Listen to Understand

In recent years, our late Pope Francis (d. 2025) led the Church of through a synodal (sin-ode-all) process so that we might learn how to be a different kind of Church. This new way of being Church invites us to listen to each other and to the world as we seek to understand the movement of the Holy Spirit.

We were invited and challenged to “listen with the ears of our hearts”. (January 2022) This kind of listening with the heart invites us to not just think about things, but to feel with others. The goal of this listening is to understand – understand the point of view of another person, understand the experience of someone different than us, and begin to understand a world view different than our own.

We experience greater communion with others only when we truly listen to them, without judgement, and with the desire to understand. The Church, the sacrament of Jesus in the world, can only be His body when it listens with the ears of the heart so to understand, to allow a flood of compassion rather than a hailstorm of judgement. This is the true path to peace: in our hearts, in our families, in our Church, in the world.

True listening leaves room for the Holy Spirit to speak into the messiness of our lives and our relationships. True listening includes prayerful silence because in the art of listening, silence is a welcome and eloquent friend.

Only through this authentic listening is understanding possible. Quick judgements always blind us. They keep us from the truth. They are antithetical to genuine understanding that always looks at the other with soft eyes, and with a softer heart.

Mastering the art of listening invites us to a more authentic engagement because we learn to listen to others, but also to the culture that we are immersed in, and to the earth that is our common home, and especially to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the Church and in the world.

Listening to understand is the path to inspired engagement.