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31/07/2009

Spirituality: dialogue

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Talking is good.  It is the way we share our ideas and experience with others.

	Listening is better.  It is not a passive activity.  Listening is the way we take on board other people's world's and thus change our own.
Dialogue is best.  By sharing where we are coming from with other people, and by listening carefully to their beliefs and convictions and knowledge and logic, our own ideas are challenged, modified and developed - sometimes by agreeing with the person we are talking with, sometimes by disagreeing with them.

How?  The intention to pray is the beginning of prayer ...

... stop for a moment.  And put aside all the stress and pressures and the demands people make of you.  And for a moment shut out the everyday noises.  And wait, silently.  And then begin with whatever words you think are right to address God beyond us.  And after a while stop talking, and listen.  And then say thank you.

Dialogue is the way in which our identity - our sense of who we are -  is formed, asserted and modified.  And what is true for our relationships with other people is still more true with God.  Our spiritual identity develops and grows and changes as we talk with and listen to God.

Dialogue which challenges us also helps us see our own limits - and thus helps us set our direction: to the horizon, and beyond.

Full dialogue is risky: we risk losing the 'self' we thought we had, the sense of our own identity on which we rely.  Yet only by risking - throwing away - what we have worked so hard to attain can we possibly move on to something new and better.  Jesus said, 'It is hard for someone rich to enter the kingdom of heaven ... by human resources it is impossible; ...' (Matthew 19:23,26).

And the internet gives historically unprecedented opportunities for dialogue.  So share your convictions and bewilderment, your doubts and certainties; tell how this discussion chimes with tour own spiritual journey - or that it makes no sense at all.  Click here.

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