Art of Conversation

Those who regularly read what I write know that I like David Brooks, the New York Times columnist.  While I don’t always agree with Brooks, I find him an interesting, bright and articulate observer of our times and life.  He is not a theologian, but his own life journey has brought him to a place of faith.  He comes out of the Jewish background, but that is not where he has landed.  He is the kind of person I would love to meet and engage in conversation.

And conversation is just the focus of a recent column.  He entitled his piece, “Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations.”  First of all, I admit I am a sucker for lists.  If someone talks about five ways to be healthy or something like that, I am all ears.  I will write down the five things if I have paper and pen.  When Brooks offers nine things, I am both excited and daunted; nine is a big number!

I like his subtitle: “The art of making connection even in a time of dislocation.”  I appreciate the idea of connection as a key to conversation.  Given the research I have done, I am very clear all folks want to belong---they want to be connected to someone or something.  In our own times, however, many of our connections are superficial or not purposeful.  For example, I am connected to the electricity company who delivers that desirable juice to my house.  But I am not really connected in any deep or meaningful way.  It is merely transactional.  Social media is a bastion of fairly superficial connection.

All of us want more than this.  We want our connection to be deep, meaningful and purposeful.  We want this from our relationships, work and other places of connection.  Brooks offers some good advice how we might leverage the connections we have into much deeper, more satisfying ones.  I cannot share all nine, but let me offer a few of his.  Some of them were obvious to me and others were framed in a way I did not expect.

The first one he labels as, “approach with awe.”  I did not know where he was going with this one.  He begins with a quotation from C.S. Lewis, which I won’t share.  Then Brooks sums it up by saying, “Every human being is a miracle, and your superior in some way.”  Ok, I think to myself.  Then Brooks adds this wonderful sentence.  “The people who have great conversations walk into the room expecting to be delighted by you and make you feel the beam of their affection and respect.”  My mind went in many directions when I read this.

It made me think about all the times I entered a room not really expecting anything---certainly nothing special.  Oh, I knew I would talk.  But talking is not the same thing as conversation.  What do I expect when I walk into a room?  Do I have a choice about what I expect?  If I expect more, will more likely happen?  As you can see, questions cascaded through my mind.  I realized that I may be in charge of what I expect---mostly in charge, anyway.  Maybe one way of upping my game is to begin to see every human being as a miracle.  I know currently I don’t see all of them in that light.

Expectations are different than prejudging or prejudices.  Those are more like predestination.  Expectations are more like providence.  Expectations are ways I begin to look at the future.  I see expectation as one way to direct my attention to the future.  In fact, the Latin root of the word, expectation, is our simple word, “see.”  Brooks has encouraged me to give more attention to my expectations.  

Another piece of advice he offers is “Make them authors, not witnesses.”  Once again, I had no clue where he was going.  Brooks begins by observing, “The important part of people’s lives is not what happened to them, but how they experienced what happened to them.”  That is a significant distinction.  I knew where Brooks was going to go.  Get folks to talk about experience, not simply what happened.  Experience turns the fact of what happened into a story.  We don’t have conversations about facts; we do converse about stories.  We can ask why and how in order to get deeper into the life of the other person.

That is what Brooks is getting at when he tells us to make the authors.  Authors write and tells stories.  They have so much more to say than simply yes-no, fact-based statements.  If we are content with the other as witness, all we are going to learn is what happened---the facts.  We want to go deeper.  

As I type all this, I get the sense for how spiritual it is.  Approach with awe is how we usually deal with the Holy One.  When I read stories about Jesus, this also comes true.  One of my theological perspective is all of life is sacred.  We’ll know when we are in touch with the sacred when we cultivate a sense of awe.  And this is what we can come to expect.  Our hope is to touch and hear from the great Author of it all---God.

If we can be involved at that level, we can be in conversation.  It might even be called something like prayer.