The three steps of a listening heart:
- Childlike openness;
- Youthful courage;
- Mature communion.
–David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart, p. 37
The three steps of a listening heart:
–David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart, p. 37
Church of the Saviour lives out its call to the inward/outward journey together in different communities. Each has a distinct charism and style, but all share the tradition of deep commitment, listening for God’s leading, and servant ministry in the nation’s capital.
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As a child I was “taught” to have feelings that were not “mine” to like people, to be uncritically friendly to them and to smile. Social pressure now has enforced those early lessons. I smile at my customers at Chico’s (harder with the mask on but I do) and my pleasing personalty helps me in my job as a salesperson. My friendliness, cheerfulness . . everything a smile is supposed to express is an automatic response, like a light that I can turn on and turn off. Most of the time I am unaware that I am making this friendly gesture and so I lost the ability to discriminate between the pseudo feeling and being myself – spontaneously friendly, genuinely curious about the other. It is become an ideal in our culture to think and to live without emotions, To be “emotional” is be risk being thought unbalanced. Since we can’t completely kill emotions they have to exist outside the intellectual side of the personality – the result is a cheap and insincere sentimentally with which movies and popular songs feed multitudes of emotion-starved customers.
Wow, thanks for this reflection Mary. The ending really shook me, that as a culture we have a hard time sharing genuine emotions and we lean into mass produced sentimentalism to feel between the lines. I hope you’re able to heal and share yourself more freely with time.