Faculty Commencement Address: The Power of Listening (June 2015)

Class of 2015, their friends and families, alumni, faculty and staff colleagues, Wendy, and Bo, I am honored to have been invited to share a few words with you all. Although I have been at Friends for only two years, and therefore have not had the privilege of accompanying our soon-to-be graduates for the length of their upper school experience, I have had the daily pleasure of listening to them and of them listening to me. I am grateful that they have elected to listen to me one more time.

That listening is integral to this graduation ceremony affords us the opportunity to reflect on listening itself. At first blush, such a focus on listening appears to be counter-intuitive. It feels less logical than a speech that is about, well, the power of speaking. One might, quite reasonably, have expected me to encourage these soon-to-be graduates to go out into the world beyond Friends and speak their truths boldly, exercising their linguistic mastery and oratorical skill in service of humanity. But to focus on the power of listening, to encourage these soon-to-be graduates to listen capaciously, constantly, compassionately, and critically is not to undermine the value of speaking, but to contextualize and ground it. What is there to say or do if we have not first listened? And what is worth hearing if it has not first been incubated in a soul attuned to the voices, and therefore the needs, of the world? Listening is how we enter, embrace, and continue the human story. Even here and now, listening speaks to our deepest human needs and desires — to understand and be understood. It is a way of being human and of humanizing each other and therefore has moral value; on it hinges our best principles — community, equality, justice, and peace. To listen is to call forth the world that ought to be, to embody in embryonic form our highest ideals and best selves. Listening, my friends, is both means and ends — the way we bring that world about, and, ultimately, what characterizes that world. A world in which status and privilege no longer determine, as they do now, who is heard. A world no longer marred by the refusal to listen to each other and the injustices that such refusal so often engenders. Listening should be our primary disposition toward the world. Listening forms us — how we listen and to whom we listen shape who we become.

It is this act of listening that is at the core of a Quaker education, performed at Friends in myriad ways, from advisory to Powell House, from classrooms to Meeting for Worship, from the Vineyard Theatre to this graduation ceremony. Friends Seminary forms students who listen, deeply, who value each other’s voices, each other’s stories, and, by extension, the multifaceted world that those voices and stories represent. Listening is what we do and who we are, and for good reason. If, as Quaker tenets teach us, there is that of God in each of us, is listening not a way to apprehend it? When we gather in Meeting for Worship, we do so in earnest expectation that in the midst of the silence, we will hear in our own soul or in another’s voice some kernel of truth that will awaken us. Shouldn’t we carry the principles of Meeting for Worship with us, in us, between us? Shouldn’t we make the very basis of our living and relating silence that fosters listening? Shouldn’t we approach the broader world in a humble posture of listening, awaiting sounds that may disturb us, challenge us, comfort us, even transform us?

In this community, it is not uncommon for us to contemplate, in some way or another, that transcendent force that connects us all, that draws us out of ourselves. That force, however named, is often imaged as Light, as something perceived by sight. Growing up Pentecostal, I’ve always associated light with sound. The most celebrated Holy Day in my tradition is the Day of Pentecost in which the Spirit of God is said to have descended like a “mighty rushing wind” on a group of devotees with “tongues of fire,” what in the Greek is translated as glossolalia, speaking in languages unknown by the speaker, but not necessarily unknown by the hearer. While I won’t parse the particulars of tongues speaking or religious experience more broadly, I think this example is instructive. Here, light is accompanied by sound; this light can be heard.

When we listen to one another, we can hear the Light in each other’s voices and stories. We accept the possibility that the other’s words may spark in us self-reflection, self-revelation, and, what is more, self-revision. Listening thus construed presumes an equality of persons, that each of us has something to give and something to receive. In listening, we acknowledge our shared humanity, what philosopher Judith Butler calls the fundamental condition of human life — vulnerability, reciprocity, interdependence. In listening, we acknowledge that we need each other and each other’s truths. We recognize that truth itself is partial, contingent, ever forming, that none of us has a monopoly on it, but each of us has a piece. Listening, in this framework, is both gift and responsibility.

Clearly listening is more than mere auditory perception. If we fall into the trap of narrow conceptualization, we may mistake the word for the thing itself, as if hearing is the same as understanding, sound the same as apprehension. On the one hand, such equivalences deny the reality of misunderstanding and misperception, of hearing, but not hearing. On the other hand, such equivalences deny the work it takes to understand others’ stories, as if such understanding is as automatic as neurotransmission. What we are after, I think, is the ability to perceive, engage, and incorporate others’ stories. For this reason and others, listening can be difficult. Neither easy nor casual, listening requires discipline, full-bodied commitment, preparation, and mindfulness — the quieting of one’s whole being to attend to the voice, story, and light of another.

But when we endeavor to listen, we are immediately faced with two dilemmas: to whom do we listen and at what cost? For so much of modern history, humans have answered the first question with “as few people as possible.” Here, my own story is implicated. I was raised in a conservative religious community that produced both the high school and church I attended. Socialized to believe in the myth of heteronormativity, I had been unable to listen to the voices and stories of LGBTQ people, unable even to reject the stifling confines of dominant masculinity. In my youth, LGBTQ persons were only legible to me as religious projects, visible enough only to become objects of fervent proselytization, as if they needed to be “saved” from themselves. Deep inside I intuited that something was wrong. I had fallen victim to restrictive listening, listening only to a narrow range of voices and excluding the possibility that anyone outside that range had something to teach me. In listening to so few sources, I became complicit in a system of violence that dehumanized LGBTQ persons. It wasn’t until college that I was able and perhaps prepared to expand my auditory horizons. I began listening intently to the voices and stories of LGBTQ persons I met and began hearing the suffering my religious community had inflicted on them. I unraveled at the seams, my religious scaffolding undone. I dumped my heterosexist theologies and embraced sexual diversity as reflective of cosmic beauty. In unlearning my restrictive listening, I became a more expansive listener, realizing that I had neglected so many voices and had therefore perpetuated unjust silencing. Without legitimate cause I had deemed some people unworthy of my time and recognition. Listening to their light became an act of solidarity, of allyship — subversive yet risky. To listen in this way is to become vulnerable, is to be open to the possibility that one’s worldview will be shattered, that one’s preconceived notions and received truths will be rendered illegitimate. Listening takes courage, often costing us our sense of certainty, but always giving us in return humanity. True listening always contains the seeds of self-transformation and therefore of remaking the world.

Expanding the voices to which I had been listening enabled me, in turn, to re-approach the religious community of my youth with a deeper skepticism. I listened to them with more critical and discerning ears. To listen in this way means that one cuts through propaganda, that one hears the story behind the story or, as Judith Butler puts it in Precarious Life, “hearing beyond what we are able to hear.” One not only registers information, but also evaluates it. One listens attentively and analytically, hearing not only what is said, but what remains unsaid or simply unheard. Such listening exposes what dominant ideologies must conceal and who they must render invisible to present false information as coherent and not suspect, as the only story in town. Deep listening produces deep questioning. In her TED talk, Chimamanda Adichie reminds us of “the dangers of a single story.” She urges us to broaden our horizons, not to restrict to one group those to whom we listen, those whose books we read and whose stories we amplify. Restrictive listening is perilous, at worst self-deceptive and at best myopic. It is more about comfort than compassion, and here again, my story appears in the rearview mirror.

Having recently arrived in a middle class bubble from adolescent days spent on welfare, I cringe every time Mom describes her continuing saga on the lower rungs of our capitalist economy. My heart breaks each time she narrates yet another humiliating encounter with her welfare caseworker, another dip in her wages, or her latest paralytic episode at the hands of debilitating fibromyalgia, unhelped by inconsistent and anemic health insurance. Heartbreak is the cost of listening to suffering. An immigrant from Jamaica who dropped out of high school at 16 to raise my then-newborn brother, Mom immigrated to the U.S. in her 20s in search of a better life, which thus far has been circumscribed by the politics of gender, race, education, and class. Acutely feeling the ceiling above her head, Mom’s highest hopes is to win the lotto. Mom’s stories unsettle me, imposing on me my past, destabilizing my sense of security, and making uneasy my class assimilation. Although I don’t always know what to do or say, listening to Mom heals us both; it liberates me from complacency and makes her feel heard, as she is so often not in a world unkind to poor, black women.

To listen to others, to the world, means that we will not always be certain of what we will hear or what it will beckon us to do. If we listen carefully, we are likely to hear suffering, exploitation, oppression, and struggle, even in unexpected places. Such listening may frighten us, may confront us with a sense of impotence, reminding us that we are not in control. We may find ourselves wanting to retreat to the safety of restrictive listening, to prisons of privilege, but if we habituate such retreat, we will lose the opportunity for self-transformation and meaningful impact. We may wonder if listening is enough. I would say, no, ultimately not, but it’s a start, indeed the only logical one, the very foundation of thoughtful social and political action.

Soon-to-be graduates, you have worked hard to become good listeners. You are well equipped to embrace the ethical labor to which expansive listening invites you. You are brave and empathic, courageous and compassionate, qualities that are indispensable to the work of listening to the world. I have the highest hopes that you will take these qualities with you beyond the walls of Friends, into your continued studies and service. May you always listen to the voices of those victimized by imperialism, jingoism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, religious bigotry, and environmental degradation. May you never retreat from what you hear, resisting the luxury of comfort. May you discover again and again the power of listening. And may your listening heal the world.

This commencement address was delivered in June 2015 at Friends Seminary and was published in News from Friends in the winter/spring 2016 edition. https://issuu.com/friendsseminary/docs/nff_winter2015_r3