Quotes about Communication

Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

Love that cares, listens.

No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation.

The first duty of love is to listen.

We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea.

But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the Day of Judgment. For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned." — MATTHEW 12:36-37

Jesus is what God sounds like. He's literally the "living Word of God." Hearing his voice is not so much a skill we must master, therefore, as a master we must meet.

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.

Start by calling God 'Father' (Luke 11:2). That's the key to prayer.

God did not say everything at once. The earlier communications take into account the limitations in the understanding of people at earlier times.

It is wholly incomprehensible to think that thousands of years ago God would have felt constrained to speak in a way that would be meaningful only to Westerners several thousand years later. To do so borders on modern, Western arrogance.

A relationship based on trust means not walking on eggshells, but talking openly, honestly, with no hint of passive-aggressiveness or any of the other dysfunctional manipulative tactics we tend to impose on family and friends.