The Blog That Speaks: What Has Indian Curry to do with Listening
I had just finished presenting a paper on the subject of listening at a pentecostal academic meeting (Society for Pentecostal Studies) when I was asked, “I understand that I will always listen selectively, but how can I listen less selectively?”
My paper had drawn from Lizbeth Lipari by asserting that listening naturally involves listening selectively. When we are listening to a story, we inherently pick and choose what we hear based on who we are and the experiences we have had. This is comparable to my shopping among racks and racks of clothes, and I home in on the 100% cotton, blue shirts with stripes (my closet bears this out). Likewise, when I listen to others, I am more attracted to certain ideas, expressions, or words while paying less attention to other concepts. Like my zeroing in on blue-striped, cotton shirts, my selective listening is based on my background. Every experience, whether happy or sad, moral or immoral, useful or useless, influences us as we listen. Every relationship, whether an acquaintance or confidant, helpful or hurtful, from the past or the present, joins us as we listen. If I am in a room alone and I talk aloud to me, hundreds of voices are talking to me and hundreds of voices are simultaneously listening to me. In other words, when we listen to the other, or even ourselves, we do not listen alone, but our relationships and experiences guide our listening. As Lipari indicates, this is a description of how we listen as we cannot refrain from listening selectively (see also the blog I’m Listening (she says in her best Frasier voice)…or Not).
Listening selectively is similar to eating selectively. A case in point is my being raised on a beef farm in South Dakota. I grew up with a simple dietary regimen: meat and potatoes. Our meals were not elaborate even though we ate steak multiple times a week. Our family did not flavor steaks, hamburgers, or pot roast with teriyaki, Cajun, or delicate wines. Rather, we seasoned our beef with the refined condiments of ketchup and yellow mustard.
Neither did we customarily deviate from our meat-and-potato diet even when eating at a local restaurant. We typically dined at Harold’s Café in a nearby town in which the menu listed an American fare of steak, chicken, and burgers. Mom ordered broasted chicken, and Dad had hamburger steak.
My family’s food preferences are evidence that one’s upbringing shapes the kinds of restaurants and foods that one chooses. Our tastes in food are not completely our own but are influenced by previous experiences and relationships. That is, each of us eats selectively. Specific food choices for breakfast, lunch, and supper frequently reflect people’s upbringing, religious training, ethnicity, region, and culture. Those who were raised in the southern United States may champion grits and corn bread. Persons from Hispanic homes may desire beans and rice, and Jewish families may select Kosher foods.
Our palate mirrors our previous exposure. We are drawn to what we know.
Listening is similar in that we listen to what is most familiar. Analogous to my family choosing Harold’s Cafe and broasted chicken or hamburger steak from the menu, our listening is based on our upbringing, experiences, religious training, ethnicity, region, and culture. Like our food choices, the voices from our background join us as we listen to others.
This leads me back to this blog’s opening question: is there a way to listen more broadly, beyond our upbringing? Yes, I believe so. To demonstrate this, I return to my story about food preferences. Little did I know at age eighteen, my palate would undergo a change upon entering a new world called college.
The cusp of change began with a friendship. The resident director (RD) of the freshmen girls’ dorm had traveled the world. It was not surprising, then, when she introduced foods and customs from faraway places to young and naïve college students. Unfamiliar aromas periodically wafted throughout the old, three-story building as she prepared culinary delights from the islands of Fiji in her RD apartment. This was where my palate expanded. It was in this red brick building in a small farming community in North Dakota where my tastebuds first experienced Indian curry. And it would not be my last as my cuisine preferences quickly blossomed. What began as sampling Indian curry turned into savoring the world of curry: Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, and African. I explored chicken, beef, and goat curries. Chicken curry with potatoes. Meat and vegetable curry simmering in coconut milk with basil. Chicken curry with fruit.
From there, my tastes continued to diversify, and my food selections proceeded to broaden. I was introduced to other kinds of unfamiliar-to-me foods: tamarinds, mangoes, papaya, and plantain. I tried other cuisines: Caribbean, Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, and French. To borrow from Disney’s Aladdin, it was a whole new world of food. And it all began with a single friendship.
In like manner, if we desire to augment the voices that join us when we listen, I propose expanding our experiences. In the same way that my limited palate grew via a friendship, I believe our selective listening may also widen through relationships. These relationships are not just cultivated through friendships but also through books, lectures, interviews, art, music, histories, etc. While we can never stop listening selectively, we may be able to diversify the voices to which we listen so that we learn to listen less narrowly. In the end, it becomes a question: Are we open to expanding our selective listening? For instance,
- Pastor, have you led your White congregation through a study involving Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley?
- To my Caucasian male pastoral friends, when preparing for sermons or Bible studies, do you draw from commentators who are Asian, Latino, Black, or female?
- If you are an educator, are students required to read or listen to lectures from those of other cultures, race, or ethnicities rather than from those who are predominantly represented in your classroom?
- For all of us, who are our friends? Are they from other cultures, race, ethnicities? Are we cultivating relationships with those who are not of the same race or even of a different political stance from ourselves?
I believe that our willingness to increase the number of voices to whom we listen has become even more important today. Western culture has experienced a shift in the last thirty years. We have become less inclined to listen to voices different from our own. We are more likely only to converse with those from our tribe, so to speak. We are less likely to demonstrate a willingness to discuss and learn from different voices. No longer is difference seen as a thing of beauty but has become a threat to our own voice. We have entered into a period of tribalism, stifling the voices of those who are unlike ourselves.
We are so clamoring for recognition in this age of authenticity that other voices have become the enemy because the other’s recognition robs me of my recognition.
We prefer instruments to measure the size of our audience, such as the number of likes or followers, rather than the sharing of our common humanity.[1] As such, we have progressed from dialoguing with the other to plugging our ears to the other to seeking to silence the other’s voice.
As a Christian, this is disturbing. The church, too, has been guilty of erecting a wall against those who are not like ourselves, overlooking shared humanity. It may be men building barriers against women. The political right walling off the political left. Whites constructing fences against non-Whites. However, building barriers in the church has not only been a twenty-first century problem. It was also an issue in the book of Acts, which comes to the fore particularly in Acts 10.
At this point in the story of the church, the Spirit had predominately been poured out on Jews and Samaritans (who were partially Jewish). Having practiced for hundreds of years the importance of separating themselves from non-Jewish people, Jewish Christians would not have considered that Gentiles would experience an outpouring of the Spirit. Therefore, it is safe to say that in our story, Peter, a Jew, had inherent prejudices. F.F. Bruce expects that although these “prejudices were wearing thin by this time, . . . a special revelation was necessary to make him consent to visit a Gentile.”[2]
And so it happened . . .
Peter had gone to the rooftop to pray at noon while he was hungry when he had a vision. The vision was of a sheet being lowered in front of him, containing various kinds of animals that were both clean and unclean. Peter then heard a voice from heaven commanding him to kill and eat.
But being a Jew, Peter responded (v. 14) by saying, “Certainly not, Lord, for I have never eaten anything defiled and ritually unclean!” For Peter, the laws, which distinguished clean from unclean animals, were part of the Torah (see Lev. 11:2–47) and were to be strictly obeyed. It was part of his upbringing and religious training to avoid eating anything unclean. For instance, animals identified with four legs that both chewed a cud and had cloven hooves were clean and therefore fit to eat, e.g. sheep. Animals which chewed a cud but did not have divided hooves were not fit to eat, e.g., camel. For Peter, eating anything unclean was not open for a debate.
Ajith Fernando points out that Peter’s response contains a contradiction. On the one hand, Peter says “Lord,” indicating obedience and honor toward Jesus Christ. On the other hand, he refuses to obey the command to eat what is being presented to him.[3] His resistance reveals how deeply ingrained it is in Peter not to eat that which is unclean. This resistance is based on his upbringing and religious training. Thus, the voice from heaven presses the matter further: “What God has made clean, you must not consider ritually unclean!”
It was critical for Peter to understand the vision’s message. So much so, it occurred not only once but three times! Yet, this was not God merely calling Peter to expand his palate, but rather it was a call to welcome the Gentiles into the church. As Bruce writes, “The divine cleansing of food in the vision is a parable of the divine cleansing of human beings.”[4] As Peter later tells the story: “I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism in dealing with people but in every nation the person who fears him and does what is right is welcomed before him” (10:34-35). Indirectly, Peter (and later the church in chapter 11) is embarking on a journey of learning to listen more broadly.
Like Peter, increasing our level of inclusivity and expanding beyond our narrow, selective listening may involve deliberate choices on our part since we naturally gravitate to those who are similar. Will I ever stop listening like a White, American woman from rural South Dakota? Not completely. After all, I still love red meat with a baked potato or French fries. However, I have the capacity not only to expand my palate but also broaden the number voices that join me when I listen. This is a way to strengthen my listening skills.
If we are genuinely sincere about learning to listen less selectively, then it is imperative that we ask ourselves, “To whom are we predominately listening? Are they limited to voices that are like our own?” May it be that we broaden the voices to which we listen in such a way that we do not fail to miss what the Holy Spirit is saying and doing in the world today.
[1] For more on this topic, see Andrew Root, Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025), ch. 3. Root writes, “Everyone is an expert, leading to conflicts at every level as people fight for an audience. There is nothing objective but persuasion itself . . . It’s not credentials but followers that matter.” Root, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, 92.
[2] F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of Acts (Grand Rapids: Wm B Eerdmans, 1984), 217.
[3] Ajith Fernando, Acts: The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 320.
[4] Bruce, The Book of the Acts, 207-208.
Image of listening by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay