We continue with some introductory pieces about the importance of dialogue (over monologue)within the church and our society. Walter Brueggeman in "Mandate to Difference."
Such monologic practices seeks to silence, and such imposed silence kills. The hope of U.S. imperialism is to silence voices to the contrary, most recently even those of "old Europe." The manipulation of the media, moreover, is an effort to still the critical voice of a free press...
The same effort as silencing is alive and well in the church. (He notes that this takes place from both the right and the left)
A subset of such singular silence that kills occurs when individual persons arrive at absolute certainty and claim to identify their own view with the mind of God; such persons are characteristically engaged in profound denial about the complexity and conundrums that constitute the self.
We hear these kind of voices quite frequently in a society that is saturated with religious talk that is used like a bat or a device to control what is right and good and proper. Some voices silence others. Some voices only know how to exist in a mode of promotion. Under such a life view, there is much silence - at least from one side. How unfortunate for all of us when we let the church be a place of one way communication. Not only are we led to believe a limited view and interpretation of life, we are also denied the grand openness that comes when there is prayerful dialogue. Prayerful dialogue for me is simply when dialogue really happens. I think when there is dialogue - there will be prayerfulness because we are doing as much listening as speaking...and that has the power of changing us.
Whenever the voices in our lives deny us the opportunity to discuss the life we enter together, it is easy to let some people become controlling and...it becomes easier for us to be controlled. In such places and times, dialogue becomes an instrument of resistance. When one voice attempts to rule and interpret life and then set the parameters of what life can be, other voices must resist. Someone else - maybe me, maybe you - need to remind us that the emperor has no clothes. There may appear to be power within a monologic community but it is so vulnerable to the power of truthfulness and questions and open conversation that insists on honest dialogue.
Connection: Dialogue is a part of every aspect of our life together. You don't have to wait to practice those skills that help to create dialogue.
Word of Life, you make your Word into flesh and we all are draw more closely into relationships because we hear and see how your Word among us renews life and keeps pulling us beyond ourselves and into your Reign of wholeness and peace. Amen.
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