Faithfully Yours: Moving from listening to hearing

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Published on Saturday, September 24, 2016

By Neil Strohschein
The Banner

In last week’s column, I suggested that one of the ways to resolve lasting disputes is for those in authority to sit down with those who have grievances and listen to their stories.

There are many who will argue that this has been happening for years and nothing positive has come of it. Unfortunately, they are quite right; and for reasons that are easy to explain.

The church I served in Edmonton celebrated its 100th anniversary while I was there. One of the things we did during that year was to hold a series of listening sessions in which we invited the congregation to gather in small groups and share their ideas of the direction the church should take as it began its second century.

Our facilitator was a church member who had lead similar sessions for corporations and charitable societies across Canada. In addition to her expertise in the field, she was very familiar with the unique personalities to be found in the church. So our first session included roughly 30 minutes of instruction on how to move from listening to hearing.

“One of the first things we all have to do,” she said, “is leave our personal biases, prejudices and preferences outside this room. We have to listen to what others will say with an open mind. Our goal is not to get others to see things our way. Our goal is to hear and understand what others are saying and to accurately interpret their opinions before offering our own.”

The concept described above is not new. Two thousand years ago, St. James in his letter to the church wrote these words: “get rid of all filth and evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.” (James 1:21)

Those words highlight a problem that has plagued society since creation. We are not, by nature, open-minded people. Our natural tendency is to allow everything we see and hear to be filtered by the economic, social, political and religious views which we picked up in our early years, acquired on our journey through public and secondary education or developed in the years since thanks to what we have seen, heard or read. The more deeply entrenched our views are, the harder it is for us to be open to ideas presented by those whose views differ from our own.

Case in point—the whole debate over Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada. The debate has never been over whether or not the issue is a social or criminal problem. On that there is general agreement—every case of kidnapping, murder and violence is a criminal act. The question which needs to be answered is: “Why are so many of these crimes against aboriginal women never solved; and why don’t people seem to be all that concerned about it? Is there a problem in society that is creating, facilitating and maybe even perpetuating this injustice?”

I will be the first to admit that my understanding of this issue is far from what it should be. I am glad to see that we finally have appointed a panel that will conduct an inquiry into this issue.

My hope and prayer is that all concerned will display an open mind and a determination to get to the truth, whatever it may be. And I also hope that all Canadians will display the same open mind when they read the report and the recommendations that the commissioners will present. Our First Nations people and indeed all of us deserve nothing less.