“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in reflecting on how language confers reality upon existence. “And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” But if an experience is spoken yet unheard, half of its reality is severed and a certain essential harmony is breached. The great physicist David Bohm knew this: “If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature,” he wrote in his excellent and timely treatise on the paradox of communication, “we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”
So when I (or you) truly listen to someone, we enable that person's experience to exist in a way it didn't before. And if we can create an atmosphere of freedom in the spiritual direction room (or across the cafe table!) then there is room for a creative exploration of experience that does not have to be defended.
Listening in this way is truly a sacred vocation.
If you would like to read the rest of the discussion including Erich Fromm's six rules of listening, click here.
