To Listen is to Love
Rev. Steve Miller
This article was published in Fall 2019 issue of Windows, a publication of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. (Miller, S. (2019, Summer/Fall). To Listen Is To Love. Windows Summer|Fall 2019 from Austin Seminary, 134(3), 16.)
There is a banner hanging from a light pole on the Austin Seminary campus that reads, “The first duty of love is to listen.” That places love at the center of storytelling. It sums up the total gravity of the work I do and why storytelling holds the key to the survival of humanity.
I am the founder of the Truth & Reconciliation Oral History Project, a project in tandem with eleven HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), that documents racial trauma and allows loved ones of color to share an experience—in a safe space, to someone willing to listen in love—about a time they were racially discriminated against. The stories are archived at Baylor University and placed on the internet so they can be viewed all over the world. We are strategic in this because it allows loved ones without color to listen and view from a place and time of their own choosing, which helps break down the natural instinct to avoid bad news. We also use these stories to inform public policy and as examples to the church so it may be compelled to work toward racism’s resolution—because the church has been a most egregious and unwilling listener.
Our work attunes to the groans of people of color. A groan is that prolonged wordless sound brought on by and expressive of excessive pain and grief. To give voice, then, is to (1) have a right to express an opinion, (2) participate in a decision, and (3) reveal the intensity of the related pain. Through this process, our participants give words to their pain and participate in decisions about its articulation.
Many verses in the Bible mention the children of Israel groaning, then God hearing their cries and acknowledging their sorrows. God expects us to do a similar thing—to hear and listen and acknowledge the groaning and cries of another. Ontologically, when we hear a story of deep emotional and physical pain, that something is just not fair, everything within our being tells us to act, to go beyond listening. Our holiness compels us. But we have not always acted—because of fear or shame or simply because we genuinely just don’t know what to do. Acknowledgement, then, doesn’t simply mean someone listening intently and nodding, “I feel your pain.” Real listening admits to the problem’s existence, recognizes its truth or validity, expresses gratitude to the storyteller, and accepts an inherently legal obligation to help provide a solution.
For the storyteller of color, the story reveals the groaning too deep for words. This is often the case when people articulate the racial oppression they experience and how the majority have often discounted those stories in a number of hurtful and inhumane ways. But what about the listener of no color? Robert Perkinson in his book Texas Tough masterfully explains how we have become hardened, positing that the sheer violence and callousness it took to maintain slavery and Jim Crow for so long has so injured its practitioners and collaborators that violence and callousness have become inheritable traits, possibly even coded into the DNA. Thus, both telling and listening expose the deep wounds of each.
I, therefore, argue that harm has been done to storytellers and listeners alike. I cannot heal without being attuned to the wounds of another. To fail in that is not to love at all. From the work that I do, I have come to know that everyone needs healing, those who have experienced racism and those who have been injured by their own need to obtain and maintain oppressive structures. And I have discovered that storytelling can start the healing process for both the storyteller and the listener, and we must create a space for it.