Chapter 5/1

The DIALECTIC at Home

Home is where life gets itself together (or pulls itself apart). Home is our first school. Rebel against it as we may, the DIALECTIC of home life cannot be shaken. It shapes our thought, habit and action more than we are aware of. We are much more like our parents than we suppose. On the other hand, to the degree that we rebel against parental example, it is that example that is calling the shots, telling us what we do not want to become. As with most of us, I was a parent, perhaps even a grandparent, before my DIALECTICal relationship with home came into focus.


Are You Listening?

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 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 can we accomplish in our conversations 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 your 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. Except when 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–as most sermons--were monologues. He would not have appreciated it if someone had spoken out 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 many times about Daddy. It is too late now for me to ask him, 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 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 an expected part in 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 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.