Deep Listening

“The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer cited listening as the foundational requirement for sustainable community. Listening is the heart of what we provide one another. Community thrives with it, and can't survive without it.

Our contemporary polarization is maintained by instant reactions. Media platforms reward hot takes, certainty and force. Listening, by contrast, introduces time. It slows reaction, suspends judgment, and allows complexity to remain unresolved.

We've all experienced the sense of alienation that comes from speaking to someone who has already judged the merit of our words. 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 personal and civic lives.

Painter Norman Lewis explored different modes of visual representation to translate black urban life and the struggles of his Harlem community in the mid- and late-twentieth century. The meaning of his 1949 abstract expressionist work, "Untitled," is not readily apparent. He uses 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. That requires disciplined and open attention to the work until we recognize what it is revealing to us. The painting reminds us that understanding others does not happen according to our terms. Sometimes it is just the willingness to stay with what we do not yet grasp.

To reclaim our democracy we need citizens capable of deep patient listening.

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, quoted in Krista Tippett, “On Listening: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Advice to Christians,” On Being (Apr. 24, 2014).
2. Norman Lewis, Untitled (1949). Museum of Modern Art.