Conversation—The Sacred Art: Practicing Presence in an Age of Distraction

Praise for Conversation—The Sacred Art: Practicing Presence in an Age of Distraction

This is a book you will linger with—as you do, after a meal, over a cup of coffee, when the conversation is as nourishing as the food.

—Sharon Daloz Parks, co-author, Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World; former associate professor, Harvard Divinity School and Weston Jesuit School of Theology

Exquisite.... Diane Millis writes with the grace, wisdom and caring of a wise and skillful spiritual director, leading us all to touch the sacred within ourselves, within others and in the midst of all of our conversations.

—Rabbi Amy Eilberg, Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, St. Paul, Minnesota

A beautiful book filled with exquisite insights, practices and stories. They illuminate our heart and mind and awaken us to Presence.

—Imam Jamal Rahman, author, Spiritual Gems of Islam: Insights & Practices from the Qur’an, Hadith, Rumi & Muslim Teaching Stories to Enlighten the Heart & Mind

Integrates the author’s intensive study of spiritual guidance with her personal and professional experiences [and] offers both inspiration and practical guidance to restore the art of conversation as a sacred activity.

—Dr. Aostre N. Johnson, professor of education, Saint Michael’s College

Plunges us into that holy space from which we can connect with God, with ourselves and especially with others at a depth we would have thought impossible. Our conversations will never be the same after reading this book—they will be infinitely richer.

—John Backman, author, Why Can’t We Talk?: Christian Wisdom on Dialogue as a Habit of the Heart

Diane Millis knows that our conversation reveals us to others, and, done right—caring more important than understanding, talking balanced with restraint and periodic silence—reveals to us depths we didn’t know we have. She has learned much from others, and shares her own practical wisdom, most forcefully and poignantly demonstrated in the transition from ‘broken apart’ to ‘breaking open.’

—Patrick Henry, retired executive director, Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research; author, The Ironic Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World

Profound ... teaches us how conversation—listening, speaking, and even silence—can help us genuinely connect to others and even ourselves through our hearts, deepening our relationships, recognizing God within us and God between us.

—Sara Hacala, author, Saving Civility: 52 Ways to Tame Rude, Crude, and Attitude for a Polite Planet

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For Mark and Ryan

We mark with light in the memory

the few interviews we have had

with souls that made our souls wiser,

that spoke what we thought,

that told us what we knew,

that gave us leave to be

what we truly are.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

PART ONE

WHAT IS THE SACRED ART OF CONVERSATION?

Chapter 1:    Encountering the Sacred Within

Practice: Entering the Cave of Your Heart

Practice: Listening to the Conversation in Your Heart

Chapter 2:    Encountering the Sacred in Each Other

Reflection: Souls Who Have Made Us Wiser

Practice: Tending One Another’s Light—Holding, Beholding, and Being Held

Chapter 3:    Encountering the Sacred Between Us

Reflection: Increasing Awareness of the Sacred Between Us

PART TWO

GATEWAYS FOR CONVERSATION

Chapter 4:    Listening to Your Life

Reflection: Steppingstones on the Journey

Chapter 5:    Noticing and Naming What Gives You Life

Reflection: Nurturing Awareness of What You Hold Sacred

Reflection: Looking at the World with the Eyes of a Poet

Chapter 6:    Discerning a Heart-Centered Path

Reflection: Listening to Your Inner Guide

Reflection: The Thread You Follow

PART THREE

PRACTICING THE SACRED ART OF CONVERSATION

Chapter 7:    Practicing Attentive Presence: Listening Within Before Speaking Out

Practice: Three Deep Breaths

Practice: Centering on the Breath

Chapter 8:    Practicing Receptive Presence: Welcoming All That We Encounter

Reflection: The Three Gates

Practice: The Welcoming Prayer

Chapter 9:    Practicing Compassionate Presence: Going Within Before Venturing Out

Practice: Offering the Gift of Contemplative Questions

Practice: Sacred Holding

Practice: Compassionate Abiding

Conclusion

APPENDICES

THE SACRED ART OF CONVERSATION IN COMMUNITY: CREATING OCCASSIONS FOR CONTEMPLATIVE CONVERSATIONS

Appendix 1:    Cultivating Contemplation and Compassion in Community through Journey Conversations

Appendix 2:    Appreciatively Focused Conversations at Home and Work

Appendix 3:    Conversation Catalysts

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Journey Conversations Project

Credits

About the Authors

Copyright

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FOREWORD

Listen well

Speak truth

Be peace

These simple words, written to me on a bookmark from the author, say so much about this invaluable book. They advocate the kind of intention that we and the whole world need to bring to conversations at every level if we are to fulfill the promise of human community and minimize soul-killing and conflict-inducing conversations.

The great practical value of this book is that it not only gives us an overarching sacred intention for our conversations, but it also provides concrete and tested ways to carry out that intention. Diane M. Millis’s goal is to help us find a way to approach conversation as a spiritual practice and subsequently approach each other’s lives as works of art. Yet this approach is challenged by so much in our culture, keeping us on the unsatisfying, fearful, and role playing surface with one another.

Dr. Millis has a wonderful practice of placing a glass bowl of water in the middle of a group, symbolizing a still, contemplative container that invites us to see the reflection of our own and other’s deepest truths together. To reach such depth we need to listen and speak from our spiritual heart rather than from our ego self-centeredness and stereotyping thoughts. We need to be open to our own personal depths as well as those of others in the conversation, and we need to hear what is presented to us in the sacred space between us. Time for a listening silence is needed as well as space for speaking, since the fullness of awareness is found beyond words.

From my many years of structuring small groups in the ecumenical Shalem Institute’s contemplative leadership programs, I can attest to the priceless value of this basic way of being with others. We give a great deal of weight to dropping behind the self-centered and stereotyping ego level so that we can listen from the deepest place in us—our spiritual heart.

In this sense, our spiritual heart is more than the place of our feelings and will; it is also the place of a different faculty of knowing in us, the place of a more direct, intuitive awareness. In contemplative terms, we could speak of the heart as the place of deepest intimacy with the divine Presence. It is the place where our receptive spirit blends with the Holy Spirit’s movements and we find ourselves hearing and responding from the fruit of that blending.

In order for our heart to be ascendant, we need to approach it with great openness, clinging to nothing but our desire for loving truth. We must be willing to live in the fresh, immediate, living moment, released from our securing, controlling views, and give our trust to the larger sacred Presence. We need to bring to the moment only our desire for whatever wisdom and compassion is meant for us to receive or offer.

In my experience, such a shared intention in a group, lived out in a carefully structured process that gives that intention maximum opportunity to be fulfilled, bears enormous fruit for group members—sometimes life-transforming fruit.

Diane Millis provides such a crucial structure, with many witnesses to its incredible value for people’s awareness of their deeper selves, one another, and the sacred reality alive between them. Because she has formed interfaith groups whose members don’t share the same religious vocabulary, she has used helpful language for the sacred that can cross many boundaries. That, in itself, is a great contribution of this book, since interfaith, as well as questioner faith, relationships are so important for our shared well-being today. The process she provides brings people together across boundaries at the heart level, allowing so much fuller sharing together. She treats such collective deep listening as an act of love, listening for sacred currents beneath the surface stream of life.

Listening from the heart assumes the dignity of each person as a unique image of God. It assumes that within us we can access particular loving wisdom meant for us and others, wisdom that is compatible with the depth wisdom of our religious traditions. As Dr. Millis says, Each of our lives is a source of sacred truth. The price of such access is letting go of our self-centeredness and vulnerably opening the door to our larger, truer self in the sacred, loving Light. When we’re empowered to do that, we find the inner authority of our own deep awareness and its creative and compassionate callings.

Such a way of being together also connects with the wide-scale rise of one-on-one spiritual companioning in many churches and spiritual centers in recent decades, as well as with the rise of small group spiritual direction. Millis shows us the value of a wider range of possible heart-centered conversation groups today.

Think what a difference it could make both inside and outside the religious world if such listening and responding from the heart were more widespread. So many human conflicts and misunderstandings flow from fearful, over-securing, stereotyping ego centeredness. When we can let our egos become functional vessels of our deeper heart-centered awareness, rather than the ultimate definers of who we and others are, there is so much more revelation and compassion available to us in our relationships.

Diane Millis’s passion for helping us relate to ourselves, one another, and the divine Presence on a deeper level has led to her valuable research, teaching, and culminating articulation in this book of how we can be together in a crucial way for our own and for others’ sake, and ultimately for the peace of the world. What she offers us is both a mature understanding of who we most deeply are and how we can bring that refreshing and liberating depth into our relationships. I expect that everyone who reads this book will be left with a larger sense of how conversation can become a soul-inspiring sacred art.

Rev. Tilden Edwards, PhD

Founder and Senior Fellow

Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation

INTRODUCTION

When is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew? That you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane? And then fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards, you know? I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing, like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.

—John O’Donohue, On Being

I accompanied my husband, Mark, to dinner that evening with mixed feelings. I anticipated yet another night filled with conversations focused on health care, interspersed with snippets of talk about children or upcoming vacations. Since I didn’t work in health care and I didn’t have children at the time, I hoped I