Listening

A service titled ‘Listening, led by Dr. Mel Prideaux, with announcements from Liz Tuckwell, and music from Abby Lorimier and Blanca Graciá Rodríguez.

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SPEAKER_02 2:05

My opening words are from the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. But the silence in the mind is when we live best. Within listening distance of the silence we call God. This is the deep calling to deep of the psalm writer. The bottomless ocean we launch the armada of our thoughts on never arriving. It is a presence then whose margins are our margins that calls us out over our own fathoms. What to do but draw a little nearer to such ubiquity by remaining still. Welcome into this space of hope and love and light. Welcome to those of you here in person. Welcome to those of you joining us online, and welcome to those of you watching this recording at a later date. Welcome into a time of sacred commitment, sacred belonging, sacred longing. I'm Mel, I've met nearly everybody, and it's a pleasure to lead worship with you again at Kensington. I've been coming to services here occasionally for very many years, and I join your Butterworld book group. I live in Mid-Wales with my husband Ned and we have a business making charcoal in our woods. I hope if we haven't met before, that we might meet after the service. And the service today is about the sacred art of listening. Not just, of course, to sound, as that's not always an option for all of us, but in listening to communication in all of its forms, including listening to ourselves, our internal voice, and listening for the quiet intimations of the divine. I'm going to light our chalice flame now, as Unitarians do each week. It's a moment for us to stop and take a breath, settle ourselves down, put aside any preoccupations we came in carrying. This simple ritual connects us in solidarity with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists all over the world. And it reminds us of the proud and historic progressive religious tradition of which this gathering is a part. Here today, in this place, and with these people, may we listen so that we can hear. May we hear so that we can feel. May we feel so that we can know. And may we know so that we can change ourselves and our world. May this chalice we light light our way. I'm absolutely thrilled to be singing, because I don't get to do that very often. And our first hymn is hymn number twenty-one in the purple book, Come and Find the Quiet Centre. Including some words from an anonymous Jesuit source in the spirit of Ignatian prayer for discernment. You might want to adjust your position for comfort, you might want to soften your gaze or close your eyes, there might be a posture that helps you feel more prayerful, whatever works for you. Do whatever you need to do to get into the right state of body and mind for us to pray together, to be fully present here and now, in this sacred time and space, with ourselves, with each other, and with that which is both within us and beyond us. We turn our full attention to you, to the light within and without as we tune into the depths of this life and the greater wisdom to which and through which we are all intimately connected. Be with us now as we allow ourselves to drop into the silence and stillness at the very centre of our being. God of silence and God of all sounds, help us to listen. Help us to do the deep listening to the sounds of our souls, waiting to hear your soft voice calling us deeper into you. Give us attentive ears that begin to separate the noise from the sounds that are you. You who who have been speaking to us and through us our whole lives for so long that you can seem like background noise. Today help us hear you anew. And in a few minutes of shared silence and stillness now, may we speak inwardly some of those deepest prayers of our hearts. Reaching out in faith and hope to the one who holds all. Let us each lift up whatever is in our heart this day, our struggles, our questions, our dreams, and ask for what we most need. As this time of prayer comes to a close, we offer up our joys and concerns, our hopes and fears, our beauty and our brokenness. And we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal. As we look forward now to the coming week, help us to live well each day and to be our best selves using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice and peace. Amen. Ned and I were recently visited by some dear friends of ours who are Quakers. And of course, there are many connections between Unitarians and Quakers. We used to know a couple in Yorkshire who described themselves as Quakatarians, because he was a Quaker and she was Unitarian. And I sometimes describe myself as a singing Quaker. Talking to our friends about meetings for worship, their meetings for worship, about what they describe as sitting in companionable silence, about what it means to listen in that silence, really struck a chord with me when thinking about my theme today. Because of course we can only listen if we learn to be silent. And reading some of the sections of Quaker, Faith and Practice, which is also called the Quaker Book of Discipline, I was struck by some sections which really helped me think about the relationship between silence and listening. So the first is from section 2.12, called Silent Waiting, and written by somebody called Pierre Lecout. He wrote, In silence, which is active, the inner light begins to glow, a tiny spark. For the flame to be kindled and to grow, subtle argument and the clamour of our emotions must be stilled. It is by an attention full of love that we enable the inner light to blaze and illuminate our dwelling and to make of our whole being a source from which this light might shine out. Words must be purified in a redemptive silence if they are to bear the message of peace. The right to speak is a call to the duty of listening. Speech has no meaning unless there are attentive minds and silent hearts. The word born of silence must be received in silence. And the next section is 2.63, and it's entitled Meeting for Worship, Vocal Ministry, and was somehow written by a conference. Who knew? A group of people wrote this. When language is used unthinkingly, without being related to the experience of either the speaker or the listener, it is meaningless. Words are only symbols, and when there is no shared experience, the symbolism breaks down. When we speak of our own experience, our feelings are always involved. The same is true when we listen to others. We may read into their words meanings which are not intended but which reflect our own emotions. Certain words or kinds of language may arouse such strong emotions that we are only able to relate them to our own experience and not to that of the speaker. Speakers too may be unaware of the effect of their words. The more important and profound the subject matter, the greater the need for sensitivity in choosing our words. This is no excuse for playing safe in what we say or for not listening to others when what they say makes us uncomfortable. So some words there from the Quaker Book of Discipline. I just love the idea of having a book of discipline. Can you imagine what that would look like in a Unitarian context? So our next hymn is on the green sheet. I thought we were going to have to be playing um prayer book Jenga, but Jane is so organized, it's on a sheet. And it's Do You Hear? He had many things to say. About the importance of listening as a spiritual practice. To be fair, he had a lot of things to say about a lot of things. I find his concern with the theme of listening quite poignant because it's hard not to imagine that he had a very difficult time with being listened to as a child or as a young man because he was adopted as a child by members of the Theosophical Society to become what they called the world teacher and was trained to hold almost messianic status. And this must have been an incredible burden. And he parted company with the Theosophical Society as an adult and started a teaching which was based on his oft-quoted maxim that truth is a pathless land. You may have heard that before. That each individual must work on self-understanding, right relationships, and not follow any religious guru or leader. He was, however, convinced until his death that he did have a special access to higher knowledge, which again poignantly he believed had influenced nobody. He's a fascinating character. He's an interesting figure, and he's got some interesting and sometimes challenging and actually sometimes contradictory teachings. So this is from Krishna Murti. Listen to the bells, the bells of the cows and of the temples. Listen to the distant train and the carts on the road. And if you then come nearer still and listen to me also, you will find there is a great depth to listening. But to do this, you must have a very quiet mind. If you really want to listen, your mind is naturally quiet, is it not? You are not then distracted by something happening next to you. Your mind is quiet because you are deeply listening to everything. If you can listen in this way with ease, with a certain felicity, you will find an astonishing transformation taking place in your heart, in your mind, a transformation which you have not thought of or in any way produced. If you can really listen to everything, to the lapping of the water on the bank of a river, to the song of the birds, to the crying of a child, to your mother scolding you, to a friend bullying you, to your wife or husband nagging you, then you will find that you go beyond the words, beyond the mere verbal expressions which so tear one's being. Those words from Krishnamurti. We're moving into a time of meditation now. And to take us up to take us into stillness, I'm going to share some words from Barbara J. Pescan. Following vote, these words will hold a few minutes of shared silence, which will end with the sound of a bell. Then we'll hear some music for meditation from our wonderful musicians. So again, let's do what we need to get comfortable. Adjust your position, put your feet flat on the floor to ground yourself, close your eyes. Whatever you need to do. As ever, these words and music are just an offering. Feel free to use this time to meditate in your own way. Thou that hearest, listen. In the beginning is the cry, inarticulate, inchoate, essential, the primal cry of desire. Much later comes the word ordered, various, a pattern on a dark glass. Oh how we must listen to hear the wanting within the word. Oh listen to the he oh listen to hear the meaning in the soul of what is said. The first act of a prophet is to hear one's own first cry. In the silence, let us listen. You've heard a lot of words already today. It's in the nature of Unitarian Sunday worship that we listen to a person sharing words, their own and others. We might not hear the words physically, we may have them written down if our hearing is restricted, but we listen nonetheless. And sometimes there really are a lot of words, aren't there? We can't remember all the words, not all of them land with us. Not all of them resonate in some way. Not all of them we understand. We listen though for those things which do resonate, which we know as soon as we hear that we will continue to think about for the coming week. Have any words landed with you yet today? Have there been any words so far which have really resonated? Now a question for you to ponder and maybe we can talk about later. Why do you think the words landed with you? Or maybe why do you think that none have? Was it the poetry of the writing? Was it an image that was conjured? Was it a memory stirred? Was it a message you needed to hear today? Was it a message you've been avoiding? Or was it something else? Maybe the light caught your eye in a particular way, or you noticed someone else's response to the words, or the delivery or phrasing jarred, or you couldn't help but be thinking about something else. I ask these questions because, not because I'm judging you on whether you've been listening, by the way. That's okay. I ask these questions because I want us to think about the quality and nature of our listening. What it is we're listening to, what qualities are needed for good listening, and why listening matters to us and those we listen to. And I like to think of these as the conditions for quality listening. Here at Kensington, some of you will have had some experience of engagement groups or of groups such as Heart and Soul, which use engagement group methodology. So some of you may be aware of the covenants which we commit to in making engagement groups work. And there are three of those which specifically relate to listening. I'm going to read them from the list of the covenant for engagement groups. The first is we will take care to listen to others without interruption, crosstalk, expressing judgment or personal comment and not jump in with our own anecdotes or unsolicited advice when they finished. The next is we will allow people to talk about difficult situations or feelings without trying to fix them unless they've explicitly asked for help. And the last, which relates to listening, is we respect one another's rights to participate in ways that they feel are best for them and at a depth which enables each one to get the most out of the experience they can. These provide us with a very practical framework within which to do the work of quality listening. They give us guide rails to remind us that we are listening to another person, not waiting for our moment to comment, not engaging in discussion. We're being a huge ear on legs. All our focus is on listening to what is being said. And a necessary prerequisite for that quality listening is silence. And my reading is really focused on the quality of silence needed for listening. So my necessary conditions for listening must always rest on silence. And that is not just the silent hearing of another person, but also the silence which allows us to hear the voice within or the voice of God. Unitarians are not always so comfortable with silence, and I consider it a welcome development in our worship that periods of silence have become longer, more actively held, and more central to our experience of worship. Because without the periods of silence, when do we have space to really hear those many words? And without those periods of silence, when do we really find what it is we want to say? I love especially those Quaker words as they are very practical but also make me think of listening as multidimensional. In silence, we listen to what the other communicates, and the other may be the person who is speaking, but it may also be the other which many of us call God. And so when we have listened in silence and listened to our own silence, we might find there is something we want to say, and only then do we speak. Our speaking is rooted in deep silence, it is shared into silence and it is received with deep listening. So as Pierre Lecout said, the word born of silence must be received in silence. And the engagement group covenants give us those very practical conditions for listening, not interrupting, not listening with expectation, not listening in order to debate or discuss. And these are not easy skills to learn. We all struggle with them. But I would say these are the next layer of necessary conditions for listening, to follow the rules of quality listening. So after a commitment to listening silence, comes these rules about how it is to listen. Not just because they stop us from interrupting or disrupting someone's flow, but because they teach us the discipline of stilling our own desire to speak and to be heard. My Quaker friend rather controversially said that the best meetings for worship were when nobody spoke. But the quality of silence in the room meant that everyone was listening intently to the voice within. I would also argue, and I have found this one hard to both express and to accept myself, that a necessary condition for listening is to listen without judgment, with love and inclusively. So that's my third necessary condition. First silence, then follow the rules, then listen inclusively. Sometimes the one who is communicating cannot find the right words, does not know the accepted language for communicating their ideas, does not understand how their words might land. Sometimes they know that what they want to say will be hard for people to listen to. And I think there must be room in listening to accept that this is the case. That we need to listen even if it is hard, even if it hurts, because it's not always about us. To repeat those words from Krishnamurti, if you can really listen to everything, to the lapping of the water on the bank of a river, to the song of the birds, to the crying of a child, to your mother scolding you, to a friend bullying you, to your wife or husband nagging you, then you will find that you go beyond the words, beyond the mere verbal expressions which so tear one's being. And clearly I am not saying that if someone purposefully or repeatedly says things to hurt, that this should be acceptable or go unchallenged. Instead, I'm agreeing with that earlier quote from Quaker Faith in Action, which read, Our feelings are always involved. The same is true when we listen to others. We may read into their words meanings which are not intended but which reflect our own emotions. Certain words or kinds of language may arouse such strong emotions that we are only able to relate them to our own experience and not to that of the speaker. Speakers too may be unaware of the effect of the words. The more important and profound the subject matter, the greater the need for sensitivity in choosing our words. But this is no excuse for playing safe in what we say or for not listening to others when what they say makes us uncomfortable. And I think this inclusive or sensitive listening is important in helping us to become good allies for those with different life experiences to our own. Let's think of the experience of someone who is heterosexual in a religious group where homosexuality is considered sinful. Lots of us might have spent time in that sort of context. When that person first hears the testimony of someone who is gay, are they listening to that testimony or are they listening to their memory of scripture and their own prejudice? They are hurt by the words of the person who is gay. They find the language unacceptable and even offensive. What they are listening to is difficult to hear. But if they can listen through that pain, if they can listen to the deeper teaching of their scripture, perhaps they can come to a new position. But if they shut down the speaker because the language or the subject matter offends them, then they get nowhere. And so maybe it should be when we hear the other side. When we hear those bigoted and offensive positions, maybe we need to listen deeper. To try to hear what is beyond the words, to try to hear what is beyond and beneath our response. Not because our fundamental principles might change, although we have to be open to that, but because in that listening we might come to a place of Understanding where we can find common ground which might liberate both of us. This I think is the hardest work of listening. And I know many of us are struggling with it in the current political climate. A recent social media post from the Very Good People at Refugee Week, which is marked on the 15th and 21st of June, highlighted this need to listen, and I thought it was really powerful because it was set in that context. And I'll read you what they said. Courageous conversations are where we speak from the heart, stand up for our shared values, and listen not just to respond, but to truly build understanding. When we listen deeply, with genuine attention and curiosity, we create space for new ideas and perspectives. Much of what I have said has focused on listening to another person, but I've kept it indicating the importance of listening to the voice within listening to God, letting all the clamour go, and in silence listening to something more than the human. And this is something we may do in periods of meditative silence in church. And I'd like to recommend it as something to do in daily life as well. Many years ago through Hartlow Summer School, I was introduced to the examine, an ignation prayer practice which invites us to reflect on our day and to listen for the guiding voice, or to use the Jesuit language to discern God's direction for us. Now, obviously, some of you, maybe many of you, may not find that theologically comfortable as a motivation, but as a practice, it is a way to give space each day to listen to what is inside us, whatever that might mean. And the prayer I used earlier is one of the best encapsulations of it, so I will close by repeating the words. God of silence and God of all sound, help me to listen. Help me to do a deeper deeper listening to the sounds of my soul, waiting to hear your soft voices calling me deeper into you. Give me attentive ears that begin to separate the noise from the sounds that are you. You who have been speaking to me and through me my whole life for so long that you can see my background noise. Today help me hear you and you.

SPEAKER_00 50:29

Thanks to Jane for hosting, and Anisha for co-hosting. Thanks to Abby and Bianca for lovely music, and Benji for supporting our singing. Thanks to Julia for greeting and Marianne for making coffee. If you're online, stay for a chat with Aisha if you can. And also thanks to Vita for bringing and arranging the flowers. If you're in person, please do stay for tea and cake. It's apple and sultana cake or apple and pear cake today. At 12 30, Hannah is offering yoga here in the church. Or from one o'clock, we've got the craft noon next door in the hall. Tonight on Friday at 7 p.m. We've got our online heart and soul online contempl contemplative spiritual gathering. This week it's on the theme of leisure. Sign up with Charlotte for tonight or Rita for Friday night. You can find their email addresses on the order of service or the Friday email. And Sonia will be here with her near dance class on Friday lunchtime. Next Sunday, the service will be led by our own Sarah Tinka on futility and other life lessons. We've got a late addition to our programme. After the service, on the 24th of May, we'll be hosting a screening of the People's Emergency Briefing, a 15-minute film about the climate emergency, followed by a conversation about our responses and what we can do to bring about change. Jasmine is organising this event, so you can ask her for more information. And Jasmine is now going to say just a few words about it.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

Yeah, I will be speaking about this whenever I get the chance in between now and the 24th. Just to say I have seen the film People's Emergency Briefing, otherwise I wouldn't be suggesting that we put it on. It's a very um neatly condensed film that sort of brings it's a how can I say it's a summary of an event that happened uh in November, which was um called the National Emergency Briefing, and that was an event where 10 experts on various things related to the climate, so food security, health, um national security, biodiversity all came to speak about what the impact has been on the climate of fossil fuel burning and where we are now and where we're likely to go if we don't act now. None of our lives will be unaffected by changes in the climate that is here with all of us. So um I really encourage you to come. Um it'll be lovely to have you there. Please um talk to me if you would like to come, and I'll try to make sure that my email is uh available somewhere. So if you don't speak to me today, you can uh sign up another time.

SPEAKER_00 53:28

Thanks, Jasmine. Our walk-in group is going to the Lee Valley on Tuesday, the 26th of May. Please let Jane know if you're planning to come along to that and she'll let you know the precise meeting details. This month, the Better World Book Club is talking about Is This Working? by Charlie Colnut. And we have one copy to left to lend out. That's on the 31st of May on Zoom. Sign up if you plan to come. We also have some of the previous books from the Better World Book Club at the back of the church. Um if you're interested in borrowing some, feel f please feel free. We also have a little brown book that you can put your name and title into just so we know who's got the books. And looking further ahead, we're going to be running a six-part course over the summer called How to Be a Unitarian. There's a flyer in the order of service today. That will be led by Jane and Charlotte online. Even if you've attended it before, you can come again. We'll be joined by friends from all over the country to have questions on what it means to be Unitarian and the different forms it can take. Please sign up with Jane as soon as possible. Details of all our various activities that are on the order of service are also in the Friday email. So sign up for our mailing list if you haven't done already yet or done so. We encourage you to keep in touch, look out for each other, and do what you can to nurture supportive connections. And now we've just got time for our closing words and closing music.

SPEAKER_02 55:09

I always love the announcements at Kensington. It's by far, I'm sure, the longest set of announcements of any church. That is definitely the sign of a thriving congregation. Thank you for listening this morning, for listening to me, for listening to one another, and to your own heart and soul. And I close with probably my favourite benediction, which I'm sure many of you know from John O'Donahue. On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets into you, may a flock of colours indigo, red, green, and azure blue come to awaken you a meadow in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas phrase in the Kurak of Thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you an invisible cloak to mind your life.