We’re just coming to the end of an Adult Education Programme, called Evensong, which has really been a form of small group ministry -- we’ve met weekly to share our thoughts with one another in a supportive and worshipful environment. The thing that’s been different, and even difficult, about this programme is that for the main, structured part of each session there has been no discussion. Can you imagine that? A Unitarian Universalist programme which doesn’t include questions, dialogue, debate or even response to one another? A course which asks us to spend much more time than usual in simply being quiet?

Well, that last is not quite true; we do respond to one another, but the response takes the form of attentive listening, not of questioning or commenting. This has been quite hard for some of us to learn -- and as someone who’s used to being a facilitator I count myself among those for whom it’s been hardest. Our tendency when we listen to what another person has to say tends to be, usually with the best intentions in the world, to say something in return.

Sometimes it’s a question, to express our interest in what they’re telling us; sometimes it’s a soothing or reassuring comment, such as "It’s all right; you’re a good person." Sometimes it’s an anecdote from our own lives, which we hope will reassure the speaker that they’re not alone in their situation, or will enlighten and educate them.

Nearly always, it’s our own idea, from our own convictions, our own experience. Very rarely do we respond to what’s been told us with simple silence, and indeed we may be afraid, with some reason, that we’ll be perceived as unfeeling if we do -- rather as if we were given something and didn’t give back. And yet, the best gift we can give back may be our attentive acceptance of what the other person is saying, without imposing anything of our own; the best gift may be listening to understand. Those of us in Evensong are finding that it’s wonderful to be heard, and that although it’s hard work it’s also wonderful to find ourselves finally hearing what a fellow human being says. I imagine, although I haven’t reached this stage with any language other than English, that it’s rather like finally being able to follow what’s being said in a tongue that’s not your own.

If listening to someone in our own culture, even within our own faith context, is difficult, how much more difficult it is to listen to someone from a totally different culture, or to understand the worldview of people "a world away"! And yet, the best hope for peace in the world is probably this very challenging task of listening to others -- individuals or nations or cultures -- in order to understand them, keeping our own experience and convictions and judgements at least for the time being in the background.

This doesn’t mean that we discard our values, or become someone other than who we are; it means that we assume the other person’s position makes some sense to them and that if we listen carefully enough it can make some sense to us. It’s wonderful if the other party will also accord us the same gift, but even if not, it’s far, far better that one of us understands than that neither of us does! Our listening can, in itself, and in the words of Manifesto 2000, "Contribute to the development of ..... community ..... in order to create together new forms of solidarity."

I wonder how many of you read a story in a recent issue of the Globe & Mail headed "Gruesome tales show Nigeria’s desperate state." The article recounted one of the "urban legends" circulating in Lagos these days, about the driver of a motorcycle taxi who disappears suddenly and completely from his motorcycle one day, only to turn up somewhere else as a zombie, a kind of physical ghost, from whose mouth spurts huge quantities of money, from which he can never benefit. Another of the many stories involving witchcraft and ritual killings is about a man who was caught and castrated while he was still alive, then decapitated and the head and genitals used in a ritual meant to produce wealth.

The natural response from most of us in a culture of science and reason is to pass our own judgement both on the likelihood of these tales being factually true or false and on the kind of society that engenders such bizarreness. But as anthropologists point out, the widespread currency of such stories points to some deeper currents in Nigerian society. One of those deep currents is the desperation of Nigerian society. As Madeleine Drohan, the author of the Globe & Mail article, says:

Thirty years of military misrule and corruption have ravaged the country and left most people living in dire poverty. The democratic government elected in May of 1999 has not had time to repair the decaying infrastructure, which puts clean water, electricity and working telephones beyond the reach of most Nigerians. Yet in the midst of this chaos and decay there are people who are making money. As the ordinary person struggles to understand why some people become very rich without any obvious effort, the answer that appears is witchcraft. Nigerian newspapers serve up a feast of stories involving witchcraft and ritual killings [especially those which involve the use of body parts to make someone wealthy].

This idea that body parts could be related to good fortune may seem strange to us, but it’s deeply entrenched in many parts of the world. There’s a belief in the efficacy of human flesh to make things happen. It used to be that the rituals were meant to produce rain, which would result in communal wealth. These days, the aim is more likely to be for individual enrichment. Body parts are believed to preserve their maximum power if severed while the victim is alive. The genitals are commonly chosen because of their creative force.

When I decided to use this article about Nigeria as part of my talk today, I was thinking of it as an illustration of how important, and yet how difficult, it is to try to understand the thinking of other cultures. I particularly liked the part of the article which related the political and social situation in Nigeria to the gruesome urban legends and the widespread belief in them.

The explanation was satisfying, in rather the same way that it’s reassuring to see how gambling in our society is related to a perceived loss of control over our personal well-being. Then, as I was writing, I began to see how my approach was embodying the very things I’ve already suggested stand in the way of listening to understand. I was assuming that I knew the truth -- that someone else’s body parts can never bring me good fortune (and this despite the reality of organ transplants bringing great good fortune to large numbers of people in our own society!) and I was concerned to explain the beliefs rather than listen to them.

Moreover, what little listening I was doing was at a very far remove -- I wasn’t sitting down with a Nigerian and hearing her tell me what had happened to her or someone she loved; I was reading an article written by a journalist who’d got her information from anthropologists studying people who are for the most part foreign to them, and I was contributing to yet another step away from the source by passing all this on to you. This is not to say that the article wasn’t interesting or valuable, just that my relationship to it was detached rather than involved; it was not really listening to understand. To understand in this sense is not about being able to explain -- it’s far more difficult; it’s about attentiveness, empathy, relationship.

How might one listen to understand another culture? I suggest that the best first step we can take is to practice listening to understand one another. Some of us travel a good bit, but many of us maybe don’t get many opportunities to speak directly with someone from Nigeria or Israel or even Quebec. What we do all get are hundreds of chances to listen to the diverse people around us -- and if we don’t practice understanding with our neighbours and families and friends, we’re almost certainly not going to know how to listen to someone from a culture very different from our own.

One of the things we’ve discovered in the Evensong programme is that silence is a great help to listening. "What?" you may ask. "What are you listening to if there’s silence?" And the answer is that we’re listening to what we’ve just heard, and to our own heart’s response. Listening to understand isn’t something that can be done in a hurry; it takes time, it even takes discipline and a good deal of practice. We’re not used to listening! Perhaps I can clarify what I mean.

If someone has just told us that he feels inadequate for some particular task, or inadequate for life in general, our tendency, I think, is immediately to make a judgment -- that what’s been expressed is bad or good, that we agree or disagree with it, that the speaker really is inadequate or is misguided in thinking so, that they just need our encouragement to feel more adequate, or that we don’t know what they’re talking about. As if our mental judgment weren’t enough, we often hurry to say it aloud as well, especially if our judgment is socially acceptable and will make the other person feel good.

So we express surprise that the person feels that way, reassure them that they really are adequate, tell them that they’re mistaken, encourage them to focus on their adequacies, or ask some questions to try to find out what they mean. What we rarely do (or at least, what I rarely do) is let the statement sink in, receiving it quietly and honouring it with our silent attentiveness. For some of us, this is more difficult because silence itself feels uncomfortable. It has to do with our culture, I think -- with the fact that sound surrounds us most of the time and silence seems a deviation from the norm -- but it’s not unchangeable. We can learn to be quietly attentive; we can learn listening to understand.

What might we understand if we listened more attentively and didn’t rush to judgment? In the simple example I just used, we might begin to understand that the person who told us he feels inadequate really does, and that it isn’t something likely to change overnight, let alone over the few moments of our conversation. We might take time to ask ourselves (rather than asking him) what it would be like to feel that way, and perhaps remember some of the times when we’ve had similar feelings. (Remembering those times, silently, is likely to be more help to our understanding than telling him about them, although we often assume that he’s just dying to know all about us!)

We might ask ourselves what "inadequate" might mean for this person -- could it mean that he’s afraid of being rejected by us, or by his boss or his family, or that he’s really discouraged that he doesn’t measure up to his own standards, or that he’s testing to see what our standards are, or is indeed seeking reassurance, which may or may not be the most helpful thing to give him! With all these complicated possibilities, surely it’s better to allow a little time to take in what he’s said than to leap in with a response. And, by the way, I try (not always successfully) to respond with attentive silence to the joys and sorrows spoken in our services, because it seems to me that honours them most.

Knowing our own culture plays a big part in listening to understand our friends and neighbours. For example, money and status are highly rated, to say the least, in North America, and if you’re not doing too well financially you’re expected to keep rather quiet about it, as if you had some embarrassing social disease. That means that if someone does talk about money problems, especially if it’s someone you’re not specially intimate with, it probably means there are some quite serious concerns, which need to be listened to with serious attention.

This might not be at all the same in a culture with the custom of extreme modesty in talking about such things. Keith McLeod gave me some fascinating articles about differing cultural ways of speaking, and one of them pointed out that some of the things we might hear with concern in Canada might simply be polite in other places. In parts of Asia, for example, it’s quite customary for a person to make disparaging remarks, even to strangers, about their spouse and children, just as they might downplay the virtues of their home or the meal they’re offering you. Unless we know the culture, we can’t hope to understand what we hear.

One common element throughout Asia is maintaining surface harmony. In most places, it’s a faux pas to say something as simple as "no", which embarrasses people. If you’re there, you have to learn how to signal "no" without saying it. It might be as simple as saying "That would be difficult" -- which would be interpreted as "no." Now, in Canada, if your friend tells you something would be difficult, you’re probably going to expect some more explanation from her.

Even if you take your time and wait attentively, without questioning her, you’ll probably still be waiting for her to tell you why it would be difficult! Magnify these differences a thousand-fold and it may begin to dawn on us why listening to understand other cultures, other nations, is a challenging task, to say the least. Take the evening an Iranian family in Canada made a fire in their driveway and took turns jumping over it. For days after that, the family was shunned by neighbours, who thought they were devil-worshippers. In fact, the family was welcoming the Iranian New Year. (The ritual has roots in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism.)

Or consider that in China, older people are respected to the point that criticizing them is unthinkable. If an elder has made a mistake, even a serious one, they will not apologize. Perhaps the furthest they might go is to say, "I don’t know how that could have happened," which might not be heard as sufficiently apologetic by a Westerner. In Mexico, where I’ll be next week, I’m told that courtesy requires me to ask after a new acquaintance’s spouse and family, but if I were going to Saudi Arabia, questions like that would be considered an invasion of privacy.

Listening to understand, as you can tell by now, involves more than just hearing the words that are spoken. It’s something of a circular process which first requires some basic understanding in order to listen! It’s a matter of what we see and what we sense in other ways, as well as what our ears tell us. Whether we’re listening to a close friend or family member, or to the religious or political ideas of a nation far removed from our own, if we want to truly understand, we’ll need what the Manifesto 2000 referred to as "listening without engaging in fanaticism, defamation, and the rejection of others."

We’ll need, in other words, respect for the worth and dignity of the person we’re listening to and a readiness to honour them with our full attention. It’s not easy. In a book Nancy Oldford lent me the other day, on 100 ways to enhance self-esteem, there’s an exercise on listening which has this note at the end:
"This activity may be one of the most difficult in this book, but it is worth the effort because of its powerful impact on relationships."

I’ve mentioned silence as an underused and underappreciated aid to listening to understand, and I’d like us to use it for a few moments now, as I conclude my reflections. I’m going to read a passage adapted from a talk which one of our members gave in another UU congregation recently, and when I stop reading we’ll be silent for two minutes, during which I hope we can listen to the words we’ve just heard as we recollect them, and listen to the responses of our own hearts and minds. I believe we shall have gained a little more understanding, which will help the cause of peaceful co-existence to which the United Nations is dedicated.

In the process [of listening], we have to face several challenges ..... spotting patterns in ourselves and seeing how these can get in the way of being present with someone. ...... We all begin with deeply embedded inherited assumptions from our culture. ....... Then there is the burden of our personal history. ....... For example, pick an easily identified community you aspire to accept. Now remember the first person from this community you met and got to know. The next time you met someone from this particular community, how much did your first relationship colour your second? [Listening to understand] is seeing someone for who they are, and not whom they remind us of.

[We also have a] tendency to separate ourselves from those we feel uncomfortable with. ...... [Listening to understand] involves peeling back the comfortable layers of abstract theorizing and looking closely at the inner discomfort, confusion and inherited prejudice we all carry. It involves confronting the illusion that "the other" is foreign and alien to us. "The Other" can be a reflection of a facet of ourselves we aren't comfortable with. ....... I officiated at a Halloween wedding last year. ..... As requested, I came in full costume. I arrived to an auditorium full of fully costumed persons and ..... I was spotted immediately. I saw the same looks and heard the same whispers I heard when everyone was in formal garb. As before, what I wore or didn't wear made no difference. .........I was still the visiting Martian.
.....................two minutes silence ..................

The author of those words ended his talk with the observation that the kind of listening we’ve just engaged in

....... can involve personal challenge and potentially painful self realization. It is also one of the most precious things you can give. There are persons out there in desperate need of it. They in turn have much to teach you about themselves - and you.

We can listen, we can come to understand. On this United Nations Sunday, and always, in our own circle of friends and in our world of diverse nations and cultures, so may it be.