After the third meditation by P. Radcliff on friendship, there followed a reflection on the art of leading a conversation, on a conversation that leads to conversion. The footnotes under the working translation refer to the original English text.
We are invited to walk the synodal path in mutual friendship. Otherwise, we will not get anywhere. Friendship with God and with others springs from the joy of being together. However, we need words. At Caesarea Philippi, the conversation failed. Jesus called Peter Satan, an enemy. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter still doesn't know what to say, but the disciples begin to listen to the Lord, and so the conversation can start again on the way to Jerusalem.
On the way, they argue, they do not understand Jesus, and in the end, they abandon him. Silence returns. But the Risen One appears to them, and his healing words reignite the conversation. We also need healing words that leap over the boundaries of our divisions: the ideological divides of the right and left, the cultural divides between continents, the tensions that sometimes divide men and women. Speaking together is the lifeblood of the Church. We must find a common language, especially for the world, where the inability of people to listen fuels the fire of violence. Conversation leads to conversion.
How should such a conversation begin? In the book of Genesis, after the fall of the first human, a chilling silence settles in. The quiet community of the Garden of Eden has turned into a shameful silence. Adam and Eve hide. How can the Lord bridge this chasm? God patiently waits until they dress to cover their embarrassment. Now they are ready for the first conversation in the Holy Scripture. The silence is broken by a simple question: "Where are you?" This is not a request for information. It is an invitation to come into the light and stand unmasked before God's face.
Perhaps this is the first question we should use to break the silence that divides us. Not to ask: "How can you have such ridiculous opinions on the liturgy?" Nor "Why are you such a heretic, why are you such a patriarchal dinosaur?" Nor "Why do you pretend not to hear me?" But to ask: "Where are you?" "What are you afraid of?" This is me. God invites Adam and Eve to stop hiding and to show themselves. If we also come into the light and let ourselves be seen, if we show ourselves as we are, we will find words for each other. In preparing for the synod, it was often precisely the priests who hesitated to step forward with their concerns and doubts. Perhaps we are afraid of being seen naked in the eyes of others. How can we encourage each other to overcome the fear of exposure?
After the resurrection, the silence of the Lord's tomb is again pierced by questions: In John: "Why are you weeping?" In Luke: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" When the disciples flee to Emmaus, they are filled with anger and disappointment. The women said they saw the Lord, but you know how it is with women… Even today, their voices are sometimes not counted. The disciples leave, abandoning the community of the Church, as many of our contemporaries do. Jesus does not hinder them nor condemn them. He asks: "What are you discussing?" What hopes and disappointments are stirring in your hearts? The conversation of the disciples sounds harsh. In Greek, we read: "What is this word that you are throwing at one another?" Jesus encourages them to share their frustration. They had hoped that Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel, but they were mistaken. He disappointed them. And so Jesus walks with them and opens their anger and fear.
Our world is full of anger. We speak of the politics of anger. Recently a book on this topic was published titled American Rage. Anger has also infected the Church. Justified anger over the sexual abuse of children. Anger over the status of women in the Church. Anger at horrible conservatives, anger at terrible liberals. Do we dare, like Jesus, to ask each other: "What are you talking about? Why are you angry?" Do we dare to listen to the answer? Sometimes I am fed up when I hear all that anger. It seems to me that I cannot endure it. But I must listen, just as Jesus did on the way to Emmaus.
Many hope that their voices will be heard at the synod. They feel overlooked, silenced. They are right. To have a voice means, first of all, to listen. God calls each one by name: Abraham, Abraham! Moses, Samuel… They respond with the beautiful Hebrew word Hinneni, "Here I am." Our existence is founded on God addressing us by name, and we listening. Not the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am," but "I hear, therefore I am." We are here to listen to the Lord and to one another. As it is said, we have two ears but only one mouth… Speech follows listening.
We listen not only to what people say but also to what they are trying to say. We listen to the unspoken words, to words that are still searching. A Sicilian proverb says: "La miglior parola è quella che non si dice." (1) "The best word is the one left unspoken." We listen to the way they express their truth, we listen to every grain of truth, even if what they say is fundamentally mistaken. We listen with hope, not with disdain. At our order's general council meetings, we observe one principle: what the brothers say is never nonsense. They may be misinformed, they may express something illogical or truly wrong. But somewhere beneath their misguided words lies a truth I need to hear. We are mendicants, beggars for truth. Contemporaries of St. Dominic said of him that "he understood everything with the intelligence of a humble heart." (2)
Perhaps religious orders have something to teach the Church regarding the art of conversation. St. Benedict teaches us to seek consensus; St. Dominic to love debate; St. Catherine of Siena to delight in conversation; St. Ignatius of Loyola the art of discernment; St. Philip Neri the need for laughter.
If we truly listen, our prepared answers will vanish. We will be silenced and unable to speak like Zechariah before he burst forth into his canticle. When I do not know how to respond to the pain or misunderstanding of my brother or sister, I must turn to the Lord and ask for words. Then the conversation can begin.
Conversation requires that we imaginatively enter into the experience of another person. To look through their eyes, to hear with their ears. To experience it firsthand. From what experiences do their words spring? What pain do they carry, what hope? What path are they taking?
At the Dominican General Chapter, we experienced a passionate debate about preaching, about its essence – quite simply a hot topic for Dominicans. The document presented proposed that we think of preaching as dialogue: proclaiming faith through conversation. However, some participants adamantly disagreed, for them it brushed against relativism. They claimed: "Truth must be proclaimed boldly." Slowly it became evident that the arguing brothers were quarreling based on very different experiences.
The document was prepared by a brother from Pakistan, where Christianity necessarily exists in continuous dialogue with Islam. In Asia, proclamation without dialogue is simply unthinkable. The brothers who firmly opposed the document were mainly from countries of the former Soviet Union. The notion of dialogue with those who imprisoned them made no sense to them. To overcome this misunderstanding required rational arguments, but they alone were not enough. You had to imagine why the others held such views. What experiences led them to that? What injuries do they carry? What joys?
This required us to engage every ounce of imagination in listening. Love is always the victory of imagination, hatred its defeat. Hatred is abstract. Love is concrete. In Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory (1940), the main character – a poor old priest – says these words: "When you saw the crow's feet around the eyes, the shape of the mouth, the sprouting hair, it was impossible not to hate. Hatred was merely a failure of imagination."
We need to overcome boundaries not only between right and left, not only between different cultures, but also between generations. I have the privilege of living with young Dominicans whose journey of faith differs so much from mine! Many religious and priests of my generation grew up in strongly believing families. Faith deeply permeated our daily lives. The adventure of the Second Vatican Council lay in stepping out into a secular environment. French priests entered factories. We laid aside our religious attire and immersed ourselves in the world. One angry sister, when she saw me in my habit, burst out: "How can you still wear those old rags!?
Today, many young people – especially in the West, but gradually everywhere – grow up in a secular environment, in an agnostic or even atheistic world. Their adventure lies in discovering the Gospel, the Church, and tradition. They wear the habit with joy. Our paths are opposite, but they do not contradict each other. I must walk with them like Jesus and learn to understand what touches their hearts. "What were you discussing?" What movies do you watch? What music do you like? Only then will we find words for one another.
I must also imagine how they see me! Who am I in their eyes? Once, I was cycling around Saigon with a group of young Vietnamese Dominican students. It was long before the rise of tourism. We turned the corner and there stood a group of Western tourists. They were so large and overweight and had such a strangely ugly color. Really strange people. In that moment, I realized that I looked the same...
On the way to Emmaus, the disciples listen to a stranger who calls them foolish and contradicts them. He is also angry! But his words begin to comfort them, igniting their hearts. Could we perhaps learn during the synod the joyful delight of disagreement that leads to understanding? Hugo Rahner /1900–1968/, Karl's older brother (but much easier to understand!) discusses homo ludens, playful humanity. (3) Let us learn to speak together with a certain playfulness! Just as Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter 4.
In today's first reading, we heard that when the time is fulfilled, "the squares of the city will be full of boys and girls playing in its squares" (Zech 8:5). The Gospel invites each of us to become children: "Amen, I say to you: Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 18:3). We prepare for God's kingdom by becoming playful, childlike but not childish. Sometimes we in the Church are so tasteless and bland, joyless and overly serious, that it is no wonder people are bored!
On New Year's Eve at the turn of the millennium, I spent time in Ivory Coast, waiting for a flight to Angola. We sat in the dark with a few Dominican students over beer, chatting about what is dear to us. We rejoiced in how different we are, how different our ideas are. The joy of diversity! Back then, I feared that I would miss my flight, but it was delayed for three days! Diversity is fruitful, generative. Each of us is the result of the wonderful difference between men and women. Whenever we run away from difference, we become barren and childless, both in our homes and in the Church. Again, thanks to all the parents who are with us at the synod! Families can teach the Church a lot about how to handle differences. Parents learn how to reach out to children who make such incomprehensible decisions, and yet they know they always have a home.
When we manage to discover the joy of imagining how our sisters and brothers arrived at opinions that seem so strange to us, a new spring will begin in the Church. The Holy Spirit will give us the gift of speaking different languages.
Let us notice that Jesus does not try to take control of the conversation. He asks what they are discussing; he goes where they go, not where he would want to go; he accepts their hospitality. Genuine conversation cannot be controlled. One must submit to its flow. We cannot anticipate where it may lead us, whether to Emmaus or to Jerusalem. Where will this synod lead the Church? If we knew in advance, we wouldn’t have to be here! Let us be surprised!
Real conversation is risky. When we open ourselves to others in free dialogue, we will be transformed. Every deep friendship brings forth some dimension of my life and identity that has not been here before. I become someone I have not been yet. I come from a wonderfully conservative Catholic family. When I became a Dominican, I befriended people who had completely different backgrounds, and their political opinions drove my family crazy! Who was I when I went home for a visit? How do I reconcile the person I was at home with the person I was becoming among Dominicans?
Every year I get to know new brothers who join our order. They have different opinions and see the world completely differently. When I open up to them and offer friendship, who will I become? Even at my advanced age, my identity must remain open. In the novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) by Canadian author Madeleine Thien (b. 1974), which deals with Chinese immigrants in the USA, one character says: "Never try to be a single, undivided human being. When so many people love you, can you really remain just one?" (4) When we open ourselves to many friendships, we will not have a neatly arranged, strictly defined identity. When we open ourselves to one another at this synod, it will transform us. It will be a little death and resurrection.
Our novice master in the Philippines had a sign on his door: "Sorry, under construction!" He meant the construction of his life. The coherent outcome lies ahead of us, in the Kingdom. Then the wolf and the lamb, present in each of us, will graze together in peace. If we have a closed, fixed identity carved in stone, we will never know the adventure of new friendships that will unveil new dimensions of who we are. We will not be open to the spacious friendship of our Lord.
When the disciples arrive in Emmaus, their flight from Jerusalem ends. Jesus pretends as if he wants to go farther, but they – with wonderful irony – invite the Lord to stay with them for the Sabbath so that he may rest with them. "Stay with us, for it is getting toward evening and the day is now far spent" (Luke 24:29). Jesus accepts their hospitality, just as the three strangers in Genesis chapter 18 accepted Abraham's hospitality. God is our guest. We too must be humble to become guests. The German original states that we must leave "the comfortable position of those who offer hospitality and allow ourselves to be invited into the existence of those whom we accompany on the journey of humanity."
Marie-Dominique Chenu OP (1895–1990), one of the precursors of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, would go out in the evenings even when he was eighty. He would go to listen to union leaders, academics, artists, families… and accept their hospitality. If we went out for a beer in the evening, he would ask: "What did you learn today? Who did you sit with? What gifts did you receive?" The Church on every continent has gifts for the universal Church. To give an example: my brothers in Latin America taught me to listen to the poor, especially our beloved brother Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928). Will we listen to them in our debates this month? What will we learn from our brothers and sisters from Asia and Africa?
"When he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight" (Luke 24:30–31). Their eyes were opened. We last heard this sentence in the situation when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of life, their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked. Therefore, some ancient commentators saw in the Emmaus disciples Cleopas and his wife, a married couple representing the new Adam and Eve. And now they eat of the bread of life.
And a final brief thought: When Jesus disappears from their sight, they say to each other: "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?" (Luke 24:32). It is as if they could only realize afterward, ex post, the joy they experienced on the way with Jesus. St. John Henry Newman (1801–1890) said that only when we look back at our lives do we begin to realize that God was with us all along. I pray that this may be our experience too.
During the synod, we will be like the disciples. Sometimes we may not realize how the Lord's grace is working within us, and we may think it is all a waste of time. But I ask the Lord that when we look back, we realize that God has been with us all along and that our hearts are burning.
[1] "La megliu parola è chiddra chi nun si dici"
[2] "humili cordis intelligentia"
[3] Man at Play or Did you ever practice eutrapelia? Translated by Brian Battershaw and Edward Quinn, Compass Books, London, 1965
[4] Granta, London, 2016, p. 457
