麻豆约拍

Good morning.

During lockdown many of us tended to be on social media a lot more than before, and for many it has been a lifeline, but when times are tough and people get fractious, it is not always a pleasant place to be. I found myself this year reading posts from friends of mine getting increasingly ferocious, arguing over issues concerning sexuality and gender, privilege and justice. I could almost hear the drawbridges being drawn up, as people got more entrenched in their own positions, and were less willing to listen to those who disagreed.聽

The root question of all those issues for me was - how do we treat people whose issues are not our own? How do we learn from and value people who suffer prejudice that we do not personally experience, perhaps not even notice, because we are not their gender or their sexuality or ethnicity?

One of the most important parts of my job as a priest is listening. Listening is not just a passive activity.聽 To listen fully means to trust the person you are listening to when they tell you what it is like to be them. And the most transformative things happen when you have been listened to, when you know that you are understood and valued by another human being.聽

That is one of the most powerful gifts that God gives us, the ability to listen and to value and above all to empathise with people who are different from ourselves. When we allow our empathy to come to the fore, that is when the world changes for the better.

Almighty God, stir up within us your gift of compassion. Free us from the comfortable prisons of our own experience. Put within us the desire to walk together, that we may be inspired to alleviate the pain that we share. Take us along the harder roads, so that we may be determined to make the rough places plain. Amen.