Do We Really Listen?

     For the past five years I have volunteered at a “listening centre” where people can call (or come) to talk about whatever is on their mind. We receive calls from people suffering from domestic problems, mental health difficulties, problems of addiction, loneliness, joblessness, in a state of panic or depression. The list is long and the calls are many. We spend hundreds of hours every year just listening. Our training is along the lines developed by Carl Rogers’ “active listening.” Active listening means paying attention to the person who is speaking, welcoming their presence and their story, without judgement or advice, counsel or orientation, respecting that they will, as they speak, eventually find the path they need to follow. We thank them at the end for speaking without offering them advice or orientation. We say very little except to encourage them to speak. Often, at the end of a session, the person who called or visited will conclude by saying that they feel much better and will express gratitude for the attentive welcome they have received.
     One of the important features of active listening is that one has to draw close to someone in order to hear them. We have to “displace” ourselves and move into the place of the other. Unless there is some sort of proximity (not physical necessarily), there is no possibility of listening.
     For me, all this connects with my interest in liberation theology, which begins by listening to what people are living, to what is happening in society. Without a listening ear, somewhere, we become non-persons, alone and disconnected. Our joys and our sufferings are unheard. We serve only to move the machinery of the economy; apart from that, we might as well be non-existent.  Far too often, this is the experience of the 99% who spend their days either working themselves to death for a pittance that barely provides for their basic needs, or perhaps not even that, or who are literally set aside entirely and live off hand-outs, unknown and unheard by those who have more than enough.    
     One of the interesting dynamics of the “occupy” movement is to attempt to listen to everyone’s opinion and to learn from it. First of all, it is pretty much impossible to participate in the movement without being physically present at their activities. To participate, we have to “displace” and on many levels.
     In an assembly, even one person can block a decision if it does against his or her profound values. The person presenting a proposition will have to go back and re-work it. Dialogue is essential. When a proposition is complex, the assembly divides into smaller groups for discussion. There is usually a “talking stick” that is passed around to give every person a chance to have their say without having to fight to get into the conversation. People are listened to carefully; their intervention is appreciated and pondered. Nothing serious will go far if there is no consensus.
     Try sometime, during a day, to watch how often you are more energized about sharing your point of view or your feeling than about listening to that of others. Watch how often people’s point of view or feelings go unacknowledged in conversations or how people are cut off because someone has something they consider more important to say. We are not a society that goes out of its way to listen, especially to those who are not “significant” or who do not have ready access to contexts where they can share easily.
     It is not hard to make a leap to the larger scale. More than half of the world’s population lives in conditions that do not allow their voice and their needs to be heard by those who have cornered the means to live in excessive comfort. While the press, radio and television blare out their messages twenty-four hours of every day, the message they send is geared basically to encourage us to become nameless, mindless consumers of things we really do not need or even want. In between, there are some rather half-hearted attempts at informing. Mark Twain is quoted as saying that if you do not read the newspaper, you are uninformed; But, if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. The media are not there to listen or even to inform. They are there to orient – to consumption of commercial products. Today, it is their principal reason for existence.
     The internet and the social media were invented to provide a medium so that everyone could have a voice – that is, if you could afford a computer or an iPod.  The commercial interests have done everything possible to turn them into a space for encouraging more spending on commercial goods. To some extent they have succeeded, though it remains an extremely significant means of communication between people. As a result, billions of dollars are now being invested in surveillance of this dangerous phenomenon of people communicating with one another.
     All this, it seems to me, reveals the disjunction between the way our economic structures work and what ordinary people really want and hope for. We are faced with fundamental options about how to live our lives.   

Experience of God?

Yesterday evening, a small group of people, mostly young and some significantly older, gathered in a small café in my neighbourhood to discuss the events of the Occupy Montreal movement. We talked about what has been going on there—downtown—and about the reality of poverty and exclusion in our own neighbourhood. We asked ourselves what this meant for us, whether the movement had something also to say to us. We asked whether we also, in our own neighbourhood, should not find some way to “occupy.”  We don’t know what that means or how it could happen but, we asked the question and we decided to come back to it—soon.

Saturday, some of us will go down to the Occupy site, along with people from around the city. We will form a human chain around the site and spend a half-hour in silence meditating on peace, peace for the people at the site, peace for the movement, peace in all they struggle for.  Afterwards, we hope to be able to return regularly. We do it as an act of solidarity; we do it also to transform our own “positioning” in the world. We do it in order to say something to society but without words, in pointing to others and the “word” of their lives, of their engagement.

For me all this is connected to a question that has haunted me for decades: the question of God.

Europeans have said: How can we continue to believe in God after the Holocaust?  Latin Americans have asked how they can believe in God during the repression suffered during the 70s and 80s. Today we might well ask how we can believe in God while living under the totalitarian global capitalism of today? The fact is, many don’t. 

Living in Peru during the 1980s, I sometimes asked myself if God were not absent from the violence-torn country?  It was very difficult for me to find the presence of God in the midst of crushing poverty, death-dealing illness, severe repression, tens of thousands of assassinated and disappeared.  Yet there is something central about the notion of God’s presence in the suffering and in the death.

At one point, I have been told, Ivan Illych was giving a talk in a large auditorium, not long before his death. During the question period, someone asked him how he managed to avoid despair in situations of the major repression and violence, which, at that time, engulfed all of Latin America. There was a very long silence, then he called to a colleague, who was seated nearby, to come up beside him. He put his arm around him and replied “a friend.” 

That’s not a very theological answer but in practice it opens an important path to deal with the question of God. Today, it has become extremely difficult to talk about God. God is hidden and silent. Theology has become bankrupt largely. However, and I would underline this, the urgency, even the imperative of speaking to God is paramount. We have a desperate need to speak to a God we do not understand, and probably never will. We cry out our horror, our anguish, our longing, our desperation in the face of the world as we find it. It is the very depth of our being that cries out and, it seems, that is where, finally, God “appears,” silently, without words, without solution, right in the cry itself. We need to stay with the cry itself, our cry. Not a scream, out of control, but a cry that mobilizes all the energy within us.  

In liberation theology, the first step indicated was the call to make a choice, to take up a different position – physically. We had to move out of our everyday, normal environment in order to go to the place where the poor, the excluded, the repressed, the non-persons were and to plunk ourselves down in their reality. (Even the poor had to make the choice since they were often trying desperately to get out of that reality!)

It seems to me that something similar is still very necessary, at least for those of us who are privileged not to live in misery. We have to choose to immerse ourselves in the reality where God is absent and does not speak, where God is silent, where the easy discourse of theology and homiletics is muted. If we choose to move, it seems to me that what happens is that God also chooses to move, to accompany our move. God still remains the silent Other, but that Other becomes located in the non-persons who, because we are there, cast their gaze upon us, a very disturbing gaze, a profoundly questioning gaze. And it is in the profound depths of the silence that underlies their gaze that we are challenged. It is then, I believe, that we experience God, not seated on a lofty throne governing the universe, not ruling over the cosmos, not defeating the embattled armies of evil, but rather dwelling deep in the gaze of those others, those non-persons. The silence of God is an experience that calls to us nevertheless. For out of God’s silence, we are empowered to cry out and to mobilizes our forces. It is a cry that transforms since it is rooted in God’s silence. It seems to me the issue is not so much the experience of God finally as it is the question of God, or perhaps better said, our questioning of God! And that questioning is itself the experience.   

Official Occupy Wall Street Declaration

(Image by Cerezo Barredo)

     Yesterday I visited Occupy Montreal once again. During the general assembly they addressed three questions (while I was there at least): How to deal with people who repeatedly violate the accords taken. One option was to eject them. The assembly decided they would study more how to accompany them non-violently and asked professionals to offer their time to help. They also looked at the question of people too shy to speak in public at an assembly and decided to use a system of the "talking stick" in small groups to assure them a safe place to speak out. Finally they dealt with the question of solidarity with other occupations suffering repression. In each case they dealt with the issue sensitively, caringly, openly. Good government!
   Next Saturday there are plans for a half-hour inter-faith peace meditation chain surrounding the site. People from all traditions are being contacted.

     Gérard Laverdure sends me the folloiwng link for the official declaration the Occupy Wall Street. It speaks volumes about what this movement is all about. First, here is the link: Occupy Wall Street.

Secondly, here is the text found there:

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Moving into Winter mode

Forgive me if I am a bit fixated on the Occupy Montreal movement at this point. The fact is that this is a phenomenon that is forging a new history.

Just for your information: The village--400 people certainly makes a village--is facing nights that drop to the freezing point.  The first indication of a move to prepare for winter--in Montreal that can mean temperatures dropping to twenty below zero (Celcius)--was the appearance of a yurt. Now the call is for trucks to bring in the long wooden poles that will be used to put up teepees.. The arrival on the site  of Mohawks from a local reserve in order to set up their traditional living structures marks a new chapter in the history of the movement here. To me it is extremely significant and symbolic. Secondly, since the refusal of the city to allow an electrical connection, There is a good chance that those who want to stay for the winter will have all that is needed: warm, safe, housing and a steady supply of good food.
Now there is a daily workshop on economics for those interested. Those at the village are deepening their understanding of the issues of inequity in democracy and in economy. This is a movement that drives at the achilles heel of the Empire.
There are also groups springing up here and there around the city. They meet to discuss the issues raised by the 99% movement. As one commentator said: If this movement can leap the boundaries of class, race and generation, it will change things radically. The people at the village today are well along the way.