March 2, 2015

NOT BEING

LISTENED TO

Listen to yourself the next time someone doesn’t listen to you – when you inwardly complaining because you weren’t being heard. .

Everyone has had that experience!

We’re talking here about yawns.

We’re talking here about the other looking at their watch or the clock  on the wall or at the door or over our shoulder – while we’re talking.

We’re talking here about being cut off by another.  

We’re talking here of unreturned phone calls.

And when it happens with the same person too many times, in deja vu situations, frustration roams the corridors of our mind.

We wonder if we should just tell another whom we’re connected with what we’re feeling, what we wondering. Maybe we should just say, “Well, I guess that’s it.  I guess this is how relationships end.”

And maybe the other really wants to say: “Disappear. You’re really not that interesting to me anymore. I’m bored with you.”

If that’s the case, the nothing is less painful than the something.

To listen to another is difficult.

To listen to another is to believe that another has something to say that is worth hearing.

To listen to another is to empty ourselves.

Speaking to another is taking a chance.

Speaking and listening are essential for communion.

To communicate is to take and eat, to digest another, their thoughts and feelings, to be invited by them into their upper room.

To communicate is to believe another matters.

It’s a willingness to walk with them, to talk with them, in the cool of the evening in the garden of their delights or to pray with them in their agony in the garden,  to help them take the cup and stay awake with them in their darkest hours.

Until we begin to do this, how can we pray, how can we receive communion how can we know what’s the matter or what matters.

When we do this, we have begun to pray, we have begun to listen,

we have begun to matter to each other.

Hello. How are you? Is anything the matter?

I suppose those are the first questions to ask another who doesn’t seem to be listening.

© Andy Costello, Reflections