Dialogue as a Pastoral Experience;
Dialogue, especially inter-religious dialogue, is a pastoral activity. While it allows one to be a teacher and a student and while it encourages theological reflection, it is neither pedagogy nor theology. Dialogue is not about things, or ideas, or rituals, or traditions. It is about people who use things, have ideas, celebrate rituals, and follow traditions and the willingness to enter into a conversation with others about our engagement with the things, ideas, rituals, and traditions that structure our lives.
Dialogue is that simple. It is no more than a conversation and requires nothing more than the courage to be in conversation with another. It is a pastoral activity in which the focus is on one’s partner and the goal is letting one’s partner speak. But it is an unusual one since it demands mutuality. The other is a partner, not a client, nor a patient; not a teacher, therapist, nor a chaplain.
To enter dialogue, one must first be prepared to listen before speaking and to listen to what one says as deeply as to what one hears. Dialogue begins in silence and ends in relationship.
Dialogue is not an encounter, although it is a possible response to an encounter. To move from encounter to dialogue, the partners need the courage not to flee, nor fight, nor freeze. Dialogue requires one to be present, to be open, to listen, and to share.
Dialogue’s goal is more dialogue. More dialogue leads to a deeper understanding of one’s self and one’s partner and this better understanding allows for other activities and experiences to emerge. But those are possible benefits, not goals.
Dialogue recognizes the power of words to create connections out of the chaos of ignorance, anger, fear, pride, guilt – those very human experiences that separate us from each other. Dialogue reflects a willful attempt to use words to give voice to the best and to the worst that we have within us and by speaking and sharing these words gain control over them.
Dialogue is a pastoral activity. As such, in dialogue one does not try to dominate the other. One seeks clarification rather than justification. There is no attempt to harmonize differences or find compromise positions beyond challenging exclusivist claims that marginalize the other.
In dialogue, as in other pastoral activities, self-awareness is a primary tool. One needs to feel secure enough in one’s cultural and spiritual tradition to speak honestly of one’s own experience. One needs to know where one’s fears and courage lay. One must be able to acknowledge one’s strengths and one’s weaknesses. And, one must remember that one does not speak for one’s tradition but out of it and one speaks only for one’s self.
Respect for one’s partner and one’s self rests at the heart of dialogue. Without honoring the full humanity, including all our very human faults, of each other, there can be no dialogue. Over time through dialogue, mutual understanding will develop, trust will grow and friendships will emerge, but without the willingness to see the other as a partner, there can be no dialogue. There are only words.