Dialogue and Discernment

This post is a follow-up to last month’s “How to Fail at Dialogue”. in which we looked at modernity’s most common misunderstandings about what true dialogue is. 

 

Pope Francis’ vision of dialogue 

Pope Francis has a pretty unique philosophy of dialogue, a fruit of his study of the theology of Romano Guardini as well as his many years of active ministry. A very broad summary would go something like this: when people of different opinions and even religious beliefs come together, as long as they are open to one another and sincerely desire what is best for everyone, God can do something new and unexpected in the process. I’ll be breaking it down a bit more in what follows.

 

But before we do that, two preliminary remarks. 

First, Pope Francis acknowledges that the conflicts going on in our culture, in our families, in our institutions - you know, the ones we argue over, get heated over, sometimes cry over - are real conflicts. They matter. The hot-button political issues of our day (think: marriage, sexuality, the environment, religious freedom, etc.) have to do with our most foundational convictions about God, the human person, and creation itself. These are no small peanuts; we are dealing with the heart of what it means to be human. 

It is therefore naive to pretend that these issues don’t matter, that “agree to disagree” is a manageable long-term solution, that we can live well together while operating out of fundamentally opposed worldviews. Rather, we need to start by calling a spade a spade, and openly acknowledging the chasm that stands between the Christian and the secular ideas of family, or education, or suffering (to name a few) and how those competing ideas will necessarily interact with each other in the public square. Only once we have faced the true challenge before us can we constructively address it. 

Second, even though Pope Francis’s ideas are challenging, they should in no way be taken to mean that good should dialogue with evil. Evil ideas, such as abortion, racism, or communism, are excluded from dialogue because they are violations of the very universal moral truths that lie at the heart of dialogue. Pope Francis calls these universal moral truths “human values” where he writes, “It amazes me when I hear people talk of ‘non-negotiable values.’ All true values, human values, are non-negotiable… If it is of value, it has a value that cannot be negotiated” (Let Us Dream, p. 52). This rules out the idea that dialogue somehow leads to moral compromise. Where evil is concerned, Pope Francis is clear: there can be no compromise.
 

Opposites Interact 
For Pope Francis, the animating principle of dialogue is Gegensätze (in moments like these I am grateful to be safely behind my keyboard, untethered from the responsibility of knowing how that is pronounced), which he translates, “contraposition.” This notion of contraposition has to do with the “creative tension” that occurs when two opposites pull on each other (Let Us Dream, p. 79). This tension “keeps different sectors from becoming complacent and self-centred in their outlook and their limited concerns” (FT, no. 203) and forces both sides out into new territory where neither is comfortable, where there are no “winners” and “losers,” where working together is no longer optional.

Consider the following example. Say my husband and I are taking a family vacation to Cheboygan, Michigan this summer. I, for my part, find driving delightful, but have a paralyzing fear of air travel. My husband, on the other hand, loves flying, but is terrified of suspension bridges. So we have our contraposition: flying to Michigan is impossible for one of us, but arriving at our destination by way of the Mackinac Bridge (the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere) is out of the question for the other. 

What do we do? Well, we have a few options: 1) we could argue back and forth endlessly, each telling the other person to “see it my way” and suck it up; 2) we could throw our hands up and skip the trip altogether, since we know neither of us can overcome our respective fears; or 3) we could take an alternate route through Chicago on the south side of Lake Michigan and then up to Cheboygan from there. It will add four hours to our trip, and we will miss out on driving through the beauty of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but we will get where we’re going. 

And maybe, just maybe, those extra hours in the car will be filled with rich and unifying conversation. Maybe we will find that the South Shore of Lake Michigan holds a unique and unexpected beauty for both of us. Maybe our car will break down on the freeway and we will have to rely on the people of Michigan to come to our aid, hitch a ride with a baby in our laps, and sleep on the floor of the auto mechanic’s shop - and through these trials and tribulations, our marriage will be tested as gold in fire and be strengthened in ways we could never have imagined. 

Suppose we choose the alternate route. Did either of us get what we wanted at the start? No. Did either of us have to give in completely? No. These are the elements of the decision that seem to be little more than compromise. But there is more to the story: we also had a chance to have an adventure together, one we never would have had otherwise. True, we got more difficulty than we originally bargained for, but with those difficulties came the opportunity for deeper relationship and profounder cooperation. 

This is how contraposition works for Pope Francis. It begins when there are certain things that neither side is ready to budge on. That tension, if we choose to endure it out of love for the other and out of desire for the common good, has a catalytic effect for creating new possibilities that we would have never considered before. We didn’t consider them because we didn’t have to, until the moment we encountered someone who saw things differently. Writes Francis,
 

Our main task … is not to disengage from polarization but to engage with conflict and disagreement in ways that prevent us from descending into polarization. This means resolving division by allowing for new thinking that can transcend that division. In this way, divisions … bear valuable new fruit (Let Us Dream, pp. 77-78).

 

The Overflow

The last concept to discuss is what Pope Francis calls “overflow.” True overflow is more than mere human creative problem-solving; rather, it is the action of God in the midst of our conflicts, endured patiently and prayerfully. I will let the Pope speak for himself first on this idea:

[Overflow] comes about as a gift in dialogue, when people trust each other and humbly seek the good together, and are willing to learn from each other in a mutual exchange of gifts. At such moments, the solution to an intractable problem comes in ways that are unexpected and unforeseen, the result of a new and greater creativity released, as it were, from the outside. This is what I mean by “overflow” because it breaks the banks that confined our thinking, and causes to pour forth, as if from an overflowing fountain, the answers that formerly the contraposition didn’t let us see. We recognize this process as a gift from God … when the ocean of His love bursts the dams of our self-sufficiency, and so allows for a new imagination of the possible (Let Us Dream, pp. 80-81). 

 

Here we come to the essence of true dialogue: it is a form of discernment. In dialogue we acknowledge God as the protagonist in human history (which, after all, is itself wrapped up in God’s Great Story) and as the only source of authentic renewal. In dialogue, the discomfort we feel in the presence of different points of view from our own acts as an invitation from the Holy Spirit to seek not my will, but God’s will; not my good, but the good of others. If we respond to grace, our inadequacy gives way to God’s superabundance.
 

This should give us immense hope when our efforts at dialogue seem hopeless, when we appear to have reached a stalemate and there is no further progress we can make together. Our task in those moments is to “hold” the conflict, to continue loving the other and seeking what is best, and to trust that God will act. He is unlikely to act in the way we want, but He will act.

At the conclusion of this extended reflection, I’m reminded of the following exchange from the Old Testament between Joshua and an angel of God:
 

When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man stood before him with his drawn sword in his hand; and Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” And he said, “No.” (Joshua 5:13-14)

Every time I read that passage, it startles me. We are so used to seeing other people, particularly those who think differently from us, as our enemies, that we begin to array ourselves in battle against them and expect God to follow suit. God’s response to all this is “No.” In other words, it is not God who chooses to be on our side, but we who must choose to be on God’s side, and this demands conversion of heart. That is the crux of why dialogue is so important for Pope Francis. It changes us, and releases God’s action into the world. 

 

Brief Case Study: Catholic-Lutheran dialogue

The Protestant Reformation was the most profound rupture in the Church in its history. It is unnecessary to go into much detail here, except to say that the break between the Catholic Church and what would become the Lutheran Church was in large part over the question of justification (simply put: is man saved by grace through faith and good works, or by grace through faith alone?) This debate had Catholics and Lutherans arguing and hurling censure at one another for nearly half a millenium. Talk about contraposition. 

Then, in 1999, an overflow occurred. The Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation issued the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in which they concluded “a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics” (JD, no. 40). 

This consensus didn’t come out of thin air. It was the fruit of a huge shift in the ecumenical tide that started in the 70’s when these two groups began the long and arduous work of dialogue, attempting to work through these issues together, drafting documents, writing replies, editing, clarifying, sifting through to find where the hard boundaries really lay, and in the process uncovering common ground previously obscured by centuries of division. The final result was the shocking realization that after nearly five hundred years, Catholics and Lutherans could agree on the basic truths of justification. 
 

Think about that for a moment: the very same doctrine that was a major cause of the division in the Western Church became the occasion for reunion. The controversy that had both sides issuing public condemnations of the other now became a conversation that enabled Catholics and Lutherans not just to “agree to disagree,” but to speak with one voice.