Sometimes I wonder whether we have lost the ability to talk.
I don’t mean the ability to form and speak words. I mean the ability to talk –
really talk – with others.
Think about all the “conversations” about race, politics, or
religion that you have heard or participated in recently, on TV, at public
meetings, in church, on Facebook. It appears to me that, on the whole, we are
pretty good at making demands, spewing projectile perspectives, yelling,
interrupting, accusing, labeling, and making sweeping assertions about whole
groups of people or about how the world ought to work. But we are not very good
at conversing, especially when the stakes are high. At least, I don’t hear much
genuine conversation going on around the very difficult issues we face together
as the body of Christ and in the world, issues like racial tension, violence,
politics, religious perspectives, sexual identity, even the future of the
church.
In her wise and important book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
reminds us that “To ‘converse’ originally meant to live among or together, or
to act together, to foster community, to commune with…When we converse, we act
together toward a common end, and we act upon one another…Indeed, conversation
is...a way of building and sustaining community.”[1]
If we are going to find a way forward through these
challenging times somebody needs to create spaces in our life together for genuine,
careful, caring, honest, mutually-honoring conversation, the sort of
conversation that changes the participants and builds and sustains community
toward a common good, rather than tearing it apart in a wrestling match over
who will get their way, over whose perspective or interest or power will
dominate the day.
Of all people, we who have been marked with the cross of
Christ and sealed with his Spirit ought to be able to engage and create space
for this sort of conversation. After all, trust in the grace of God made known
in Jesus who is our forgiveness, love, and hope frees us to go deep into the
sorts of paradox, ambiguity and pain that so often give rise to fear and angry
imposition of hardline demands. We who rest in amazing grace and walk in the
way of the cross are able to face hard, harsh truths about the brokenness and
sinfulness of life – together – and to lead the way in our human search for
life-giving paths forward.
All
this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us
the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the
world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting
the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since
God is making his appeal through us. [2
Corinthians 5:18-20; NRSV]
This sort of conversation is neither natural nor easy. In
many ways, it’s quite countercultural. It involves deep listening to the other,
listening at the risk of being changed, not listening in order to find a hole
in an argument or a target for rebuttal. Community building conversation that
moves to action calls each participant to honest sharing of their experience or
perspective in an non-judgmental environment that honors each and is committed
to working together for the common good. It’s walking, or rather, talking in
the way of the cross, trusting that there really is “one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.” [Ephesians 4:6; NRSV]
How might we create space for this sort of conversation in our
families, our neighborhoods, and our congregations this fall?
How might your
book group or Bible study or youth meetings or congregation council or
committee meetings be different if genuine conversation about difficult issues
were to become a high priority?
What if we all looked around our congregations,
communities, and workplaces for people who are different from us or who hold
perspectives different from ours and invited them into genuine and sustained conversation
about the very things about which we differ?
Such conversation certainly won’t
remedy all the challenges, divisions, and injustices that we face. But I do
suspect that, with McEntyre, we’d discover “conversation that discloses us to
one another and brings us into relationship that reaffirms our common
dependencies and our importance to each other. Like prayer, good conversation
fashions words into vessels that carry living water.”[2]
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