Tell Me Everything

A point frequently made about our common inability to listen well is that rather than listening, what we’re often doing is waiting for our turn to talk. This is true, and anyone with even a hint of self-awareness can attest to this being the case an unfortunate amount of the time. It’s definitely a problem, but at least sometimes in this mode of suboptimal listening, the bad listener has good intent. They are trying to find something in what the speaker is saying that they can respond to in a loving way. This isn’t always the case, but sometimes it is, and I think at those times we are at least getting closer to a slightly better model of listening than others. There’s still a certain grace to it, even if it’s imperfect.

Lately, the model of listening I’m most concerned about is listening to entrap, especially in a conversation with someone we disagree with, or whom we’ve decided we don’t like. We get it in our minds that if we can catch a person being dishonest or disingenuous or dumbfounded, we’ll feel better about ourselves and our positions. But why do we think that feeling will last more than thirty seconds? What benefit do we actually think we’ll find on the other side of a “gotcha!”?

I recently relistened to a radio interview I first heard five or six years ago (though the interview is probably about twenty-five years older than that) in which the interviewer arranged an interview with an older person in his field, of more prominence than himself, with whom he disagreed, under somewhat foggy pretenses. He then proceeded to barrage the man with a number of unexpected and pointed questions, essentially asking him to defend out-of-context sentences from books and talks he’d written or given a number of years earlier.

When I first listened to it, I delighted in its sharpness because I was more ideologically aligned with the interviewer. I wanted this other person (one with more “power”) to have to account for the things he’d said. Relistening to it over the weekend, I found my sympathies had shifted. Though I still probably agree with the interviewer on a few more things than the interviewee, I couldn’t help but feel bad for him and grieve the apparent (though potentially subconscious) bloodlust of the interviewer. It was more of an ambush than a conversation, more of a cross-examination than back-and-forth dialogue.

All the self-satisfied glee I felt upon my first listen was replaced with a heavy heart after the second. I had previously heard the conversation from the same antagonistic vantage point of the interviewer. We had both made up our minds before ever picking up the phone. Any interview or conversation that isn’t zeroed in on listening isn’t a legitimate form of either. We might try to soothe our pricked consciences by telling ourselves that we only do this in cases where we feel we have to, only when we talk politics or religion, or with certain people. But like many other disordered ways of going about life, it spreads, and we find ourselves doing the same with our colleagues, our close friends, our spouses, and our children about anything and everything.

Near the end of a recent interview with Ezra Klein, author and Mbird favorite Zadie Smith, after admitting she often finds it “unbelievably difficult … to know another human being,” was asked if she thought she’d gotten better at knowing people deeply over time. She answered:

I talk too much. I’ve always talked too much. And to know people, you need to listen. I think I have the gift of a comic novelist, which is a problematic gift where you see someone in the street and you can guess a lot about them almost immediately. The paper they read, the ideas they hold. And you can write novels that way. And you can also go through your life that way, making those smartass guesses and being right in some broad way. But it’s just not the whole story, and it’s not sufficient.

… there’s a line in “The Fraud,” which is basically … — “tell me everything.” And that, to me, is the key — being able to sit in front of another human being and just listening. Not projecting, not trying to make them agree with you, not trying to make them say what you want them to say. Just listening to them. And that is so hard.

Smith is telling the truth. It is hard to sit with and really listen to another person without an agenda. But it is worth it. Think about the last time someone unexpectedly took the time to listen to you. How miraculous did that feel? And think about the last time you were on the other side. Didn’t that feel like the absolute best use of your time?

When we’re finally listened to, our automatic response is one of relief, gratitude, and love — both to the listener and ultimately (hopefully) to God, who has put the listener in our life at our time of need, and has somehow gotten that person to act (at least in that moment) as the ears of Christ, which are always open and turned to us, Jesus endlessly enjoining, “Tell me everything.”