JOHN DEMPSTER: Being really listened to is often enough to help someone out at a crucial time in life
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I know how liberating it is to have a friend who truly listens as you share things which are troubling you.
Sometimes joy comes through the listening, and points the way ahead. So I was particularly interested to talk to Janet Logue at Culduthel Christian Centre about the Listening Ear Project.
Janet and her team offer people, free of charge, “the gift of listening.” She’s aware of the extent of loneliness in the community, aware how many people are struggling with mental health issues in the wake of Covid, bereavement and the cost of living crisis.
The team meet with people who ask for help in a series of one-to-one sessions, encouraging them to talk, listening with empathy and without judgement. “How are you? How are you now?” You feel a deep sense of relief when you are welcomed, and accepted.
Though Janet is herself a trained counsellor with extensive experience, Listening Ear offers not therapy as such, but a safe space to talk and to be heard. For many, that is enough. Where individuals need more specialist help besides a “listening ear” they’re referred to other agencies.
Churches, Janet says, can be places of “help and hope”, and the benefits of Listening Ear have been widely recognised. Highland Council encouraged Janet’s team to apply for funding to add a mental health care element to the Happy Healthy Hilton initiative. The NHS recognises Listening Ear’s role in supporting people not being reached by other mental health services.
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Janet has faced her own challenges. Finding a pathway in life after leaving school early. Moving from a much-loved job in Edinburgh to care for her mother in Inverness. Identifying a church where folk shared her passion for helping people in the pain and perplexity of life.
She knows personally the benefits of having friends who truly hear. “Though I was struggling,” she says, “I would call out to God and he always provided. He never left me. He put the right people in my path.”
Listening Ear is not just for Christians, or religious people. Everyone is welcome. Janet tells me that although Christian faith and compassion is the motivation for the service, and though the team are ready to talk about issues of meaning and purpose with anyone expressing an interest, the “gift of listening” comes absolutely without strings.
As a child in the Free Presbyterian Church Janet would watch worshippers approaching the Communion Table while Psalm 116 was sung. There, the poet tells of his love for the God who hears his prayers, the God “who bowed to me his ear.”
As Janet’s team hear people sharing their stories, God’s ear too is bowed to listen.
