Learning to Listen

We are a people of speech. We are trained from childhood to have an answer, to fill silence, to prove our understanding through the words that come out of our mouths. Listen, we are told, so that we can respond intelligently. Pay attention so that we can contribute meaningfully. The entire architecture of our education is built on the belief that the person who speaks has won something, and the person who listens is waiting for their turn to speak. We have forgotten what it means to listen for no purpose other than to hear.

But there is a formation that cannot happen while we are still talking. There is a clarity that does not arrive through our own explanations. There is a kind of knowledge that only comes when we have finally stopped managing the conversation, stopped preparing our response, stopped insisting that we have something to contribute. This knowledge arrives in silence. It settles in the spaces where we have learned to be still.

To listen is to become small. It is to admit that the world does not begin and end with your perspective. It is to recognize that someone else's understanding might contain something you have missed, and that your job in this moment is not to add to their understanding but to receive it. When you truly listen, you are not constructing an argument. You are not waiting for a pause where you can insert your own experience. You are simply present to what is being offered, without agenda, without the need to improve it or correct it or add to it.

There is a particular kind of formation that comes through pain. Pain teaches you things that comfort cannot teach. It teaches you the limits of your own understanding. It teaches you that sometimes people do not need your solutions. They need you to sit with them in the reality of what is broken and not try to fix it. When someone is in pain and you begin to offer your own pain as a bridge, or your own solutions as a raft, you are refusing to listen to the specific shape of their suffering. You are making it about your capacity to help rather than their need to be known.

"The deepest listening is not the preparation of a response. It is the willingness to be changed by what you hear, to let someone else's truth reshape the contours of your own understanding."

Formation happens when we stop insisting that we already know what the answer should be. It happens when we listen to the voice of God in the silence, and we listen to the voices of those around us with the same respect and openness. It happens when we allow ourselves to be wrong, to be surprised, to discover that the world is larger and stranger and more complex than our categories had accounted for. This is not weakness. This is the courage of genuine transformation.

The formation you are offered in silence is different from the formation you can give yourself through speech. Through talking, you can only reinforce what you already know. But through listening—to the voice of grace, to the wisdom of those around you, to the lessons of your own pain—you can become someone new. You can develop the humility that comes only from recognizing that your understanding is incomplete. You can grow into the person that the world actually needs, not the person you thought you should be.