I couldn’t solve her problem because she was right: she was dying, and it wasn’t fair. She died, angry to the end, and I knew I had failed her. I thought about it for years. A couple years ago, after I’d had a lot more experience, I finally realized that I hadn’t needed to fix her, I’d just needed to hear her. I wondered if I would ever get another chance to do it right. This time, it was your turn. And because you failed as I once had, I got the chance to say those three words I wish I had said ten years ago.”

All John did was listen to her heart. It was all she needed. Most of the time, it’s all any of us need. It’s our own wisdom that we need, but we can’t hear it because our fear, our desperation and our fury keep us from hearing ourselves. Sometimes, it just takes someone else. Not someone to fix us, not someone to give us wise answers like dishing out pills. Not someone to listen to our symptoms and diagnose a medication. Just someone to listen to our heart. Just that.

And what a gift it is. That young woman died a few weeks later. During those weeks, she spent every minute she could loving her husband, her children, expressing her appreciation for all that others had been able to do. She had found a peace I didn’t think possible. It was certainly a peace I couldn’t have led her to. But she didn’t need to be led; she just needed to be heard – and to listen to herself.

Of all the thoughts I’ve had about that experience, two stand out.

The first was realizing that virtually all of our frustrations, angers and disappointments in life result from the fact that we expected more. Our friendships or relationships aren’t as satisfying as we want: we expected more. Our parents, our families, frustrate us with their scripts, their expectations, their badgering. We expected more from our family. Our job drives us nuts: we expected more from that! We’re not attractive enough, not successful enough, not happy enough: we expected more.

Sometimes, of course, there can be more. Every social action, every political action effort in history has been the demand that our society be more. The American colonists expected more representation for their taxes, demanded it, fought for it, and got it. A century ago, women expected more of a voice in elections. They fought for it, and got it. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam era anti-war movement, the movement to remove President Nixon from office, and hundreds of other movements came precisely from the fact that we expected more, worked for more, and got more. So this isn’t about urging a spineless passivity. Some things can be changed.

But not everything can be changed. Some things must finally be accepted. Then it’s time to look for spiritual miracles. Those miracles don’t change the world around us; they change the world within us. That’s what religious miracles are about: not walking on water, but learning to walk on the earth for as long as we”ve been given: awake, aware, and grateful.

The second lesson I learned is that it usually won’t happen unless we can listen and hear. Not only chaplains, ministers and listening ministers need to listen and hear, but those telling their stories need to listen and hear, too. I don’t know how many times that woman shouted her story, but she never heard what her heart was saying, and she put others off so much that they didn’t even want to listen. If both she and John had not been willing to listen to her heart, I think she would have died in that same painful fury.

When we can get our hearts and our heads together and listen, sometimes miracles happen. They really happen every day, all around us, in quiet conversations and quiet reflections going on everywhere. Life can have profound disappointments, but it also has its miracles. Indeed, miracles abound. Sometimes all we have to do is listen.