What would you call the season we are in right now? We are: knee deep in violence around the world, sweltering under very hot skies with too little rain; listening (or not) to candidates for president; figuring out how to send our children off to camp or college; crippled by a system of race bias......
and if we look into our personal lives, we are mourning the loss of a loved one or celebrating the birth of a new child. We are worn out by the struggles of aging or parenting or being a teenager. For some it is a season of healing and for others a season of dying.
Where are we? Could this be the season of rhetoric?
I chose this with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. Seems no one talks to anyone anymore. We chant, we demand, we yell, but we don't talk. We no longer use civilized speech as a path to persuasion or enlightenment. In fact, I think 'enlightenment' has gone the way of the dodo bird. There is limited rational conversation and, in fact, I think we have lost our basic 'rational speech' skills.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speech. Or at least that is what it is intended to mean. Our most common experience of it comes when a very good salesman persuades us that 'this is exactly what you were looking for' when we know that we weren't even looking in the first place but he persuades us that we are! A good rhetorician puts together examples and images and data in such a way that we follow the argument and even though we still have questions, we are persuaded to look at things in a new way.
In current times we use 'rhetoric' to mean empty, even ideological speech. There is no attempt made to persuade but rather to cut off debate, and insist on the rightness of our position. It has become almost a pejorative term which, in the end, points to the use of speech to tell 'the big lie.' If you tell 'the big lie' often enough, it becomes the accepted truth. Propaganda makes much use of 'the big lie.'
Can we in the faith community take first steps to actually speak with one another without rancor and with a desire to hear - truly hear - what is being said? Can we begin to accept that the 'truth' to you may not be the 'truth' to me?
One last question. As much as you bemoan the poor dialogue (or total lack of any dialogue) not taking place, are you willing to sit around a table and slowly, gently begin to talk about the great taboo subjects?
This is risky business. Are you ready?
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