I just needed someone to listen to me.1
Someone here has said that at sometime in their lives. Or thought it, or felt it. I certainly have. In our moments of greatest frustration, sometimes this is the thing we really need.
But listening doesn’t always come easy. Our world is loud. Full of distractions from what matters most. Full of demands on our attention, from every which way. It has become too easy to tune out almost everything for noise. To keep our defenses up, trying to let only the most important things catch our attention. To keep out the parts of the world that feel ambiguous, uncertain.
When I hear Rev. Connie Simon’s words, I think of my own experiences as a listener.
I had just started driving to class when I caught it – the tail end of an interview on the radio. All I heard was the interviewee’s last reflection:
“You know, I never knew, when I went to a church, would I be welcomed? I would have to prepare myself, and so I’d sit in the parking lot, and I’d say, God, give me an undefended heart.”2
Later, I had to know what else she had to say. In just those few words, I heard her speak to so much of what I have felt throughout my life. As it happened, this interview was with Karen Oliveto, a woman who would become the first openly gay bishop of the United Methodist Church. A trailblazer, someone who had to be practiced in finding little bits of fortitude. I heard so little of what she had to say. And yet they said so much.
I had asked myself that very question so many times in my life. “Would I be welcomed?” But on that summer morning, in that season of my life, it was taking on new relevance. I was spending a summer doing an internship as a chaplain. I tried my best, and usually succeeded, in staying grounded. But the questions were always with me.
Would the patients I visited welcome me to care for them? I may have been the first transgender person they had ever met. Would the run me out of their rooms? Would they shut down, or ask to see someone else? Could I really be the one they wanted to listen to them?
At the root of my anxiety was a fear of uncertainty. How would patients receive me? I couldn’t know that. More crucially, could I hold the immense pain they might share? Could we be present with one another? But even when I knocked on the door while my confidence faltered, I always had a responsibility to walk through anyway.
Like Bishop Oliveto, I knew that I couldn’t answer that small, crucial question by sitting in a hallway or a parking lot. I had to find out by walking through the door. Only then could I know what fears or anxieties awaited us. Never mind what joy, or wonder, or curiosity.
What I longed for was something to give me the courage to listen. So I took up a new practice that summer. Each morning before I began my day, I began praying. I challenged myself to keep an undefended heart. One that would let me hold whatever people needed to give me. Because the work of caring for one another needs us to keep our hearts open.
If only it was that easy to remember! But our connections are so often invisible. So often out of sight and out of mind. But in times and places, the morning sun catches a spider-thread. We can see more clearly what was always there, shimmering before us. The invisible strings of our lives light up. Often when we’re close together.
In a family, in a high-rise, in a small town – or small congregation – the threads connecting us become physical and visible. We know pretty quickly what condition our relationships are in.
Your brother took the trash out when you had been meaning to, but forgot. Or your neighbor left their trash in the hallway, stinking.
You found out that your new friend is the one who always cleans the flowerbeds. They make the churchyard so beautiful! But that same morning, the person who makes coffee every week is sick, and everyone else is scrambling to get ready.
The old-timer and the new member can’t agree on a social-justice project. Their committee forgets how to answer their calling. They’ve lost track of the mission of the congregation and our faith.
We can sing “what touches one affects us all,”3 and know it is true when we are so close together. The strings are always there, visible. Even when we disagree. Even when we are mad at each other.4 Our interconnections, our crossing threads, still pull at us. They call us back into loving relationship.
These interconnections weave a net to catch us. A lifeline to hold us steady. They are as close as our loved ones, and as warmly distant as the neighbor who always greets you with a smile. But life is quick to remind us that it isn’t always so easy. Our crossing threads tangle us up. They can be uncomfortable, frustrating, even painful.
Later that summer, I visited a patient who reminded me of this. A nurse asked me to visit someone who wasn’t cooperating with her. She described him as curt and dismissive, and had a suspicion. She suspected a recent diagnosis was bothering him. Maybe a visit from a chaplain might help him open up.
So I knocked on his door. I drew back the curtain, and went in. His room was dark, and I could barely make out that he was sitting up in bed. I told him who I was, and why I stopped by. He did not open up. At least not in the way his nurse or I might have hoped.
Instead, with quiet rage, he told me how angry he was. Angry that staff weren’t open with him. Angry that someone was talking about him behind his back. Angry that someone had asked me to check in on him. It all poured out. And as he let these feelings out, I sat in the dark next to him, listening for something behind his anger. I wasn’t sure I was going to find it.
As I got ready to go, he said, “I’m sorry I was so angry with you.”
And I said to him, “It’s OK to be angry here.”
It’ was OK. Here is this small, sick man with very little control in his life. And here I am, the one who can walk into his room and out of the hospital at the end of the day. I could take some of his anger. I could be a person who listened. He challenged me to keep this heart open, undefended.
Who could have guessed at that outcome when I went in to sit down with this man. But we could not have gotten there I had let myself shut down. If I had been afraid of what he might say. If I had defended my heart from his hard feelings, I would have missed what he needed to say. We would have missed an opportunity to connect, heart to heart, in a genuine way.
I never did find out what was behind his anger. What was deeper than his interactions with me or his nurses. We rarely encounter each other fully. Face to face. Heart to heart. Whole life to whole life. There is always something more or less unknown, uncertain. And the unknown can frustrate even the best and most patient of us. Our lives may not give us much margin to face what we don’t understand. We work, we go to school, we age, we raise children and care for elders. And when our society’s injustices pile on top of us, we have even less margin. Even less to risk on uncertainty.
Yet “Where fear and greed make many holes \ …our hearts can hear \ A different call.”5
Keeping ourselves open is a vulnerable practice. But vulnerability sets up an encounter with something that at least feels like risk in our bodies. I can imagine the risk that Rev. Simon may have felt in her body. 4 I feel the deep breath filling her lungs before walking in. I’ve drawn that breath so many times in uncertain conversations. If her heart was beating all the way up in her throat as she took a seat, I’ve felt that too. Especially when the request comes to me second-hand. I know I am not the only one here who has felt these things. And yet she went in, and sat down anyway. She left her heart’s defenses out in the hallway so she could be present with the aching person in the room.
Because of this relatively small risk, this person Rev. Simon companioned could open up. She shared her story. She shared her pain and frustration. And together they found a problem with an easy solution. But what strikes me about this story is where it ends. The patient doesn’t thank Simon for helping her file a report for the missing purse. This woman thanks her for the simple act of listening. That act that didn’t need graduate-level training. All it took was brave, simple presence and care. That is what she lifts up to us at the end.
And I wonder, how did Rev. Simon’s simple act ripple out? What risks was this person able to take because someone listened to her? How did she go on to change her world, even in the smallest ways? I wonder, who did she open her heart up for? And then, who did they open their hearts for? Simon likely didn’t know how her patient’s life continued to unfold. We certainly won’t know here. But it’s clear that it meant something. If it did nothing else, it reminds us of how we are connected to one another, how we need one another’s support.
Think for a moment. Who gave you something you needed to open and soften your heart? Who’s care gave you the capacity to risk the uncertain? Did you take something out of this place to make a corner of the world better? Did you bring something else in here, to this community? This story teaches us a lesson in our own interdependence.
“The way we build our attitudes \ with love or hate, we make \ a bridge or wall.”6
How we treat each other, how we respond to each other, can open and close doors beyond our knowing. We will never see the outermost ripple. We may not even see the next ripple out from us. But if we look at our own lives, and the lives around us, the evidence of every small act of care may be there. Waiting for us to remember it. For us to remember the power between us all.
When we gather here, we are all ministering to and with each other, whether that is our vocation or not. Our Principles ask all of us to remember that everyone else has an inalienable worth and dignity, just like we do. Our Principles remind us that we share a responsibility for each other’s growth, and therefore flourishing.
But while this is true, so is this. We do not all bring the same gifts to bear. Some of us train as nurses, or counselors, or in some other field that encourages firm, flexible boundaries. Boundaries that allow us to take in the concerns of others while caring for ourselves. But not all of us. Some of us live in social locations that give us more breathing room in this society. That give us more privilege and capacity to care for and repair this breaking world. But not all of us.
And if you have heard me here, and thought what I am suggesting is too tall an order, too out of reach, then let me offer you this. It is only as tall an order as we each can take. We do not do this alone. We do not have to. We can, and must, ask for help in caring for each other. We can, and should, offer our care when we know it’s needed. All of us can all do something. It takes all of us to build a more principled world. Then, our hearts are in a holy place.7
This sermon draws some material from one I gave at First Universalist Church of Denver in 2024. Returning this time, I bring the practice of caring into a new context (temporal, political, congregational), and draw in more resources from the rest of the service.
1. Connie Simon, “Someone to Listen,” Braver/Wiser, Unitarian Universalist Association, November 8, 2017, https://www.uua.org/braverwiser/someone-listen
2. Karen Oliveto & Robin Ridenour, ““We’re Going to Lead with Love.” A Lesbian Bishop Reflects on a Career of Service,” StoryCorps, June 6, 2024, https://storycorps.org/stories/were-going-to-lead-with-love-a-lesbian-bishop-reflects-on-a-career-of-service/
3. Cecily Taylor, “Our World Is One World,” in Singing the Living Tradition (Unitarian Universalist Association:1993), #134.
4. Patrice Karst (author) and Joanne Lew-Vreithoff (illustrator), The Invisible String (Little, Brown, & Company: 2023), 25-27.
5. Taylor.
6. Simon.
7. Joyce Poley, “When Our Heart Is In A Holy Place,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition, #1008.