How To Know a Person

[Music] thanks so much Campbell and I'll just add my own welcome to all of you joining us for today's online conversation with David Brooks on how to know a person I'll also add my own thanks to our sponsors today we really appreciate prce Circle Bill and Dana Wickman David campaign with the Ronald blue trust as well as our Anonymous senior fellow and five other guests who asked to remain anonymous and sponsoring this program your generosity means a lot to us and we really appreciate you and we're delighted that so many of you are joined today we have well over 3,000 people who have registered today and just appreciate the honor of your time and attention I'd like to give a special shout out and Welcome to our firsttime guests today we have well over 400 firsttime registrants as well as our nearly 300 international guests joining us from at least 38 countries that we know of ranging from Afghanistan and Austria to Singapore and the Sudan so welcome from across the miles and the time zones if you haven't already done so let us know where you're joining us from in the chat feature it's always fun to see the community around the world so if you are one of those First Time guest or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum we seek to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith and to offer programs like this online conversation to do so and to come to better know the author of the answers we hope this will be a small taste of that for you today in a new book just out this week Our Guest today makes the case that one of the greatest human needs is to be paid loving attention to be known and understood and that learning to see others calls forth and develops the best in both the subject and the holder the problem is we're terrible at it on the whole whether due to distraction or ego or overwhelm or ignorance we either do not look do not listen do not care or do not understand and the cost is tremendous in terms of sad and lonely adults socially and morally confused young people and an increasingly mean and fractured Society so how might we become more attuned to others more interested and skilled at seeing and understanding them if to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver attention is the beginning of love how might we learn to better love our neighbors it's one of life's both enduring and Urgent questions and so I'm so delighted to get to introduce Our Guest today who has wrestled with it with remarkable wisdom humility Clarity and charity David Brooks David is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators who's an op-ed columnist for the New York Times a writer for the Atlantic and appears regularly on PBS newsour he's also the author of a number of bestselling books including several number one bestsellers on the New York Times uh list including bobos in Paradise on Paradise Drive The Social Animal the road to character the second mountain and his wonderful new release just out earlier this week how to know a person the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen which we've invited him here today to discuss David welcome good to be with you Shere I'm very intrigued by the anonymous senior fellow who who donated some money for to help this I just hope it isn't my wife can't can't afford it well we never turn that down from but it's actually not your wife I can I can tell you later who who it was so starting out I want to just ask you like what led you to write this book it's sort of unusual that a columnist who is generally used to scanning the landscape for cultural Trends turns his attention uh from the broad landscape into the eyes of another person so what made you decide to shift your gaze from the populace to the personal well first I'm surrounded by like we all are by sort of a rising tide of barbarism and a rising tide of dehumanization and so we all know the statistics the rising depression Rising suicide Rising loneliness Rising bitterness Rising meanness and it occurred to me first I'm not exactly helping the situation you've known me for a lot of years and I'm not naturally the most socially Adept human being on the face of the Earth and so I just wanted to get get better uh Frederick Benner a hero of mine in many of ours uh he was shut down emotionally for the first part of his life and he he said in the middle of life I learned that I I seal myself off from the pain of living and from the emotions of living I'm sealing myself off from the holy sources of life itself and I didn't want that to be me and so I realized along the way that to see others well you have to be openhearted uh you have to open up your heart to other people but that's not enough you need skills and so you need the skill of really listening well being a great conversationalist dis ageing well sensing anxiety somebody in somebody's voice and asking them about it hosting uh so that everybody feels included and so over the course of the four years I wrote the book I want to be more openhearted and just a more emotionally available person I wanted to know more about human nature so I would know what I'm looking at but really I just wanted to learn the skills how to be concretely considerate in Daily circumstances of Life yeah you know you um you describe just paying attention which seems like such a simple Act is actually a really profound um moral and creative act and you know even just our last online conversation we hosted Kurt Thompson and one of the things Kurt has said I know you know Kurt um is that really the paying attention to what we pay attention to is usually the start of the spiritual disciplines too um that there's something that really uh affects us in terms of the decisions about where we pay attention so what given all your research do you find um why is it that that simple Act of paying attention to others is so is so powerful what is it about uh that that kind of brings forth change in in us as well as as others well I'll tell you a story to illustrate how powerful attention is so I'm I'm in Waco Texas and I'm having breakfast with a woman a 93y old woman named laru dorsy and she presents herself to me as this tough intim intimidating woman who was a teacher most of her career and she said I loved my students enough to discipline them and I was a little intimidated by her and in the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy derell and Jimmy is a pastor he pastors a church under the bridge uh which is for homeless people and he comes up to our table and he grabs Mrs dorsy by the shoulders and shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93-year-old and he says to her Mrs dorsy Mrs dorsy you're the best you're the best I love you I love you and that tough intimidating drill sergeant suddenly turned into a bright ey shining 9-year-old girl and so the attention you cast on a person changes who they will be and who they will become uh and so why that's important to me is not only that Jimmy's a warmer personality than I am but Jimmy is a pastor and so he sees anybody anybody he's seeing someone made in the image of God he's looking into the face of God he's looking at a person who has a soul of infinite value and dignity a soul so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person and so I tell people you can be Christian Jewish Muslim atheist agnostic but approaching people with that level of reverence and respect is an absolute precondition for knowing them well and you've got to know that the person in front of you is not a problem to be solved but in a a a wonder that will never be gotten to the bottom of and in that First Act of meeting someone everyone when we meet someone we're unconsciously asking ourselves a question am I a person to that person am I priority to those that person and the answers to those questions will be expressed in the in people's gaze before they're expressed in words so that First Act of attention as Iris Murdoch says we want to cast a just and loving attention on others and I can't do a whole Trinity Forum event without CH citing the chosen but if you look at that show the way Jesus looks at everybody else in that show is actually masterfully done because we want to look at other people with those eyes you know I think um well both of us probably all of us have had some kind of story where someone saw something in us and kind of by you know through that attention but also by naming it kind of helped call it forth um but you have said that the act of actually seeing each other with love and um just and loving attention affects not only um those who we behold but also affects the beholder yeah I'd love for you to say a little bit more about what that means how how is it that there's there's truth goodness and Beauty in the eye of the beholder right yeah so it's when I ask people tell me about the time you've been seen they tell me sh with bright eyes and joy in their face they tell me about time somebody totally got them because seeing someone if if I see potential in you you in you you'll see potential in yourself if I beam my attention on you you'll Blossom and so it's just super powerful to feel seen but it's also powerful and fantastic to feel like you're the Seer like you look at another person and so I'm sitting here right in my living room and about two years ago I guess about two years ago uh I was sitting at across the table from where the laptop is and I was reading a boring book which is what I get paid to do uh and my wife an Snider senior fellow at the attorney forum and editor of comment magazine uh walks in the door which is that right over there and she the door is open and she opens the door and she's standing there in the doorway and it's summertime and the sun is coming coming in behind her and I look up from my book and she doesn't even notice that I'm there because that's the kind of Charisma I have uh and and and she's looking at an orchid that we keep on a table by the door and I look at her and I have this sensation come across my mind which was I know her I know her through and through and if you would ask me what I knew about her at that moment it's not like her personality traits or or any adjectives I would use to describe or to a person it was like the harmonies of her music the EB and flow of her being sort of the incandescence of her personality the occasional fierceness the occasional insecurities it was as if I was almost not seeing her but I was seeing out from her uh and if you really want to understand other people you have to see the world a little from their point of view and it was said just a moment of human contact and it just felt delicious like I know her I know her and if You' asked me what word I would use to describe how I was seeing her at that moment the word I would use is behold I wasn't inspecting her I wasn't observing her from detached perspective I was just beholding her and it was like a just wonder at this other human being and I mentioned this story about a year later to an older couple and they said that's what we do with our grandkids we just behold them and it's just an appreciative way of welcoming somebody's whole presence into your life and into your mind and it was so much fun I remember it vividly to this day well incandescent is a good adjective for an but um you in some ways as it's a wonderful story and as joyful and delightful as it is to behold people it seems well at least you tell us we're awfully bad at doing it um and really was kind of remarkable you mentioned different uh studies I going to cite some of these that strangers accurately each other only around 20% of the time close friends and family only around 30 to 35% of the time and moreover the people who are just absolutely awful at it think that they are as good as the people who are actually more skilled why are we so bad at beholding when it is so generative and joy-giving yeah well first we're um we're egotistical so we're busy not think we're busy thinking about ourselves so we don't think about other people uh second some of us have so much anxiety in our heads there's so much noise up there they don't have time for other people some people just can't appreciate that their other people have different viewpoints they think everybody sees the world the way they do and if they don't and if the other people don't there's something wrong with them there's a a little story I tell about a guy who was on one side of the river and there was a woman on the other side of the river and she shouts at him how do I get to the other side of the river and he shouts back at her you are on the other side of the river and so he couldn't put herself in her viewpoint and see and so that's part of it partly we're shy you know and we don't ask we don't ask uh and so I I have a a friend of mine named naobi way who teaches seventh grade boys how to do interviewing so they can become journalist student journalists and the first time she ever did this she um sat in the front of the room and she said okay you guys shoot some questions at me I'll answer truthfully whatever you ask and so the first question from one boy was are you married she said no second question from another boy are you divorced yes third question do you still love him and she's her eyes open wide and then she says yes and they say does he know by now she's crying do your kids know like kids will ask the direct question they will go right there but then as we get older we get a little shy sometimes appropriately shy uh but in my view we're too shy and so I've learned that the qual one of the qualities of your conversations will be the quality of your questions and so when you're getting to know someone I ask people where they're from I love to get them talk about their childhood they love people love to talk about their childhood and you learn so much about about them just from you know what town was it in what was your family like and sometimes I'll ask uh like we have a mutual friend who I won't out him here but I once asked him what's your favorite unimportant thing about him about you what's your favorite unimportant thing about you and he's a prestigious academic and the amount of reality trashy TV show that guy watches was crazy like so I learned that by asking that and then as you get to know people better you can ask them questions that take them out of their daily existence and get them to think new about themselves so if this chapter if this five years is a chapter in your life what's this chapter about it gets people talking about what are the themes what are their main life tasks or what transition are you in the middle of what crossroads are you at we're usually in the thinking about some transition and so you have you ask a big question like that you get big conversation and it makes it a meaningful conversation whether it's just friends or colleagues uh we have a mutual friend I won't out them either but I don't think they'd mind but she says our um our friends we like friends who are linger people you just want to linger with and that's good company and I a lot of it comes from a just a conversation that's going sensationally where you really are learning things about each other uh one other topic that I used recently and an thought it was a little pretentious which it was but I asked anyway and it turned into a good conversation which was how do your ancestors show up in your life and so there was a Dutch family there they talked about their Dutch Heritage there was a black couple there they talked about African-American Heritage I talked about my Jewish ancestry and it our lives are affected by things stretching back generations and the way we look at the world our culture her Heritage and so it's just fun to explore that topic uh and so when you have a big conversation like that you leave it feeling a little more seen yeah can imagine I almost feel now like I need to ask you like what big transition you were in in the middle of your life becoming a bah high no I you know it was interesting that you again kind of give a stat you're you give lots of stats but really that you estimate only around 30% of people are natural question askers and we don't really get a lot of training in sort of how to do that and you also called asking good questions a moral practice um so how would you if someone came to you be like David you do this for a living you ask lots of interesting questions I have no idea where to start um what would you tell them how do you ask a morally formative question yeah I mean I I do ask questions for a living but we all have conversations for a living and the sad thing is there's no place to go get taught this stuff and you don't have to ask uh you know one thing that makes us shy is where the under the illusion that people don't want to be asked and there's in the book I cited a guy named Dan McAdams who studies how people tell their life stories and he has people come into his research lab and he asks them tell me about the high points of your life tell me about the low points of your life tell me about the turning points and after a few hours he hands them a little check to compensate them for their time and they push the check back some of them and say I'm not taking money for this this has been one of the best afternoons of my life and so I have found again and again if you respectfully ask somebody to tell you their story no one has ever asked them and they get such immense pleasure out of it and they they love to talk and it it it just makes you curious and so it's not hard to get people going Monica Guzman is a journalist and she has a question why you like why was it you who felt compelled to run for school board why was it you who decided to start that company and then gets people talking about their desires their motivations the things they dream about and that's not a hard question to ask uh and so these are and you know relatively easy questions to get people going and I you know I have a friend who hires people for a living and his one of his questions is uh who are you in high school and how has that changed uh because his theory is that whoever you were in high school you're carrying a little of that those insecurities around with you right now uh your sense of where your social location stuff like that and so he's fantastic at hiring and he hires for what he calls Spirit of generosity and he says you can tell someone's spirit of generosity when as they talk about their childhood who loved them who did they love uh and that's as part of a job hiring process is learning about skills and when we have to let someone go from any employment it's never because it's rarely 11% of the time it's because they lack technical skills 89% of the time it's they weren't a team player they weren't calm in a crisis they weren't generous to colleagues and if we're going to hire someone marry someone befriend someone raise a kid you just got to be a lot better at at seeing them accurately yeah your friend is probably someone that you would refer to in your book at least as an Illuminator and you have sort of divided different approaches to U beholding people or paying attention is uh between diminishers and alumin ators uh what's what are the different practices of diminishers and illuminators and how can we tell if we're being a diminisher when we should aspire to be an Illuminator yeah well diminishers first they don't ask so if you're not a question asker you're probably a diminisher secondly um they uh stereotype and so they have labels and thirdly they do a thing called stacking and stacking is when if you learn one fact about a person you make a whole series of assumptions that you think must also be true of that person and so you learn somebody's a trump supporter then suddenly you've made all these stereotypical assumptions about that person but those are almost never true I heard about a trump supporter who was a a lesbian biker who converted to Sufi Islam after surviving a plane crash like what stereotype does she fit into and I find most people like that they're just way more complicated than their stereotypes and then illuminators make you feel lit up I quote a bar uh IEM Foster was an English novelist lived about 100 years ago and his biographer said he had a kind of inverse Charisma he listened to you with such intensity that you had to be your best sharpest and most practiced self so that's just intense listening I tell in the book The Story may be apocryphal of Jenny Jerome and Jenny Jerome went to was an she later became Winston Churchill's mom but when she was a young woman in Victorian England she was one seated next to uh William Gladstone the prime minister at a dinner and she left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the cleverest person in England and then a couple of weeks later she happens to be seated next to Benjamin Disraeli Disraeli Gladstone's great political rival and she left that dinner with Israeli thinking that she was the cleverest person in England so if you can make somebody else feel like they're the cleverest person in the country you've done your job um another example of an Illuminator is uh it occurred in Bell Labs the legendary research facility and so there's there was some researchers were way more creative than others and they wanted to why and they said was it IQ no was it educational attainment no they found out their most creative uh researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist and Harry would ask them about their their problems get inside their head sort of think along with them and together they thought through their problems and came to Creative Solutions so Harry Nikish was an Illuminator he got inside his colleagues heads and just helped them think through their own problems uh and making everybody better so um one of the things that you have mentioned in your book is that uh there's a problem not only with our personal kind of sense of lacking illuminators but uh kind of on a population level we're kind of a lacking illuminators as well that um you know there's steady after steady showing that Americans are lonelier sadder murder rates gun sales hate crimes are surging social Trust able giving is is declining um and you conclude that people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness but in reading all of that one of the things that occurred to me is how much of it is that we don't know how to treat others with kindness yeah as opposed to the we don't want to you know we have found benefits to trying to one up or dominate or even humiliate others and it it's been working for us on an individual level if even if not on a societal one yeah well I don't think it has been working I think the reason 36% of Americans feel persistently lonely is because we have they haven't been trained and if you don't know how to start a conversation uh you're not going to want to do it you're not want to do something you think you're going to fail at and so I don't know whether it's the churches or the schools or wherever just these basic skills how to host a party effectively uh how to ask for forgiveness and offer forgiveness uh these are just basic skills that somehow we're not teaching and I I do think it leads to the am miseration of lots and lots of people like one of the weird statistics is the number of people who say they have no close friends has gone up by four times in the last 20 years like what what is going on with our country and so one of the reasons I think it's skill-based is because people just don't how to interact but then I just saw a study a couple weeks ago they looked at the number of men who have never asked a woman out on a date and the number is super high and they wanted to know what was why hadn't asked the women out on date and it was low flirting skills and so we don't think a flirting is a skill you have to learn but if you can't flirt it's going to be hard to like approach a romantic love interest and flirting is a thing uh and so that's why I think teaching the skills is so important then more broadly and I'll just speak personally you know as this wall of of depression suicide loneliness anger meanness has been rising it can seem naive to be like me to think oh we should all know each other we should all understand each other but in my view I've decided to adopt this defiant humanism like in a world of loneliness when people are attacking I'm going to be the one who's going to lead with respect I'm going to lead with curiosity and I'm going to argue that it's the most practical thing you can do is to try to open up your eyes and try to understand another human being and make them feel seen heard and understood that is to me is the only way you're going to break down the cycle of misapprehension and hostility and since we're on Trinity form if I could be a little explicitly religious here Jesus lived in a time of bitter hostility and Revolution and the model he sets for us is of someone who who looks at all this Rising tide of hatred with the gentle Eyes Of Love and looks at each person with the gentle Eyes Of Love uh and so we're sort of called to do the to try to do this and we're not do it as well as Jesus did it but we can do it a little and when you go look in the Bible especially after writing the book I've been writing you realize how many dramas of recognition there are how many times somebody was not recognized and obviously the disciples don't recognize the Risen Christ Esau and Isaac and the birthright and even in the the Good Samaritan the a lot of people see the injured guy on the side of the road but only the Samaritan really sees him and the Bible is always giving us these dramas where somebody didn't see well and those failures when people misunderstand someone those are failures of the heart not failures of the head and so we're really given a lot of instruction in the Bible on on how to see and the errors of missing yeah no that that makes a lot of sense you know it it's interesting and that you know loneliness obviously is very much on the rise and you you've pointed out that lonely people also often not always but often tend to be more aggressive and fearful um and the loneliness drives a lot of that such such that the people that we that most need um that kind of loving attention are probably the least likely to get it but you know I think there's also attention which is um you know on one hand we're called we are Christians are called to love our enemies not just you know merely our antagonist but at the same time there's also presumably a need for certain certain boundaries um around enemies and antagonists and you know even as a a colonist you I'm sure have far more people who want or even demand your attention um than you than you can provide how do you think about just the inevitable tension between the call to love our neighbor and our enemy and the reality of uh very finite uh attention as well as potential um potential harm from some others yeah yeah well first on the sometimes you're just overwhelmed like I I'm thinking about I'm I'm about to go on a book tour so I'm going to travel around the country talking about my book for the next um uh three months or so and I'm thinking of all the plane rides and train rides I'm going to take and do I have to talk to a person on next to me every single time I don't know that seems like a lot like when you're on book Tour all you just want to do a shut down and relax in between talking so we all face these normal barriers but I do think we can get better at sort of tamping down the offic efficiency mindset that some of us use to carry through every day of our life and so for example if I'm pulling in the gas station I I think to myself oh I've got 90 seconds while I'm pumping gas I can get two emails done that's just a horrible way to think like I've got this productivity clock in my head and if I think that way then when I'm picking up my kids at school or you know hanging out with somebody I'm going to still have that clock in my head of course I'm not going to be lingible of course I'm going to want our relationship to be um efficient and so I've got to Tamp down that efficiency and say no I'm going to stay with this right this person and I've learned you know treated attention as an onoff switch not a dimmer and so it's be 100% or 0% I'm not going to multitask you another human being and I've learned from our friend and Atty form's friend Andy Crouch uh to be a loud listener and I mentioned Andy in the book because when you talk to Andy if people know him from the events he's been on here um he's he's like a Pentecostal Church he's like like uh-huh yep yep preach yes amen I'm in I agree I agree I'm in I'm in and I'm like love talking to that guy so I want to be a little more of that but as you say there are some people who are beyond the boundaries so if you're an Illuminator or wannabe and somebody is persistently a diminisher and it's just going to stereotype ignore and attack well there's not much you can do about that and you can try to release a little vulnerability to see if they'll respond in kind but you know I'm not naive enough to think that if I was in the room with members of Hamas which I've been in those those rooms that somehow I should try to understand them and everything will be peaceful beess some people are just genocidal monsters and you got to protect yourself uh but I do think most people and I've been in Palestinian homes there were we may disagree profoundly about a bunch of stuff but there's genuine graciousness and warmth in the home uh or Trump supporters I'm not a big Donald Trump supporter but I've had a zillion conversations with Trump suppor to some in my own family that have been deep meaningful um real great friendships and sometimes there are certain subjects we won't talk about just to keep the friendship alive but that's super easy to do uh and if I meet a trump supporter and I say you know what was what was your best job ever like what was the best job you ever had uh suddenly they'll tell me a story and if they tell me how they lost that job because it got shipped overseas or immigration or whatever then suddenly I understand where their head is at Visa Donald Trump I I may not agree with their voting choices but I it's a legitimate standpoint yeah you also and it was really one of the most I think kind of gripping and poignant parts of your work uh describe the experience of trying to to see deeply to connect with your best friend from childhood um Pete who was was caught in uh depression and the world that he inhabited Ed seemed very difficult to behold or or understand um how so many of us who are watching you know do have close friends or loved ones who um at some point in their Liv seem to be occupying an alternative reality that's very hard to understand H how do you learn to behold and see deeply someone who seems to be caught um in that kind of despairing alternate reality well this is yet another skill that we're not taught and am a reasonably well educated person you think somewhere along the way somebody would have taught me how do you sit with someone who's suffering from depression but I didn't know and so for the first 57 years of his life Pete had this wonderful life of he was an eye surgeon he was a had a wonderful wife two great kids uh lived up in Connecticut we met when we were 11 and basically played basketball for 40 years of our lives together um and then Peete got hit with depression and I didn't really understand back then what depression was and this was 2019 and I since learned from one of our friends Michael Gerson Mike said that depression is a man a malfunction in the instrument you use to perceive reality so Pete was not seeing reality accurately and he he like Mike had these obsessive voices in his head uh no one would miss if you're gone you're worthless you're dragging everybody down and so that's the reality Pete was living with for three years and in the beginning I didn't know how to talk to him and I wanted to say something that would help and so the first mistake I made was I tried to give him ideas for how to snap out of depression so I said you know you used to go on service trips to Vietnam why don't you do that again you found them so rewarding and I learned later that telling giving somebody ideas about how to go get out of depression is just a sign that you don't you don't understand what depression is because it's not ideas they're lacking it's energy then I made another mistake which was positive reframing I tried to to remind him of all the wonderful things about his life and that is negative too that has a bad effect too because it shows that he's not enjoying the things that are palpably enjoyable so there must be something wrong with him gradually over coid or phone calls I learned um just to be present just to recognize the awfulness of the situation be present show I'm not going anywhere and then I think if I had to do it again I would um I would first uh have sent more touches like just a little text here and there just say I'm thinking of you no response necessary I'm just thinking of you uh then I I may have said you know I admire your courage because you're still here you're in a lot of pain you've been in a lot of pain for three years and you're still here I admire your courage and then I've learned from Victor frankl's man Searcher meaning when he was counseling people who were contemplating suicide he said life has not stopped expecting things of you life has not stopped expecting things of you and that seems a little harsh to tell someone who's like complaining but Franco says no they have to know they're here for a reason and they they have a lot of good they can do in the world and later I read a quote I was given a quote by a friend of mine a pastor named Chris Davis um a a quote from Thorton Wilder the playright and he said uh without your wound where would your power be it's your very low your low voice trembles into the hearts of men because of the wounds you carry uh in love Service uh only wounded soldiers can serve so it was peed and for somebody's suffering it is their very suffering that gives them credibility to reach into the hearts of other sufferers and to sit with them and be a comfort to them and so that's a power that comes from that strength and I wish I'd reminded Pete of all these things having said that I don't think there's anything ultimately I could have said that would have made a difference he ended up succumbing to Suicide about a year and a bit ago uh because the monster was just too big for him uh and it was going to be too big for us it was just it's a monster this thing um so there's nothing I could have said that would have changed things but things I wish I'd said just to be a a better presence along the way we're going to turn to question some our viewers in a second but before we do obviously the process of immersing yourself in all this material not just the research but also the theologians the philosophers and the like whose works you yeah you summarize and synthesize um in essentially helping others to better love and see our neighbors how did it change you uh I'd be interested if there's any practices or disciplines you've adopted or even just changes you see in your own practice of seeing others well I think I am a more open to people in stranger situations but I hope I'm I have conversations that are are deeper and better and more memorable for all involved uh and I hope I reflect back uh I hope I cast what iris mura called the just and loving attention on people that I I do come to rever each person as this soul of infinite value and dignity and I hope I'm more emotionally open I think I am I I'll tell you two stories one of which is in the book one of which isn't the one in the book is involves me name dropping but uh I've been interviewed by Oprah twice in my life in 2014 and 2019 and after the 2019 interview she comes up to me and says you know I've rarely seen someone change so much in middle age you you were so emotionally blocked before and so that was a good moment for me that I I you know she should know she's Oprah like so I I'm making some progress as a human being the other story is um I was at a conference recently and we were at a church and with everyone was handed out a song sheet with lyrics of Some Love Song and we had to pick a stranger and S sing the song into their eyes while gazing into their eyes of a stranger this scappy love song and if you would asked me done that 10 years ago my head would have exploded but I did it I was out there for the emotional openness so I did it and it took me like six months to recover but still so but I I I think hopefully especially for guy us guys you soften in middle age and you get a little more emotionally open so I hope I'm I think I'm that way well there's lots of questions that are in up so we'll just Dive Right In Trisha hickey asked how does one start this cycle of knowing and being known when they've spent years building up walls due to hurts and life yeah well that this is what Frederick bner teaches us because he was hurt by life and he built up a lot of walls uh and so you know one of it is just uh I find that it helps me to have a spiritual and emotional book going at just before you do the more complicated interacting with another person person uh a big book for me was Sheldon van ains severe Mercy uh and I read that book on a plane it's a very sad book and I cried and the flight attendants were worried about me uh and so just even that for me because I'm pretty Inward and pretty much of a bookish reader to sort of loosen myself up with um with literature uh was just tremendously valuable and I have a friend when he's in a cracky mood his wife asks him do you have a novel going CU I think you need to be reading a novel cuz you get cranky when you have no novel going so that's one thing but then I think you know just the normal um occasions of Life uh just to ask that extra question and so I I I've learned that you we we all some of us ask questions but then when somebody has a bringing a problem to us it's useful to ask three or four questions about the problem and then ask another three or four more questions than you think tell tell me more about that what am I missing and I found it's amazing how often when you ask somebody three times or five times how each time the answers get bigger and different and better and so a good conversation is not people making statements at each other a good conversation is a is a group exploration and it doesn't have to be personal but it's like what there's something intriguing and you said something that's interesting let me expand on that and maybe you could expand on what I said and then it just becomes fun then you're just you're learning together and you don't have to get super personal to do that to have that kind of explorative conversation Stone Soup almost of yeah exploration I want to combine two somewhat related questions Alan seinger asked Can you comment on how knowing others and being known can help reduce animosity towards those with whom we disagree and Kevin ofner asked can you give us some insight on how to engage someone face Toof face with whom you have strong all caps disagreements someone that you know is you strongly disagree with on something that you think is vitally important how can you express respect and appreciation in a way that's genuine yeah well I have a chapter in the book on hard conversations and those are conversations across class difference religious difference ideological difference any kind of difference in disagreement and often when you're in those hard conversations people are coming at you with critique and lame in their voice and your your first instinct is to say well it's not me I'm not the problem here I'm one of the good guys or here's what I'm doing here's how I see things and I've learned your first job is to resist that hesit that temptation to get defensive and my first job when I'm being attacked by someone who really disagrees and who we he and I disagree my first job is to stand in their standpoint so that's to say I'm I really need to understand your point of view so tell me again this is goes back to the three things time tell me again tell me again what am I missing here the Scottish have a a word Ken that we have the phrase that's beyond my Ken so the Ken is the in Naval navigation it's the part of the ocean you can see wherever you are it's your little area so my job is to stand in their Ken so I really understand that point of view and I may never agree but the very fact that I've ask three or four questions about it communicates respect and there's a great book called crucial conversation that says in any conversation respect is like air when it's present no one notices when it's absent it's all anybody can think about so at least I've shown respect the second thing I've learned is that every conversation takes place on two levels there's the official conversation that we're normally nominally talking about then there's the under conversation which is the flow of emotion between us as we're speaking and so every comment I make then I'm making you feel feel either more safe or more threatened and the same you're doing that to me so if my comments can make you feel more safe then everything else we say will be at least a little more Humane then two final things one is uh keep the gem statement in the center if you and I disagree about something there might be something deep down that we actually do agree upon if my brother and I are fighting over healthc care our dad's Healthcare we we might disagree about that but we really both want what's best for our dad so if we can take that thing we both agree on that gem statement and keep returning to it then we save the relationship as we're in the middle of a fight uh and then the final one I'll give is find the disagreement under the disagreement so if you and I disagree about tax policy or something or even a marketing plan at a company there's probably a philosophical reason or a personal reason we're disagreeing so instead of just repeating the things at each other let's have an exploration to find out what what really is the philosophical difference that's caused us to come out on different sides of this issue and again we're at a joint exploration and so these are all occasions when you can take bitter disagreement and at least open up channels of communication will it always work and believe me I've been attacked in public by people who hate my point of view on one issue or another and I do not always rise to the occasion I sometimes sync to the volley of anger and anger but I have found 90% of the time if someone viciously attacks you and you email them back or you say hey can I buy a beer you a beer immediately everything changes from bitterness as soon as you show a little modicum of respect suddenly they're like yeah let's talk about that so a question from Don Morgan who asked what social structures platforms and institutions might facilitate the kinds of deep conversations you're talking about yeah first um I somehow as listening to the question I'm reminded if anybody remembers there's a book called called about the tiger mom by Amy Chua H and she was like how to raise smart and high achieving kids and she was one of the things she said I don't let my kids my daughters go to sleepovers with other teenage girls because I want them to do something cognitively demanding like practice the violin and my reaction on reading that believe me there's nothing more cognitively demanding than going on a sleepover with a bunch of 13-year-old girls like that is the most cognitive thing you can possibly do the Dynamics social dynamics um and so I do think those kinds of encounters which kids are not getting because of phones uh are one training one way we train the second thing I think is um is extended families that back in the day when people had three or four generation families there was a lot of again a lot of Dynamics to negotiate uh and so you had to go to Aunts Uncles grandparents uh cousins and so that was seems to me intimate training in this kind of advanced social skills and then I do think um churches played a bigger role than they do now and I think schools played a bigger role and up until 20 or 30 years ago it was a norm for schools to think our job here is moral formation that's our job here it's not to get our kids into Harvard or Yale our go job is to make people better versions of themselves and to be considerate and part of being considerate and in my sense the first part of being considerate and being a moral person is paying the right kind of attention to other people everything else follows you paying the right kind of attention and usually as the philosopher Irish Murdoch said we pay attention to others in self-centered degrading ways uh and if we can grow by looking as she writes then we've become morally transformed uh and I I've quoted Jesus already but I'll quote a higher authority uh which is Ted lasso uh and so Ted was um if anybody saw that program he's asked in season one um uh what's your goal as a soccer coach and his answer is I just want to make my players better versions of of themselves on and off the field and that's that's moral formation and I think it's our inability to do moral formation has caused this deterioration in our inability to relate to another in an intelligent way you mentioned both Iris Murdoch and churches and we have questions on both so rert M Harris asked how has Iris Murdoch influenced you yeah a great deal and you know I I I learned that I I was influenced by her through three women who I wrote about in the current issue of comment she Irish Murdoch was influenced powerfully by Simone V and so I wrote about Simone VY Eddie Hillis and Edith sty and these were three women born in Jewish homes caught in the Holocaust uh and so they're living in the horrors of World War II one in France one in Germany one in Amsterdam and they're surrounded by barbarism and the men are fighting and Eddie Hillis who was the one living in Amsterdam uh started out the war as a self-centered brat basically but she became more compassionate as she watched people getting shipped out to the death camps and as conditions got worse and the war got more brutal she got more gentle more Humane more other centered and by the end of the war she was serving in a death camp and but she was a a source of joy for others and people recounted her as this generous unbelievably generous person and her biographer wrote about her that she grew by paying close attention to others the cck of the neck the anxiety in their voice the hunger in their eyes pay close attention to others and serve those needs and you see this woman in her Diaries over the course of four years in these horrible circumstances really Rising into some sort of Saint like like presence almost and E the Stein the same thing happened to her and she literally was canonized as a saint and Simon ve was the same Simon ve said uh attention is the essential moral act and that prayer is a form of attention uh and it's that kind of attention I'm reminded of a quote I saw from Mother Teresa was interviewed by Dan Rather and he said when you pray uh uh what do you tell God and she said well I don't really tell him anything I just listen to him and he said well what is God telling you and she said well God is just listening to we're just listening to each other and she says if you can't explain understand that I can't explain it to you and so I I do think it is that act of attention that these three women really found Central which then Simone VY wrote which then Irish Murdoch turned into a philosophy that male philosophers build these vast moral systems think of Emmanuel Kant but a lot of the men are blind to the systems of care that that are right around them and Edith Murdoch Iris Murdoch and Edith Stein and Eddie Hillis simm andone they were attentive to the systems of care in the daily acts of daily life even amidst the hor of war and I found them very inspiring it's beautiful so Nathan Swanson asked how can local congregations or other places of worship help Foster The Deep conversations among members so they sense that they're known by others in the congregation yeah I do think a lot of it is having conversations like that are going to happen after our session here I mean and make them storytelling conversations uh I I never ask people what do you believe about this I say how'd you come to believe that and suddenly they're telling me about a person who shaped their values who's important or some experience they had uh and you know the best ones you know there're all these curricula you can have and I'm if you read my book you'll get a bunch of questions but a lot of it is just being natural and hanging out with each other uh and especially in times of of suffering uh and in those moments when somebody is grieving their mental models of the world have collapsed because their mental models were framed about the husband or wife who they just lost or the kid they just lost and they're in the moment these moments where your mental models are res shifting are moments of intense pain because it's just painful to go through one of these transitions of you had this connection suddenly that connection is gone if you lose a husband your the fibers of your brain are reaching out to him but he's not there it's just intensely painful so sitting through somebody as they process that grief I put in the book a story and this was in a chapter of how to sit with those who are suffering um a woman uh who lost her husband and she's walking out of her apartment building I think in Washington and she's um a a neighbor who knows what's happened screams at her from across the street and she says you'll think you'll think you're sane but you're not not and what she means is you don't understand how grief is going to destabilize you over the next year and she said that was so profound because within six months I was I was at the CVS and I was screaming at the employees because they were playing you'll He'll Be Home For Christmas on the sound system and I knew my husband would not be home for Christmas so I started screaming at them and it was a form of CLE temporary derangement and so sitting with someone and this is what churches and synagogues and Mos are great at they when somebody's in suffering people know to show up and I worry about all these people who are de Church they may have friends but they don't people don't know to show up if there's no institution around them and I'm afraid we're going to see a lot of that kind of loneliness because people are under institutionalized and David Richards asks some people have learned that it isn't safe for them to be open or vulnerable and sharing about themselves an Illuminator may have the best intentions asking thoughtful and seeing questions but the receiver might see those as intrusive or threatening do you have thoughts on how to approach conversations without awareness yeah there's a quote in the book from um thh Lawrence that you should approach um somebody the way you would approach a do uh Fawn in the forest with a complete absence of will complete patience uh and you just need to take your time and that process you can't really have a lot of these deep conversations unless trust has been established so the way trust is established there's a chapter on accompaniment which is a Pope Francis comment or concept that he talks about a lot and accompaniment is just another centered way of being in the world and so uh we think of the way a Pianist accompanies a singer you're just paying attention to them trying to make the singer shine and so the easy form of accompaniment is just small talk and a lot of people have a negative view of small talk I do not I like small talk cuz it when we're doing Small Talk we're just getting used to to each other and we're never going to feel safe with each other in the mind unless we our bodies feel safe around each other and so if we're talking about sports or weather or whatever I'm just getting a little to know you and you got to go through that process of getting to know before you can feel safe and having a deeper conversation another thing that I just think is super valuable is play I mentioned my friend Pete and I we played basketball we played softball we did all this stuff but plays were natural we're not overly conscious but we're high-fiving Trash Talk passing the ball and I know people who play basketball in weekly basketball game they may have never had a deep conversation in their life but they probably surrender their lives to each other because in play they've really become close friends I had an episode that reminded me of how powerful play has in my own family my oldest was at the time like 14 months old we were living in Brussels and he got up at 4:00 a.m. and I didn't go off to work till 10:00 a.m. so we had six hours of play every morning while I or at least he played while I tried to sleep um but I remember once when he was about 14 months old I he I looked at him and I thought I probably know him better than I've ever known anybody and he's probably knows me better than anybody's ever known me because I've been so openly emotional while playing with his trains and we never said a word to each other because he couldn't talk and so it was that that act of play prepares you for the stages when you can really have the deeper conversations so it is a gradual process and you you can't rush it yeah so so many questions and apologies to all of you who are uh asking them we will not be able to get to all of them but U there's a question from an anonymous viewer asking how much do you think of marital Discord is due to the inability to actually see each other yeah I think when you have a couple that one of the things I learned is you I you quoted that statistic from a guy named William micus that uh when we meet somebody we see the other person accurately only 22% of the time that same researcher found that the longer people are married the less they see each other uh not always but typically and that's because they have an early model in their head of who that person was and then over the years the person changed and they haven't updated their models and so even though you can be married to somebody for a long time you can still be kind of oblivious about their deepest desires or you know how the wound their childhood show up and a lot of marriage really is like reminding people of who who I am right now and and a lot of it is that sort of communication of who here's who I am right now here's my desires right now uh and here's how childhood is affecting how I see this right now and so I do think one of the reasons marriage is suffer is people become strangers to each other uh and um it's int having intentional conversations is a skill and how many times have you gone off I always tell my students marriage is a 50-year conversation talk someone talk marry someone you want to talk to for the rest of your life you do not want to be that couple in Applebees who sit there silently with each other um you you and so pick someone you want to talk to all the time then the other bit of advice I give them is uh love comes and goes but admiration stays uh pick someone you admire uh and if you admire the person then you'll always have a sweet soft SP for them even if you fight we'll take one more question from Elizabeth UA who asked if you could talk a little bit more about the idea that people are not problems to be solved but creatures to be loved yeah we want to fix people and everyone comes to us with their flaws and their Brokenness uh and it just doesn't work that way people will only change after they feel understood uh and so you know I had a a friend who had a daughter in second grade and she was struggling and the teacher said to her you know you're really good at thinking before you speak and that little comment turned the girl's whole year around because suddenly she thought this weakness uh social awkwardness suddenly oh no that's a strength I am thoughtful uh and so she wasn't fixing her she was just seeing some potential in her and we we try to give each other the personalities we can go with the reputations we can then go live into and so I'll close with this the there's a scene from a movie I hope everybody's seen called Goodwill Hunting and in that movie The Robin Williams character pulls the Matt Damon character out to a pond and the Matt Damon character has been this math Wiz the whole movie but the Robin Williams character says you know I ask you about war you probably quote shakes smar once Ms into the breach I ask you about peace you probably quote or love you probably quote me a son it but you've never been in a war and you've never been vulnerable with a woman so when I look at you I don't see a confident man I see scared kid and there's nothing you about you that I can't learn in some book and then he says unless you want to talk about you who you really are then I'm fascinated and but you don't want to do that because you don't know what you might say and in that speech the Robin William character is doing something to me profound he's like saying first I see the thing that you're most trying to hide which is you're terrified of life I see that I put it on the table and it's going to be okay and then he says and plus I'm going to critique you with care I'm going to direct you in a way that where you can fix yourself and all I have to do is point out that there are two types of knowledge there's the technical knowledge we learn in books then the personal knowledge we learn from emotional openness from actual relationships from actual experiences and so all the Robin Williams character is doing saying you're really good at book knowledge you're not so good on this other kind and in the movie The Matt Damon characters he launches off in life to be better at the other kind it's a beautiful example of listening well and then critiquing with care not trying to fix just trying to say here's how I see you from a position of unconditional love David that's great and in just a moment I want to give you the last word uh but before that a few things just to share with all of you who are watching first immediately after we conclude we'll be sending around a feedback form really encourage you to fill it out we always read these uh we try to take the advice to heart to make this an Ever more valuable program and as a small incentive and thank you for filling out that feedback form we will give you a code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice there are several that we would recommend that are Germain to our discussion one the long loneliness to which David and his wife an wrote the introduction but also from authors that we've actually discussed today Victor Frankle uh man search for meaning uh Simone V's a work wrestling with God as well as others augustin's Confections and on friendship that we'd recommend uh that pertain to today's discussion in addition for those of you who signed up for our postevent discussion groups after this webinar is over you can just exit it as you normally would and then click on the link that was sent to you this morning via email to enter those discussion groups if you haven't signed up for them and you want to participate there should be a link in the chat feature where you can join us for the next 45 minutes to talk through with others some of what we've talked about here today with David in addition tomorrow we will be sending out around noon a follow-up email that gives additional readings resources and as well as a video to today's online conversation to help one go deeper with some of the things that we've discussed as well as share this discussion with others so be on the lookout and finally we want to invite all of you who are watching to join the Trinity Forum Society which is the community of people who help Advance Trinity forums mission of cultivating curating and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good in addition to being part of the community there's a number of advantages to joining the Trinity form Society including a subscription to our quarterly readings our daily what we reading list of curated reading recommendations and as a special incentive for any new members of the Trinity form Society or with your gift of $100 or more we will send you a signed copy of David's excellent book how to know a person so we'd love to have you join us for those of you who are in DC if you are around next week on Monday October 30th we'll actually be hosting historian and presidential biographer Ron White on the unlikely heroism of Joshua Chamberlain and stay tuned for far more upcoming online conversations including on December 1st with Tish Harrison Warren on Advent finally if you are not always able to join our online conversations we do make these available by via podcast as well which are released later this coming Tuesday our next podcast released will be with Bonnie Christian on trust truth and the knowledge crisis and hope you'll be able to join us for that finally as promised David the last word is yours first I want to encourage people to join so they get your daily what what we're reading that the that daily email organizes my reading list every day so I I appreciate what the Trinity Forum does with that uh so my book is meant to be practical so I'll finish just with two practical hit tips and this is how to be a better conversationalist tips uh and one of them is don't be a Topper so if you tell me something you're having trouble with your teenage son my instinct is say oh I know exactly what you're going through I'm having a trouble with my teenage son and that seems like I'm just trying to relate to you but really I'm saying I don't really care about your problem let me talk about mine and so that's called topping don't be a topper and then the final one I don't know if this will work with a so uh Don't Fear the pause and so I read this from a book by Kate Murphy um and she says if I'm talking to you and there's a visual here which is my arm sticking out um if I'm talking to you and I start my comment at the shoulder and I talk all the way my fingertips at what point have you stopped listening so you can think of what you're going to say in response usually people stop right about here and so my advice is let me talk to my fingertips and then I have a friend who does this he he'll hold up his hand and he'll pause for three or four seconds as he tries to think of what's to say and I always feel wow he's really listening to me hard if he's really pausing you don't want to do it all the time if you're hanging around a bar you want the conversation to be fast and fluid but but if it's a deep conversation there something important then don't fear the pause let me talk to my fingertips pause and then think of what to say and that way you'll really really hear me David thank you so much this has been a real Delight oh thank you Sheree always a pleasure to be with you and thank you to all of you for joining us have a great [Music] weekend

Channel: The Trinity Forum

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Length: 64min 18sec (3858 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023