Wisdom Is Listening

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I just came across what follows. A colleague used it as part of a day working on race relations. I'm not sure if the exact wording is hers or if she found it somewhere else, as it captures the essence of the instructions more than an exact translation. I love what it says and how it says it, and want to keep it for myself.

In 1546, Ignatius sent three Jesuits to Trent to help address the matters that were pervasive as they were delicate. He instructed the three Jesuits with these five principles: be slow to speak; listen attentively; seek the truth in what the others are saying; correct misstatements humbly and gently; and allow the conversation the time it needs.

Be slow to speak. In the most difficult of conversations, it is often easy to be overly reactionary, allowing hurt, anger, or frustration to fuel my approach. And so, I am reminded to pause, even if only momentarily, and to invite the Spirit’s guidance and wisdom before engaging the conversation.

Listen attentively. Defensiveness, while an easily adopted default stance, often inhibits genuine listening and true conversation. Attentive listening requires my vulnerability, my full presence and sincere openness to the other.

Seek the truth in what others are saying. No matter how fully I may wish it were otherwise at times, I am not the keeper of all truth. Every difficult conversation holds the potential to teach me something, something about the topic at hand, about the other, and, undoubtedly, about myself. I strive to learn.

Disagree humbly, respectfully, and thoughtfully. While not the keeper of all truth, as a sharer in the conversation, it is incumbent upon me to speak my truth in love with humility and respect.

Allow the conversation the time it needs. Resolution is not always readily apparent or feasible. Some conversations simply take time, leaving me to trust, as Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin advises, "in the slow work of God."

I think it pairs nicely with a couple of quotes from Shane Snow in Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart:

The important ingredient, the thing that gets teams into The Zone, is not peace and harmony and sameness--it's engaging the tension between their perspectives, heuristics, ideas, and differences.

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The key to intellectual humility is increasing the cognitive diversity inside our own heads.

They capture the essence of that excellent book.

I hope to someday achieve this level of specialness.

"Cecelia, do you know why you're so special?" her mother had asked. Cecelia shook her head as her hair dried her tears. "You saw in him what few are able to see in another. You saw yourself within him. Each time you looked into his eyes, you saw your own happiness, love, vulnerability, and pain. You're a rare child to be able to see so deeply inside the heart of love."

― K.A. Reynolds, The Land of Yesterday

Since the project we're working on right now is race relations, I've been doing some reading of the authors we're be hosting. I hope to keep listening to and learning from them. First is a quote from Tanner Colby's Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America then a bunch from Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me.

When you're white in America, life is a restricted country club by default, engineered in such a way that the problems of race rarely intrude on you personally. During the time of Jim Crow, it took a great deal of terrorism, fear, and deliberate, purposeful discrimination to keep the color line in place. What's curious about America today is that you can be white and enjoy much of the same isolation and exclusivity without having to do anything. As long as you're not the guy dumb enough to get caught emailing racist jokes around the office, all you have to do is read about black people in the newspaper. And, really, you don't even have to do that. Where you need a deliberate, purposeful sense of action is to go the other way, to leave the country club and see what's going on out in the world.

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The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

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My experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic--an orc, troll, or gorgon. . . . There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. . . .

"We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any," writes Sylzhenitsyn. "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law." This is the foundation of the Dream--its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is some passing acknowledgement of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.

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But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

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"White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons.

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It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

And, finally, two more from Coates. They are off-topic, but I love them.

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

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The changes [in my life] have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

One of the things Colby said struck me as something to preserve. Paraphrasing: A lot of the debate in politics right now is about defining what it means to be white. Are whites a distinct tribe that should remain separate and pure or is whiteness the generic standard of universal to which all others must conform? Both, of course, come with an inherent assumption of superiority.