IF there is such a thing as holy silence then her twin sister must be holy listening.
If the practice of silence is a gateway to the presence of God, so too, in my experience, is the power of the listening ear. But in a culture of so much noise and of so many different voices how should we listen? G K Chesterton reminded us that “there’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing” and it is a sad indictment on the way in which we hold our conversations that most often as we listen to others, our minds race off to recollections of similar stories and all we are doing is waiting for the other person to finish talking so that we can top their story with a better one. There is a place for that kind of conversation – one story leads to another, each person learns something about the other and acquaintance deepens. This, however, is not the kind of listening that I have in mind.