Promoting dialogue

THIS is what we should be doing always. Engaging in dialogue, first with God and then with everybody else, is a basic and indispensable prudential norm in life, given our nature, dignity and present condition and circumstances.

Our problem often is that we snub the value of dialogue. And if we do some dialoguing, we fail to go all the way, or we approach it with wrong attitudes and inadequate dispositions and ways.

Even up to now, despite the sophisticated information technologies we are having, we still find ourselves largely clumsy about this business. There’s a lot of improvisation and ad hocism involved. In fact, there’s hardly any system or structure for it.

And the little system and structure we have is often set aside when emotions run high. Thus, while we complain against extrajudicial killings, we often have no qualms to go extrajudicial when resolving political issues.

In this regard, we have to be wary with the tricks of media, ideologues and some politicians who stir us to become a rampaging mob bent more to destroy than to correct what is wrong in our society. They have a way of boiling our hormones while freezing our reason.

Worse, our dialogue is often confined to attaining personal benefits only. It’s notoriously self-centered, parochial and shallow. Heavily emotional, it often refuses to go any further after those personal gains are made.

At best, it can be used to derive mutual advantages from among the parties concerned. But there’s hardly any effort to use it to arrive at a deeper, clearer and stronger grasp of what is objectively true and good for all of us. This is the tragedy of the whole thing. We need a paradigm shift.

In many Church documents, the constant recourse to dialogue is abundantly recommended. It’s a way to build and strengthen our unity, tenuous as it is, considering the many and often competing forces that go into it.

Dialogue fosters the sense of solidarity among the people. It facilitates the identification and the pursuit of the common good. Thus, the Church’s social doctrine tries to be interdisciplinary in its approach.

“To better incarnate the one truth about man in different and constantly changing social, economic and political contexts, this teaching enters into dialogue with the various disciplines concerned with man,” the Church’s Compendium of Social Doctrine teaches. (76)

We have to do everything to make this continuing dialogue among ourselves work. It starts with each one of us cultivating the proper attitudes and skills for it.

We have to learn to be open and sincere with everyone, respectful to one another, no matter how different our views may be. We have to learn to listen, restraining our tendency to make hasty judgments and to be dominated by emotional, knee-jerk reactions.

We need a lot of patience, and the strength to discipline our temper and passions. We also need to know how to converge or even integrate diverging if not conflicting views. We should avoid getting entangled in the differences.

We have to learn to quickly disregard irritating details, and instead focus on the essentials. Thus we need to really know the objective content of our common good.

Let’s polish and refine the way we deal with others, knowing how to be consensual, and never hostile, not even bearing grudges. We can never overdo this.

We have to know to forgive and forget, and also to ask for forgiveness. We should avoid cornering a person, giving everyone a graceful exit. The “gotcha” mentality belongs to the barbarians.

Always gracious and magnanimous, we should avoid lording it over. And neither should we give refuge in our heart to any trace of resentment and revenge.

The idea is to fill ourselves with goodness, because that is the way to generate more goodness around us. We sow sarcasm and resentment now, and we reap more of the same later on. Here the principle is we receive what we give.

Inhuman or impossibly superhuman? Well, only for those who don’t want to try and who prefer to remain cynical. But we certainly have the capability for it, and God’s grace is never lacking.