Two weekends ago the JVI community in Chuuk had our spring retreat. We decided to all give talks, and below is a copy of what I spoke to. It was my first time writing out any kind of speech word for word. It has its advantages, including being able to copy and paste it onto this blog. So here it is, if you can make it through...
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On Monday, for our Spirituality night, Jessie had us work on our talks. She put on some music and we went to work. At one point, a very distracting Lauryn Hill song came on. I asked her to switch the music, but not before Lauryn Hill had commented on how we “lay ambush for the man who has a different point of view, infuriated because he doesn’t understand and brings up things we don’t want to talk about.” I think she was insinuating that we ought to be more open.
I define openness as “hearing another without judgment.”
Openness isn’t just about listening to another person’s arguments in order to formulate a best counter-argument. Openness isn’t listening to another’s words and shrugging, condescendingly holding back with a “well, that’s what you believe.” Openness is actually hearing the words, the thoughts, the perspective of another. Hearing the other with an assumption of legitimacy, of intelligence, and most importantly, of justification. It is hearing another and being fully prepared to say “you’re right.”
Sometimes this is easy to do; often it is next to impossible. That is, to be fully prepared and ready to say “you’re right.” This isn’t to say that openness is achieved only through agreement. We are free to disagree, of course, but where does that disagreement come from? Is it honest, objective and humble disagreement? Or does it come from insecurity, attachment, guilt, or, even worse, pride? To be open we have to be free of all these. We have to open our ears, our minds, our hearts, and truly hear the other – before we start thinking about what to say, or do next.
Openness is hearing another without judgment.
Openness lacks judgment. It is hearing another without ever judging the person neither before nor after they have spoken. This may be an impossible task. Nonetheless, it is one to strive for. Despite everything, can we withhold judgment of another? Being open is more than just hearing another. Can we accept them, the other person or people, as equals? Neither above nor below us? No matter what we think of their thoughts, beliefs, actions, can we withhold that judgment? As has been said before, we can judge actions, thoughts, beliefs etc. as objectively as possible, within frameworks that we know, but we can never judge a person.
Think of anybody in your life that you feel you know the best. Family members, best friends, loved ones, significant others past and present. Who did you know the best? Now, in truth, how well did you know them? How well do you know their inner thoughts, the breadth or scope of their experience? The subtleties of what it means to be them in the world they live in? We see God through a muddy glass. We see each other through a tinted muddy glass. Perhaps judgment is justified, but that is never for us to say.
So, I believe openness is truly “hearing another without judgment.” However, this is not a “This I Believe” essay so it’s time to switch gears.
When I was in grade eleven at Carleton Place High School, the public high school I went to in Ontario, Canada (Colleen), my parents asked me how I would feel about moving to Vermont. This is after I begged and pleaded my best friend Alex not to abandon us (Dan and myself) for Toronto. However, moral was very low in the public education system, not a lot was happening and I thought it would be sweet to experience St. Johnsbury Academy, the private school I would be attending in Vermont. An adventure, if you will. So I agreed, took a summer class in mathematics, and then entered what became my final year of high school. It was an adventure, and in the end I am thankful for it despite the disdain shown towards a public education. Let this not define my year there, but one of the best things that happened was a motivational speaker that was brought to the school.
Lame, I know, and they aren’t ever supposed to actually accomplish anything. And to be honest, I hardly remember what he looks like and certainly don’t remember what he said, except for this one story. I do remember that all of his stories came from past experiences as a motivational speaker which makes you wonder what he had to say when he started. Nonetheless, one story stood out and struck a chord with me.
It was about boys in a cafeteria. This speaker, we’ll call him Bob, was sitting with a group of students at lunchtime either before or after a speech. A boy in raggedy clothing came in, and sat down alone at another table. A different table of boys started joking and making fun of this other kid, saying things like “Why are you wearing the same clothes again? Why didn’t you get new clothes, are you too poor to afford a new shirt? Maybe you should drop out of school and get a job, earn some money!” And it went on.
Bob, our speaker, conveniently happened to know the kid with the raggedy clothes and his story and so, when that other table of boys were leaving, he got up and caught them in the hall. He asked them if they knew why Paul, the kid with the raggedy clothes, was wearing the same clothes for the 5th day in a row? They said no, among some snickers and smirks. Bob told them that Paul hadn’t been home. He said that Paul’s sister had been in a terrible car accident, was close to death, and that Paul had been going straight to the hospital after school, working, eating and sleeping by her side until the morning when he would return for classes.
The boys were silent until one said “Sorry, we didn’t know.”
Bob responded, “How were you supposed to know?”
This story is simple, cliché, not particularly good and might even be made up. I don’t really care, the story itself is not the point. It is that Bob responded to the boys with “How were you supposed to know?” This hit me deep. “How were you supposed to know?” Often times we excuse ourselves the way the boys did, with a “I didn’t know,” or a “if I had known that then…” or even a “how was I supposed to know?”
And the thing is, probably you weren’t supposed to know.
We have a hard enough time getting to know the people closest to us. We can go back to that person we were thinking about before, and how much we still don’t know about them. We aren’t expected to know everybody, not even close. But this means that some humility is in order.
This story Bob told made me stop. It made me say to myself, although not in so many words, that it would probably be a good idea to stop for a second and listen a little bit more. It made me think about how little I do know about other people, and consequently about the world and this thing we call reality (as far as we can sense it). It made me want to be more open, even in the simplest relationships. It made me want to cultivate my sense of openness.
This feeling got major support a couple of summers later when I was working at P&H Truck Stop. One of the waitresses and one of the cooks were partners, working for low wages and not the best hours (the waitress sometimes did the overnight with me). Through random conversations I came to learn that they had once owned a series of restaurants across the country. They were working at P&H because they had retired. They had sold their restaurants, purchased some land in Vermont and were enjoying working in the business they loved without the stress of management. A destruction of all sorts of stereotypes. This further strengthened my resolve to be open, truly open to others in all regards.
This, however, is not always easy. I had a good friend at St. Johnsbury who I don’t speak to anymore (not related to a conflict). Her name is Kristen, and we could never speak about politics. She loved Bush and, well, that was hard for me. And I couldn’t deal with it. We could not have had an open, honest conversation. Why? Because I cared too much.
And there’s the rub. I believe openness to be good, if not essential. But it’s not trivial openness that is worth speaking of. It is openness with the things that are rooted the most deeply in our hearts, the things that make us the most passionate. Can we be open to someone who speaks against the things that we don’t just dear, but the things that root us and provide us with the foundation upon which we live our lives?
Last year I had a really discouraging encounter with an S.D.A. Christian named Seth. Marcos and I met him through the ISC, and later in the year he asked Marcos if he could speak to him about Catholicism. Marcos agreed, and I made sure to be there for the conversation. Why? Because I thought that after spending so much energy in college on inter-religious dialogue I was ready for some intra-religious dialogue – that is, dialogue between different sects and denominations of one religion. In our case, Christianity.
I thought I wanted to dialogue, but I was wrong. I didn’t want to be open to him. I wanted to open him. I wanted him to see what it meant to be open to diversity, to break away from the idea of right and wrong, or at least more right or less right. He was a fundamentalist, but he was a fundamentalist who was honestly in search of truth, which I would consider an admirable pursuit. But I couldn’t hear him, because my entire worldview was at stake. So much of my time and energy, and so many millions of life decisions, big and small, were based on the assumptions that I had developed through my own experience. If I was wrong… I couldn’t even think of it, not really.
So what happened? I got impassioned, frustrated, and could feel my pride crying “red alert.” Saying, “Lincoln, you have to be right on this one or it is going to be really, really embarrassing.” I didn’t hear anything he was saying, and showed his perspective little respect. I could not allow it to be justified, it would undercut too much of who I was, who I had been with such sureness.
It is so, so hard to be truly open. Open with the things that matter most. Yet, as usual, those are ironically the things we need to be the most open with.
My favourite minister said that “Diversity is the hardest thing to live with and the most dangerous thing to live without.” It’s true. We need diversity. Of thought, of opinion, of perspective. We cannot seek homogeneity in thought, in opinion, nor in perspective. Diversity is something that should be sought, encouraged, strengthened – it should not be deconstructed, undercut or made irrelevant. And diversity exists all levels, in all sorts of different, overlapping and concentric circles. Can we truly be open to it?Openness is the sense that I speak to, but it is not unique to me. Especially the pursuit of it. The uniqueness may lie only in the fact that I decided to talk about it. Openness, the hearing of another without judgment, is a sense though. We know when we are being truly open, and we know when we are not. We can sense it.
The question that I’ve been trying to work on with intentionality since the guy we call Bob came to speak at St. Johnsbury Academy is this:
Can we be truly open to another, on any topic, in any situation?
Perhaps not, but it’s at least what I strive for, in the hopes that if I can’t achieve absolute openness, at least I can come closer to it.