On Listening to Another

Douglas V. Steere, a Quaker philosopher who taught for decades at Haverford College and was deeply involved in ecumenical and relief work, published On Listening to Another in 1955 as a slim book bringing together two essays: "Listening to the Light" and "Holy Obedience and the Listening Spirit." It came out of the Quaker conviction that spiritual life is carried on in attentiveness, and out of Steere's own practice as a retreat leader and visitor among divided churches and communities. His concern was practical as much as theological: what does it actually mean to attend to another person, and what does that attending have to do with attending to God?

Steere's central claim is that real listening is a form of love and a form of prayer, and that the two cannot be separated. He argues that most of what passes for conversation is waiting for a turn to speak, a kind of defended self-assertion, and that genuine hearing requires a costly emptying of our own agenda. To listen well is to enlarge the other person, to offer a space in which they can hear themselves more truthfully. Drawing on the Quaker tradition of waiting worship, on the saints and mystics, and on ordinary scenes of human encounter, he presses the thought that this outward listening is rooted in an inward one. The same openness that lets us receive a neighbor's pain is the openness that lets us receive a leading from God. He is candid that this requires discipline and self-forgetfulness rather than technique, and that the habit of attentiveness is as much formed by silence and obedience as by good intentions.

The book has endured because its subject has only grown more urgent. In a culture saturated with talk and distraction, Steere's quiet insistence that attention is the first act of love reads as a corrective rather than a period piece. It has been widely used in the literature of spiritual direction, pastoral care, and Quaker practice, and its influence is evident in later writing on contemplative presence and companionship. Its brevity is part of its force: it asks to be read slowly and then tested in conversation.

Who should read this: pastors, spiritual directors, counselors, and anyone whose vocation involves sitting with other people's burdens will find it an honest and searching companion, as will ordinary readers who suspect they have forgotten how to listen. It is not a manual of communication skills, and readers wanting a step-by-step method or a systematic theology of prayer will find it too spare and too devotional for their purposes.