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There once was an ugly duckling … whose story improved with the telling. The man who wrote that story, Hans Christian Andersen, died 150 years ago this month, but his stories live on. When I heard these – ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘The Snow Queen’, and so on – when I was a child, I just took them as stories. Coming back to them decades later I realized that they were really for adults.

The imagination that writers bring to their art is crucial. What was clear from Andersen himself is that he was primarily and essentially a good listener. He knew that understanding and imagining begins with attentive listening. I guess everyone knows what it is like to have a conversation with someone who is interested only in themselves and shows no interest in listening to you.

Good listening. This is true not only of artists, but of politics, religion, and just about all walks of life. I am a Christian and worked originally as a professional linguist. Being a linguist means learning to listen, to understand what is being said by someone else. Only then can I begin to interpret in a language understood by another. Interpreting does not mean necessarily agreeing with what is being said, but enabling the other party to hear and understand it anyway. The interpreter has to learn by listening.

And this also goes also to the heart of what it means to be a Christian: listening to the culture, digging deeper into meaning and intention, being careful not to use language that obscures rather than opens up. Reading the Bible daily is a discipline of listening to what is sometimes a challengingly different way of seeing God, the world and us. So to speak biblically is not merely to offer an opinion.

I would love to know what Presidents Trump and Putin’s interpreters made of the private conversations in Alaska on Friday. They will be people who read both the Washington Post and Pravda. Only by careful listening can they calibrate reality and comprehend how what is being said by one party might be heard and grasped by the other.

This is where religion might have something to offer politics. Not only must I read the Bible (and wrestle with it), but I also have to read the times (with a small ‘t’). This demands a humility – that the languages being spoken might not be entirely within my competence. When I speak with Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or secular humanist friends I know I cannot fully understand what it is to live in their skin. I can only use my imagination to try.

As Hans Christian Andersen insisted: it all begins with good listening.

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