|
The Daily Attentional
Vol. 1, Week 2: How to See Through Our Differences
|
“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Seeing each other leads to listening to each other.
The theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer cited listening as a foundational requirement for sustainable community. Listening is the core of what we provide one another. Community thrives with it, and can't survive without it.
Our contemporary polarization is maintained by the speed of our reactions. We reward immediate opinions, certainty and force. Listening, by contrast, introduces time. It slows reaction, suspends judgment, and allows complexity to remain unresolved.
Marginalized people describe the sense of alienation that comes from speaking into a system that has already decided who matters. When people no longer expect to be listened to, they react in anger or withdraw. Listening — and being listened to — restores a sense that our presence registers with others in our shared civic life.
Painter Norman Lewis explored different modes of representation to translate black urban life and the struggles of his Harlem community in the mid- and late-twentieth century. The meaning in his abstract expressionist works does not arrive quickly. He used repetitive hieroglyphic forms that emerge slowly, sometimes ambiguously, demanding patience and humility from the viewer.
Norman's work offers a visual experience of deep listening. You must stay with the painting long enough for perception to deepen. His images foster a disciplined attention in dialogue with the work until we recognize what we don't already know. The work reminds us that understanding does not always come packaged in clarity. Sometimes it is just the willingness to stay with what we do not yet grasp.
To reclaim our democracy we need citizens capable of patient listening.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, quoted in Krista Tippett, “On Listening: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Advice to Christians,” On Being (Apr. 24, 2014).
- Norman Lewis, Untitled (1949). Museum of Modern Art.
COMING TOMORROW: The Rule of Stories
