By Brother Walt
Every year, the Community of Francis and Clare gathers for Chapter.
Because we’re a dispersed Franciscan community, Chapter matters. Most of the year, our members live their vocations in different places. We pray in our own homes. We serve in our own churches, ministries, neighborhoods, and communities. We gather on Zoom. We meet in small clusters. We stay connected through email, prayer, formation, and friendship.
But once a year, we come together with a different kind of presence.
We pray together. We share meals. We sit in conversation. We remember that community isn’t an idea or a structure or a list of names. It’s a living body. It’s a shared way of life. It’s a commitment to keep showing up to God, to one another, and to the world with as much humility, honesty, and love as we can.
This year’s Chapter invited us to reflect on what it means to go deeper in community. And it became clear pretty quickly that one of the ways we do that is by learning to listen more faithfully.
Not just to be polite. Not simply to keep a conversation moving. And not as a strategy for getting along.
The deeper invitation is to listen as an act of love. To listen with reverence for the person in front of us. To listen with enough humility to believe that God is present in what another person is trying to say.
That last part matters.
In our Rule, the vow of obedience is understood in a contemporary way as humility. It reminds us that God is within and beyond us. God speaks in creation, in the lives of those we serve, and in the hearts of our companions. Then the Rule offers this simple and searching line: “We try never to be so full of ourselves that we cannot listen to others.”
That sentence has stayed with me.
Because it’s so easy to become full of ourselves.
Not necessarily in an arrogant or obvious way. Most of us don’t walk around consciously trying to dominate others. But we can become full of our opinions. Full of our fears. Full of our assumptions. Full of our need to be understood. Full of the story we’ve already written about who someone else is, what they mean, or why they said what they said.
We can even become full of our own good intentions.
And when we’re that full, there isn’t much room left for another person to enter.
Listening asks us to make room.
It asks us to set down, at least for a moment, the need to correct, advise, defend, explain, interpret, or fix. It asks us to trust that the person before us is not an interruption to our spiritual life, but a place where God may be meeting us. It asks us to believe that another person’s experience might have something to teach us, even when it’s different from our own. Perhaps especially then.
That doesn’t mean listening is passive. It doesn’t mean we stop discerning. It doesn’t mean every word spoken carries the same wisdom. Humble listening is not the same as abandoning judgment or pretending truth doesn’t matter.
But it does mean we begin from a different posture.
We don’t begin by assuming we already know. We don’t begin by preparing our rebuttal. We don’t begin by reaching for the fastest answer. We begin by making space. We begin by honoring the person before us. We begin with humility.
In the Franciscan way, humility is not humiliation. It’s not thinking poorly of ourselves. It’s knowing our right size before God. Francis understood this deeply. He knew that when we stop trying to stand above others, we become free to stand with them. We become free to receive. We become free to notice Christ where we might otherwise have missed him.
That kind of listening is needed everywhere.
It’s needed in families where old patterns make real conversation difficult. It’s needed in churches where people are tired, tender, or afraid. It’s needed in public life, where shouting has so often replaced understanding. It’s needed in friendships, marriages, workplaces, ministries, neighborhoods, and anywhere people are trying to live together without losing sight of one another’s dignity.
And yes, it’s needed in religious community too.
At Chapter, we were reminded that listening is one of the quiet practices that forms us. It slows us down. It softens the hard edges. It helps us resist the temptation to turn people into problems, positions, or projects. It creates enough space for grace to get in.
Maybe that’s why listening can feel harder than speaking. Speaking often lets us stay in control. Listening asks us to be changed. It asks us to let another person’s joy, grief, confusion, longing, wisdom, or pain matter to us. It asks us to receive the person in front of us not as an argument to be answered, but as a bearer of the image of God.
That’s an act of love.
It’s also a discipline. Most of us won’t become better listeners simply because we admire the idea. We’ll need to practice. We’ll need to pause before responding. We’ll need to notice when we’re preparing our answer instead of receiving what’s being said. We’ll need to ask God to show us where we’ve become too full of ourselves.
We’ll need to make room for the voice that comes slowly, quietly, awkwardly, or differently from our own.
And when we fail, which we will, we can begin again.
That, too, is part of humility.
The invitation of Chapter doesn’t end when Chapter ends. It follows us back into the ordinary places where our lives unfold. Into the next conversation. The next email. The next family gathering. The next meeting. The next moment when we’re tempted to speak too quickly or assume too much.
To listen with humility is to make room for God.
It is to honor the Christ within another.
It is to love.
And it may be one of the most Franciscan things we can do.
