Golden Rules

4. BE A GOOD LISTENER

How to use these suggestions

These are not ready made assemblies - you will need to do some preparatory work, however I hope these suggestions will give you starting points. The suggestions fall into three groups.

Comments

This is perhaps one of the easiest of the rules for which to find related themes. As well as exploring why and how we should listen, we can also think about the people to whom we should listen and those it is right to ignore. Some messages are good and some are bad - e.g. malicious gossip and incitement to do wrong. There is a wide variety of things to listen to - stories and music to cheer us or calm us, instructions to follow, opinions to discuss, things which people say about themselves which help us to get to know them.... We can think about listening not only to adults but also to children, and those whom we may not have thought had anything worthwhile to say. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...."
We can think of the people who listen to us and give thanks for them, and we can think of God as a listener, which provides a ready made way into prayer, and we can think about what the Bible says about the need to listen to God.

We can think of how it feels to be heard and how it feels to be ignored.
We can reflect on the distinction between hearing words and doing nothing on the one hand, and hearing and acting on the other. The Bible often talks of those who have ears to hear, and contrasts them with those who hear and hear but do not understand or respond.

God is...

Christians believe that we are made in the image of God. Therefore our values reflect our ideas of God.They are not arbitrary, nor do they just apply to children. They are an expression of what we believe is at the heart of God.
'We love because he first loved us." (I John 4:19).
Reflecting on the 'God is...' section of the suggestions from time to time takes us beyond mere " oughtism" and dry morality, and counters the danger that this sort of assembly only touches social and moral dimensions of life and ignores the spiritual.

1. God is...a good listener

We make a basic assumption when we pray that God is a good listener. Sometimes people may feel that they are alone , " Why, O Lord, do you stand far off " says the Psalmist (Psalm 10:1), but eventually the same Psalm tells us that God hears and acts "You hear 0, Lord the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, you listen to their cry." (Psalm 10: 17)

Moses discovers that, though he thought he was the only one to be aware that the Israelites were suffering, God had been listening all along, and was prepared to act to help. " I have heard [my people] crying out ... So I have come down to rescue them... " Exodus 3:7

In the Gospels Jesus is shown as someone who listened to and heard those whom others ignored - e.g. Women, children, those with disabilities, foreigners.

2. Stories

3. Words for reflection

Many of these are from the book of proverbs and the psalms. You might need to paraphrase a little. I have only used words from the Bible, but you could use other proverbs or poems in the same way. To avoid making assumptions about the children's own beliefs, it would be wise to explain that these were the words of Jewish or Christian people, expressing the way they understood things, e.g. "someone wrote these words in the Bible a long time ago. I wonder whether you agree with them / what you think about them / how they make you feel/ what you think he might have felt or meant by them."

You could,

  • write them on a large sheet of paper
  • unpack their meaning with the children
  • repeat them several times ( make up a tune and sing them) , then invite the children to say the words to themselves in their mind ( St. Benedict called it ruminating -like cows chewing the cud
  • learn them by heart
  • use them as a response during some prayers or reflection
  • draw them, act them ...

You could also

  • Explore the opposite of each rule using stories that illustrate what happens when we are not gentle and kind etc.....
  • Explore the process of keeping a rule. I saw an assembly about taking care of things, in which children who had carefully made a model were asked how it felt when they were making it and how they felt about it now.
  • Explore the reasons why we find it hard to keep rules.
  • Explore what we do when we fail. Saying sorry, being forgiven and making things right again are important skills.

Links to other Golden Rules pages