A Listening That is So Alive

Douglas Steere speaks of listening to one another with a depth that might change the speaker, and also the listener. He uses Kierkegaard’s image of vocal ministry in describing this listening which is ‘so alive that judgment is withheld…To listen correctly, we must radically shift the roles. Now it is not the deliverer of the message who is performing before me, but I myself am on the stage speaking the part. Now there is only a single listener in the audience. That listener is God.

— Marge Abbott in An Experiment in Faith: Quaker Women Transcending Difference (Pendle Hill #323).