(The Nationalist, 14 October 2005)
When I lived in Africa, I used to listen to the radio station, the Voice of America. One programme I especially enjoyed was a weekly discussion of world politics between four journalists from leading U.S. newspapers.
What I especially remember was the quality of discussion. When one spoke, the others listened. There was no interruption, no trying to out-shout the other. They acknowledged points the others made and did not try to be seen as right all the time. They discussed issues objectively, without hidden agenda or axes to grind, in short, like intelligent, civilized adults.
There is often both argy-bargy and trickiness in discussions in Ireland, and truth, justice and common sense are often casualties. It’s not a good way of communicating.
In the Gospel, Jesus had such methods used against him. There was an incident in which he was asked about taxation. Should people pay tax to Caesar, the Roman emperor, or not? If he said no, they’d report him to the Romans for subversion. If he said yes, they’d incite people against him as a collaborator with the Romans. Either way, he’d lose.
But he turned the tables on them, saying, ‘Give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, and to God the things that belong to God’. They were caught out – by themselves, hoist on their own pétard. I like to see the devious caught out by their deviousness. I enjoy seeing Jesus take the supposedly innocent question of the tricky and use it to discomfit them.
But I think it saddened him to see people obdurate, unwilling to let go of doctrinaire positions instead of facing issues on their merits, to see issues of truth kicked around as a football for scoring points. What good is it to win an argument if, in the process, you lose the truth? What gain is there in silencing another, through ridicule, for example, or the clever use of debating skills, if it is at the cost of truth?
Thomas Merton wrote about communication. ‘The deepest level of communication is communion. It is beyond words, beyond speech, beyond concept. It’s not that we discover a new unity, but that we discover an older unity: we are already one. What we have to be is what we are’.
For those in a hurry: ‘Open yourself to what is human. Be present in your day and age; adapt yourself to the condition of the moment’. (The Rule of Taizé, the community of Brother Roger Schutz, murdered in September 2005)