Radical Listening by Fr. Steve Dos Santos, c. pp. s., Cincinnati Province Vocation Director
The Precious Blood is first and foremost incarnational. Jesus took on flesh and blood and lived among us. It was a messy choice that Jesus made, one that colors how we as Precious Blood people see the world and enter into ministry. We are willing to stand in the muck and the mess with people, knowing that sometimes the only thing we have to offer is a listening heart.
Learning to listen was an important part of my formation. During Special Formation, I attended the Kansas City Province Assembly, and I remember a workshop on reflective listening. In that workshop, I learned skills that I have tried to hone over the years. I strive to listen not just for the facts and the details, but for the emotions and the values that lie just below the surface or in the background of the story. As one practices listening, you discover that sometimes important information is buried in a comment that is tossed out as an aside, or is sometimes left out entirely. Active and reflective listening means you learn to check back with the speaker to make sure you are hearing them correctly and to ask questions that help you understand what they are a sharing on a deeper level.
Listening is an important pastoral skill in any ministry, but I find it particularly important in my ministry as a director of vocation ministry. Each new inquirer brings with him a new story. Some vocation stories are clear, direct, and easily understandable. Other vocation stories are still developing and need to be coaxed out of the inquirer so that we both can better understand it. There is no single story. Each story is unique.
Listening takes time. It is an investment in the person before you. Vocation directors listen because we are engaged in discernment and not simply recruitment. We listen because we want to hear this man’ s story and help him to better understand God’ s call in his life. In that relationship, I represent the c. pp. s. and the Church, and am listening for signs of God’ s call, fitness for ministry, resonance with our charism and spirituality, and the ability to be successful in formation, among other things. I am listening so as to help him make a better choice, even if that choice is to not fill out an application for formation.
Yes, there is a whole lot going on during those conversations. I am constantly evaluating what I hear and making judgments about it. In doing so I have to draw on another hallmark of our Precious Blood approach to ministry, and that’ s openness. Openness means letting the story unfold and not jumping ahead. Openness means letting the person surprise you.
Openness is a radical idea for us human beings, maybe even more so today than in years past. Our human tendency is to put people in a box as quickly as possible. We slap a convenient label on someone and let that label tell us everything we need to know about them. Such over simplifications don’ t work for vocation directors and they really don’ t work for Precious Blood people. In a homily before he died, Fr. Greg Comella reminded us in the assembly that when we hold people captive in boxes with labels, we deny their complexity and their humanity and deny the possibility of growth in that person.
One time at a vocation fair, one of the first questions a young man asked me was whether our community celebrated the Extraordinary Form [ liturgy of the 1962 Roman Missal, widely referred to as the Tridentine Mass ]. For some that would have been a red flag and would have ended the conversation, but I opted to remain engaged and tell him the truth, that at that time there was really only one member who did so regularly. Our conversation went on for several minutes before he moved on to another community’ s table. As far as I know, that young man has never contacted us, but I do know that we had a good conversation about liturgy, our charism, and our style of life.
It would be easy for me, and for all of us to rely on labels and snap judgments about individuals, but we do so at our own peril. We’ ve heard the stories of the middle school troublemaker who grew up to be a wonderful priest and merciful confessor. Or the inarticulate high school senior who grew up to be an eloquent preacher or speaker. None of us exited formation the same man we were when we entered. Formation helps us to become the man we were made to be.
I assume that the young man sitting in front of me will grow and change over the years of formation— in continued on page 12
10 • The New Wine Press • December 2017