Communication: Broken Down and Raised Up

In the Gospel accounts leading up to the Lord’s Passion, the truth of Christ is revealed with greater clarity, even as it is misunderstood and rejected by some more vehemently.  Jesus teaches:  “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  Those to whom His words are directed refuse to recognize that they are in need of liberation from slavery; moreover, Christ exposes the rebellious root and ultimate consequence of this denial:  “But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.”  The breakdown in communication is, in other words, deadly for all involved.

In my on-going recovery from jaw surgery, I have become by necessity more attentive to the words which---so to speak---“make their room in me.”  Very simply, more words come into my ears and mind and heart than are able to come out of my mouth.  When I was recuperating in Florida in the week or so after my operation, my “conversational world” was radically limited largely to two people, Larry and Judy Garatoni.  Of course, I was able to phone a few folks and my parents were able to visit.  But even the addition of those few extra people was exhausting, because each embodied a whole universe of sharing that seemed naturally to demand verbal back-and forth.  It felt so peaceful and good to be given the blessed privilege of minimal demands on my speaking.

Such situations of convalescence can lead, if overly indulged, to an unhealthy retreat from the world and its responsibilities.  Church history is filled with men and women who initially sought the fuga mundi---the flight from the world---in the desert, on the pillar (the Stylites or pole-sitting saints, including St. Daniel the Stylite), or (at least as romantically imagined) the monastery.  Paradoxically, the more successful these people became at living their aspiration to contemplative silence, the more the crowds from the world would find them and engage them incessantly in conversation about the spiritual life!  Even a married couple ordinarily discovers their intimate dialogue of two “challenged” (leavened? stretched? opened up? tortured and mortally threatened? crucified and buried?) by the addition of children’s voices---and the wills those voices express.

During my silent time at the Garatoni home, I had ample opportunity to read.  The words of the written page were principally what filled the “inner room” of my heart and exposed me in a more guarded way---almost like my protective plastic mouth splint---to the disputes and other conversational vicissitudes of the world.  Although I mentioned in a previous blog some of the books I read during my convalescence, I also had as a silent companion John W. O’Malley’s Trent:  What Happened at the Council.  The whole monograph has as its leitmotif an extended narrative amazement that any substantive consensus on Church reform expressed in doctrinal formulations implemented over the succeeding centuries was attained with any success at all!  The Council of Trent took place, off and on, for eighteen years---interrupted by every conceivable manner of internal and external strife.  And yet the Holy Spirit was present throughout as safeguard and guide.

All of these thoughts have been constantly in my mind since my return to Queen of Peace a month and a half ago.  I have been, of course, thrown back into the swirl of conversational back-and forth that constitutes the heart of parish life.  Within this I have also returned to the family disputes---many and varied and intense---which are also part of sharing a common life.  Queen of Peace’s strength is that we are a family; and our weakness is that we are a family.  And disagreements among intimates can often be the most painful, potentially volatile, and sometimes intractable, precisely because there is so much at stake in the closeness of sharing a home and facing the challenges of agreement on what is most important and how best to attain it.  My greatest Lenten suffering has been my current inability to use my previously unfettered and practically unlimited speaking opportunities when such challenges arose.  As much of a Pastor’s work of reconciliation takes place outside of the Confessional as in it!  For now, at least, more difficult words of others are brought to the inner room my heart than can be resolved from my mouth; they and their resolution must be given to God in more silence than I would initially have offered to the Lord.

Today’s readings about the conversational frustrations of Jesus Christ---the very Incarnate Word of the universe---are strangely comforting.  Not every problem or misunderstanding can be resolved by words---still less by the electronic substitutes for personal exchange to which we have grown so accustomed to think we are adequately expressing ourselves (e-mails, texts, tweets---even blogs!).  It is the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection---leading to the sending of the Holy Spirit Who leads us into all truth---which establishes graced structures of communication unto Holy Communion in the life of the Church.  If the mortal verbal sin of our age is conversational divorce by slicker and more various technological means of ultimately uncommitted verbal sparring, Christ nonetheless still chooses to wed Himself to us in a way that opens up greater demands for---and possibilities of accomplishing---the “conversion” that transforms the most challenging “conversations” about matters of deepest truth.  On the Cross, His expiation of our refusal becomes the living and perennial condition for the possibility of our conciliation with each other in Him.

In the first reading from the Prophet Daniel, the “white-hot furnace” into which King Nebuchadnezzar thrust the three faithful Jewish men of God was the direct result of the tyrant’s becoming “livid with utter rage,” because he had no fruitful place---no faith-shaped outlet---for his passions.  Through all of our frustrations at failures of adequate communication, we know in Christ that the Lord accompanies us “unfettered and unhurt, walking in the fire” not simply through the damnable flames of human rage which threaten to consume us, but by purgative fires of His own Divine Charity.  This fiery purification refines our hearts, tempers our tempers, and transforms our communication break-downs into evangelical heights attainable only by the Holy Spirit’s descending tongues of flame.  On the conversational far side of Calvary is nothing less than Pentecost---the Church in the Upper Room simultaneously in hidden, silent prayer and joyful public sharing of the Risen and Ascending Word.