Chapter 28
Isaiah 55:3 – “Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live.”
We live in a time where people talk at one another more than they speak with one another. We interrupt before we understand, prepare replies before the other has finished, confuse volume with truth, and mistake winning an argument for winning a heart. In the noise, something essential slips away: the art of listening.
Roland Barthes noted, “Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act.” Hearing is mechanical; listening engages perception, attention, and interpretation. And in that space between hearing and listening, words take root. They stir the heart before the mind arranges them into thoughts. Our emotions often respond before our reasoning does.
Thus, listening is not merely cognitive but embodied, emotional, and relational. It asks us to notice our inner stirrings—the tightness of the chest, the warmth of recognition, the flare of defensiveness—before they quietly dictate how we judge another’s words.
True listening is not performance, politeness, or strategy. It is dignity. It tells another: You are worth my full attention, without conditions. And it admits: Your words touch something in me before I can even explain it.
The loss of listening costs us dearly. It erodes trust, flattens complexity, fuels suspicion, and hardens division. Yet beneath the shouting lies a universal hunger: to be heard without interruption, judgment, or reduction. Hemingway once observed, “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
If we cannot listen, relationships fray, communities fracture, and democracies weaken. We cannot solve what we refuse to understand, and we cannot understand what we have never truly heard.
Recovering listening requires slowing down in a culture of immediacy, resisting the impulse to correct before we comprehend, and letting another’s words land within us. It also requires awareness of our own interior life, acknowledging what rises in us before thought takes shape.
As Sue Patton Thoele writes, “Deep listening is miraculous for both the listener and the speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judgmental listening, our spirits expand.” Listening opens more than ears—it opens the self to another’s presence.
Listening is not passive. It is a creative act that transforms conflict into conversation, suspicion into curiosity, strangers into neighbors. It makes mutual change possible.
If we long for a future worth inhabiting, we must do more than hear each other’s words. We must let them reach us—body, heart, and spirit—before rushing to reply. For sometimes the first act of justice is to listen until the truth emerges. Without such listening, there can be no healing.
Paraphrased from the original Article of
Mark J. Chironna, PhD, The Disappearing Art of Listening
I wish you a good start to this new week.
Philemon