As an introvert who dreads small talk, the idea of conversation as a Christian practice, aside from its content, slightly horrified me. Growing up as a daughter of American Evangelical Christianity, I gleaned somewhere that the ultimate purpose of speech is always conversion. My American roots affirmed this in their own way: to be an American is to be bold, to stand up for yourself or for what you believe. Words are a tool to achieve specific ends, whether valiant or selfish. My impulse is to resist the insipidity of so many light conversations and reserve my energy for “what really matters” – conversion, depth, insight.

Austen, the queen of frosty drawing rooms and the witty retort, challenged me. She deliberately sets aside content or ends. Austen endows actual, often trivial conversation with the heavy weight of human flourishing by virtue of its form. Conversation comprises both utterance and silence. We fill up space, express need and desire, offer ourselves, and convey information through our voices. We give space, attend, and submit to another’s thoughts and feelings while we silently listen. Conversation’s function to form people lies even in the simplest chats, in the attentive give-and-take between persons. In practicing mere conversation, there’s a capacity for us creatures to become more alive, more like the Creator.

From The Weight of Words and Silences by Grace Hamman