Listening is an art, requiring practice, skill, spirit, and inspiration. The artistic medium is you: your ears, your body, your mind, and your heart. Listening is something altogether different from hearing, an unintentional (or possibly intentional) experience of one of your senses at work. Listening does not exclude listeners who are deaf or hard of hearing and instead is an artistic form available to all. Listening actively invites a guest—perhaps a new idea, a wise friend, or a personal story—to engage with your soul and exposes you to influence and movement in the very core of your humanity. What we hear may or may not become a part of us over time. Yet, what we truly listen to soaks into us at that very moment. We, the listeners, are receivers, holders, bearers, and witnesses.

I am never surprised to hear someone lament the rarity of experiencing the art of listening. Busyness, unrealistic expectations for productivity, distractions, the need to be heard, and thousands of apps at our fingertips prevent us from nurturing this invaluable art form. Fear, geographic and social segregation, discomfort, and the status quo keep us from listening to others who look, think, communicate, believe, love, and live differently. “What will we talk about if we have nothing in common?” some say. Others wonder how and when they will disagree or speak their own truth or get their turn. And some people’s stories or ideas are too foreign, too sad, too long, too disjointed, too difficult, too “wrong,” or too fill-in-the-blank to be deemed valuable inspiration for an artistic practice like listening that requires one’s full attention.

A thought-provoking quote from Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber, sums up my experience as a Fellow and listener in this year’s Boston Bridges cohort:

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”¹

Bridging differences of religion, political and social ideals, race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, culture, and vocation, we Fellows together create a space surging with the electric pulse of God. We do this by choosing to relate to one another authentically and humanly. And we do this namely by understanding that our primary role in our meeting space is as listeners. Of course, we ask questions, engage in dialogue, share our own stories, and kindly agree and disagree with one another. One of us may carry the melody for a given time while the rest of us orchestrate the symphonic score with our listening, but we all listen.

I treat our monthly gatherings like an art course, where I intentionally practice the art of listening in hopes that the practice pervades into my home, work, and community. Learning from the artists’ (other Boston Bridges Fellows, in this case) practice of listening to me and others, I refine my own vision for the listener I want to be. Over the past decade, however, my attention span has shortened and diminished, and listening attentively in any space has become a much harder art form. Perhaps you can relate. And as a person who values living generously, the challenge of philosopher Simone Weil cuts to the quick. She observes that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”²

What incredible generosity I have received from my Boston Bridges cohort in the form of attentiveness! The spaces we share are both my practice ground and my witness stand as I am listener and personal storyteller, giver and receiver of such generosity. These spaces are sadly rare for most people, and we are witnessing the result in our country and world. We are all capable of creating such spaces in our daily lives.

This practice of listening remains the first step, and it will require your full attention. Who will you listen to today? How will you listen generously to them? What will the art of listening move inside you? We are artists in the making whenever we open our ears, bodies, minds, and hearts to another. Let’s not give in to the slow death of this invaluable art form. Let’s gather and listen. The experience of God’s electrical surge awaits us.

1. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: T&T Clark, 1937).
2. Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015).