On the afternoon of October 4th, the feast of St. Francis, a circle of chairs filled at San Damiano. It was the first gathering of Common Ground, a year of conversations we have begun here, one Sunday afternoon a month, asking what an eight-hundred-year-old Franciscan story might have to say to the way we live now. Some in the circle were longtime retreatants. Some had grown up in the Church and left it. Some had come because a friend asked them to. A few, I suspect, were not entirely sure why they had come at all.
Before I said a word about Francis, I asked them to remember something. Think of a conversation from this past year that went badly. Not a catastrophe. Just one of those conversations where, somewhere along the way, somebody stopped listening. Maybe it was them. Maybe it was you.
We sat with that in silence. Then I asked one more question, and asked them to share the answer with someone they did not know: What did that conversation need that it didn’t get?
What the Wall Said
Carrie Rehak, one of our facilitators, wrote the answers on newsprint as they came. Patience. Listening. Curiosity. Kindness. Honesty. Sensitivity. Attunement. Openness. Softening.
And then a few that stopped me. The assumption that we are the same, without checking. Not seeing, or not honoring, the other person’s boundary. And one that every one of us has thought at some point, whether or not we have said it out loud: Why can’t they read my mind?
Look at that list again, and notice what is missing from it. Nobody asked for better facts. Nobody asked for a sharper argument, a cleverer comeback, or a more persuasive point of view. Not one word on that wall was about winning. Every one of them was about attention: the quality of presence we bring, or fail to bring, to the person in front of us.
Most of us have been trained to think of a conversation as an exchange of positions. I state mine. You state yours. We see whose survives. When it goes badly, we assume we needed better positions. But a room full of people, asked to remember their own hard conversations, said something quite different. The problem was never the argument. The problem was that somewhere along the way, someone stopped listening and started waiting to speak.
That is not a communication problem. It is a spiritual one.
The Ear of the Heart
Near the end of his life, Francis wrote a letter to all of his brothers. He did not open it with instructions or corrections. He opened it with an invitation: Hear, my lords, my sons and my brothers, and with your ears receive my words. Incline the ear of your heart.
In the Scriptures, the heart is not the seat of our sentiments. It is the center of the whole person, the place where we think, choose, and are known by God. To listen with the heart, then, is not to listen sentimentally. It is to listen with everything we are, and to let what we hear actually reach us before we decide what to do with it.
Here is the hard truth the wall revealed. Most of the time, we listen with our ears and answer from our habits. The words go in, and the reply comes out along the groove where every earlier reply has run. We hear the first sentence and we already know, or think we know, where the other person is going. We have assigned them a category before they have finished being a person.
The Sultan’s Tent
Which brings me to the story at the center of that first afternoon.
In 1219, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, two armies were dug in against each other outside the city of Damietta in Egypt. Everyone knew who the enemy was. And Francis, with one companion, walked across the lines.
He was brought before the Sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil, and instead of what anyone expected, the two men talked, by the old accounts for days. Francis did not convert the Sultan. The Sultan did not execute this strange, barefoot man from Italy. He listened to him, and sent him back across the lines safely, with a gift: an ivory horn that is still kept in Assisi.
Neither man set down his convictions. What each brought besides was attention. Each met the other as a person, and not as the category that centuries of conflict had assigned him. When Francis came home, he wrote into his Rule that any brothers who went to live among Muslims were, first of all, not to engage in arguments or disputes. In the middle of a holy war, the first instruction was this: don’t argue. Be present. Let your life speak.
What It Stirred
At the end of the afternoon we gathered what the circle had heard, and what it had stirred. I want to be honest about the second of those, because it may be the most important thing we wrote.
People named curiosity, patience, a willingness to try. But they also named the wish to fix things. The temptation to play devil’s advocate. The worry of not “getting it.” And one person wrote six words I have not been able to put down: Excited to stay. Scared, want to flee.
I recognize that sentence. I suspect you do too. It is exactly what happens inside us when a real conversation begins: the part of us that leans in, and the part that is already looking for the door, or the counterargument, or the fix. Listening with the heart does not mean those impulses disappear. It means we notice them. We notice the urge to fix before we start fixing. We notice the urge to oppose before we start opposing. We notice, we pause, and only then do we respond.
That was the rhythm we practiced in small groups that afternoon. First, what I heard. Then, what I noticed in myself. Then, what I am wondering. Opinions come later, and they come better that way.
Like-Hearted
Near the end, the circle began asking about itself. Are we diverse enough? What do we even mean by diversity? How do we keep from assuming we are all alike?
And then someone offered a phrase that may become the quiet motto of the whole year. Perhaps, they said, we are not looking for people who are like-minded. Perhaps we are looking for people who are like-hearted.
Like-minded asks us to agree before we can belong. Like-hearted asks only that we share a willingness to listen: to come as guests rather than combatants, and to let the other person be more than their position. You can be like-hearted with someone whose vote, faith, or background is nothing like your own. In fact, that may be the only place where real conversation across our differences can begin.
That is the different way of thinking Common Ground is asking of us. Not a new set of opinions, but a new posture. Not better arguments, but deeper attention. Not like minds, but like hearts.
Threads to Carry
The circle left with questions it did not try to answer that afternoon. How do we move beyond polarization? Can we live these ground rules outside this room? How might listening eventually lead to action and change?
Those are the right questions, but I am convinced the order matters. Francis heard “repair my house” long before he understood what the house was. The doing grows out of the listening, not the other way around. If we skip the listening, whatever we build will simply be another argument with better furniture.
Common Ground gathers again at San Damiano on Sunday, November 1st, All Saints’ Day, at 3:00 in the afternoon, for Simplicity in an Age of Excess. If you would like to join the circle, you are welcome, whatever you do or don’t believe.
Who in your life have you stopped listening to, because you already know what they are going to say? And what might change if, the next time you speak with them, you inclined the ear of your heart before your answer was ready?
Reflection Copyright 2026 by Michael J. Cunningham OFS
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