listen, resonate, don't appropriate

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?

Joan Jeanrenaud and her Ice Cello, a mixture of art installation and musical performance enhanced by the dripping of the ice provides us with a very fragile and vulnerable image of voice.

In my course we were given a reading from Jung Young Lee's Marginality a book I read 10 years ago. This drove me back to my Master's thesis and the importance of listening without an appropriating ear. Many people claim to speak from the margins but Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has asked whether true marginal people can ever speak because in being heard i.e. having a voice they either become part of the dominant centre or they are appropriated. Some of the worst compassion I have ever heard has been I know how you feel because (this...) and (that...) happened to me. No-one can ever know how another feels. The supposed listener has hijacked the pain of the other. They have neglected the fragility of others.

Over the years I have learned to talk less and listen more. Gabriel Marcel, a Christian existential philosopher, introduce to me the notion that to be truly present to another person is to be available to them. That I think is a challenge to any relationship and perhaps at the core of what any spirituality should be about.

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' ... 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Matt 22:37, 39