Human communication can lead in two basic directions: towards more clarity and specificity, or towards broader and deeper understanding. This weekend I am leading a workshop on Basic Training for lay people doing pastoral care. One of the exercises focuses on how to be truly present with another person. Often, especially when people are communicating in some official capacity, they want to “get to the point.” That is, they want to find out what is “really” going on. I try to teach people that such a direction is not particularly helpful, that it puts the focus more on the presumed answer to some question rather than on the development of the relationship. And it tends to inhibit conversation just at the point when more conversation is the objective.
On a larger scale, this dynamic has plagued religion for millenia. Too often religious communication and preaching is designed to identify what is right, as opposed to all the other ideas that must then be wrong. This approach presumes that a “right” answer actually exists. What if, instead of striving to be right, our goal was to become more complete – that no matter how much we already understand, we can always learn more. In the workshop, I invite the participants to get into groups of three, one who asks, one who answers, and one who observes the process. They are given a list of questions. The objective is to learn as much as possible from a person as they can in five minutes – that is to say, to “amplify” their understanding of this other person. I remind them that we can never understand another person completely, so there is always room for more learning and always opportunity for more growth and development in the relationship.
I would like to believe that when people from different religious traditions come together, their objective can be to amplify their understanding by mutual sharing rather than arguing about who has it right already.
In the spirit of what I have just written, I am interested in how you see it.
Wayne Gustafson
“The Promised Land is within and among us.”