Thinking as Dialogue

Deep into his sermon, he would lean over the pulpit and ask, "Dear hearts tonight, are you listening?" That was a long time ago but I can still hear him addressing his congregation with that old-timey phrase of endearment.

Daddy used the rhetoric of a now bygone era, but everyone in the church knew that they were dear to him, and, we knew he wanted us to pay attention because his sermons were punctuated, repeatedly, with, "Are you listening?" After all, what is the point of preaching if nobody is listening?

And what about us? What are we trying to accomplish in our conversations with each other if no one is listening? If we are going to live with each other, we will have to listen, hear, and acknowledge each other. If I don't listen, or at least look, I may not realize it when you are hurting, and that you are about to go under, unless someone comes to the rescue. If I don't listen, I may not realize how much you care, or even that you care, about me or about whatever might be the issue at hand at any given time.

If we don't listen to each other, we each merely speak our own respective and reciprocal monologues, and--unless presented by professional entertainers--most monologues quickly become boring. We need dialogue. We need to hear each other.

Daddy's, "Dear hearts tonight," (he didn't often use this term with the Sunday morning crowd) "are you listening," was not a strictly rhetorical question; he actually wanted to see it in their eyes, their posture, and even in the expression of their faces. He wanted to know that they were engaged with him.

Yet the sermons were almost exclusively monologues. He would not have appreciated it if someone had spoken up with an answer; his question was more a device to maintain or recover attention.

On the other hand, I might be wrong, as I have been so often about Daddy. It is too late now for me to ask, but although he didn't expect spoken response he might have actually welcomed it; he might have welcomed the opportunity to engage in true dialogue about the Christian gospel.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that he very well might have welcomed it. But neither he nor the congregation of six or eight hundred people expected it because that is not part of the accepted pattern of public worship. I wonder what might happen if immediate spoken feedback became a part of the sermon?

On the other hand, if the preacher is to expect his congregation to listen, he had better have been listening to them during the week. If he doesn't know their problems, hopes, fears, dreams, doubts, excitements, moral dilemmas, existential crises, laughter and tears, his sermon may miss the people completely. They may continue to come, thinking it is somehow important that they be in church on Sunday morning, but it will not be long before they stop listening with any sense of expectation and hope. Preaching will be boring--an accurate description of altogether too many Sunday mornings.

Again, what about all the rest of us and all the talking we do? If you don't listen to me, why should I listen to you.

I think Daddy listened to his church members--actually to everyone in the community--better than he did to his three sons. Many could say the same thing about their father. Fathers often engage in a great deal more genuine dialogue on the job than they do at home.

One reason is that, like my father, there are many dads who spend precious little of their time at home, and when they do get home, they are already talked out and tired. Maybe that is the reason. I don’t know. I do know that Daddy rarely seemed to hear me, and that there was so much I wanted to say.

Before I really got started trying to make some sort of connection, Daddy would stop me with clear dogmatic instructions guaranteed to get my life moving on the right track--before he even knew what I was attempting to say. He was good at discouraging dialogue.

For the first thirty years of my life I felt that he never really heard much of anything I was trying to say. Occasionally across the next thirty-three years, we had times when we heard each other and responded to what we heard. Sometimes we argued late into the night, long after others had gone to bed, closing their doors to shut out some of our fierce and loud efforts to understand and to reconcile.

And there were times--rare times--of confession. Daddy actually listened as I confessed fears, weaknesses, disappointment, and anger. To my amazement, on two or three occasions, Daddy confessed the same to me. On those occasions I was thrilled that he treated me as a real person, as a confidant, as someone he loved and trusted.

Daddy died in 1997. The night before the funeral--at which I was to be the speaker--I stood beside his open casket looking into that face I had known for sixty-three years and cried in lonely anger for the years of opportunity lost to both of us.

So few were the hours we ever listened to each other. Precious as those times were, they never began to fill the void that I felt in my relationship to a man who, for nearly forty years, was one of the most loved and respected humans ever known in Blackwell, Oklahoma and Gainesville, Texas.

He truly was a great man. and in my confusion and anger, I could speak appreciatively of him to the hundreds who came to the funeral. But I miss him, and not just now; I always did.

Was he afraid? Was he afraid of what he might hear if he listened? Was he afraid that if he revealed much of himself I would lose some degree of respect? There were a few times late at night, after I was an adult, when he hinted at a self-image that he dared not acknowledge. He told me, once, that he wore the stern face and used the no-nonsense voice to ward off any attempt to penetrate his defenses.

Isn’t that the all-too-common human story, at least in the United States? We are afraid to let conversation move much deeper than a recitation of socially accepted speech patterns.

There is a certain reciprocity, but not much, in our exchanges about how we feel, what we think of the weather, the economy, our favorite TV show, or our ball favorite team. I suspect that sports and gossip bring us the closest to anything that resembles true dialogue. Beyond that we guard ourselves, and continue to inhabit a silent loneliness.