Paralyzed Chickens

Presidential Blog by Dr. Gerry Turcotte, President and Vice-Chancellor at St. Mark’s and Corpus Christi College, University of British Columbia

Do not speak in the hearing of a fool,
Who will only despise the wisdom of your words.
Proverbs 23:9

I’ve written before about mondegreens, that wonderful phenomenon in language where a misheard phrase is substituted for the real thing, usually in music. Two such examples of this are Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, which some listeners hear as ‘ducks are hazards in the classroom’, and Eddy Money’s classic line: ‘I’ve got two chickens to paralyze’. Substitute ‘dark sarcasm’ and ‘two tickets to paradise’, and you are closer to the originals.

Classrooms are also places rampant with misunderstandings, though perhaps none as cute as the following from a Bible studies class where an elementary school student explained that the epistles were the wives of the apostles. Another in-class survey of elementary school children revealed the following: ‘Christians should only have one spouse. It’s called monotony.’ Or: ‘Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark.’ My favourite was the child who claimed that Solomon had 300 wives but 700 porcupines! Cohabitation can be prickly.

While these may be legitimate misunderstandings, I do sometimes feel that, in some matters, we only hear what we want to hear. There’s a cute cartoon of an elderly couple where the wife complains to her husband that he only hears what he wants to hear, to which he replies, ‘thanks, I’d love a beer.’ Selective hearing, though, is no laughing matter. It is the subject of management textbooks, media workshops and even psychological training manuals.

I think it’s fair to say that there are many reasons for this widely shared trait. It may be that that we simply don’t want to take on a task that is being asked of us. It is often because the news we are hearing is threatening or upsetting. At times it is because we have already decided what an individual is likely to say, and so we hear what we expect. Indeed, in such cases, it matters little what the actual message might be — we’ve determined our response well in advance.

Whatever the case, no conversations ever take place in isolation. I have heard people say that they pray to God, but never hear back! I can’t help but wonder if the reality is that they don’t like the answer they’re getting back. But selective hearing isn’t only a deficit — it’s also a positive. Think of professionals forced to work in crowded, noisy spaces. The first responder listening to a victim in the midst of chaos all around her; a crisis-call responder in a busy call centre. If you ask these people how they do this kind of work, their answer is always humble, and straight to the point: practice. Perhaps, in the end, prayer is the same. We need to learn to focus, to listen, to filter out the white noise, in order to hear the voice of God. But most importantly, we have to be prepared for the answer we may not want. If we do this, then, in the words of Isaiah: ‘the eyes of those who have sight will not be closed; and the ears of those who have hearing will listen.’

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