Nov. 04, 2007




A Very Long Conversation




By Harry T. Cook




A Sermon for All Saints' Day


The art of good conversation has been trivialized by the wonders of mass communication. From the time radios became commonplace in every living room, and then, later, television sets, normal human discourse has suffered.


The best evenings my wife, Sue, and I have are those during which we just sit and talk - and it hardly matters what the topic or topics are. It's the give-and-take, the communication or even communion, if you will, that is so rewarding. It has the quality of binding us together ever more firmly. It's a conversation we took up more than 29 years ago, and that will go on in the lives of our children and grandchildren as it began in the exchanges of our own parents and grandparents and so on back through the generations of our ancestries.


Sue and I didn't begin that conversation, and it won't end with us. We came into it at different times, and then began to share it between us, and then as a couple with our children and friends and relatives. How and where it continues beyond our ability to communicate is anybody's guess.


And that is the very nature of the church, and, indeed, of the entire enterprise of religious thought and feeling from the far reaches of our beginnings as sentient beings to now. And this "now" will soon be part of our past as new "tomorrows" become todays, and the conversation goes on.


The fancy church term for all of this is "the communion of saints" of which today is a celebration. It is a celebration not only of the church's two millennia of life but of at least one millennium prior to them in the history of the Jews, which is part of our history, too. And, by extension, we are celebrating the communion of all people in their common search for meaning . . .


. . . as in what does it mean that there is something (and, in fact, quite a lot of something) rather than nothing, as in what does it mean that we exist - that we "are" as opposed to never being, as in what does it mean that we are hard-wired to love each other even when our wires get crossed and we end up hating each other?


Those are the galactic questions that hover over us both intimately and at great distance. Those are the questions that have emerged in our common life, not necessarily to answer, because the answers are beyond even the most sophisticated human knowledge. But those questions are - or should be - the topics of the ongoing human conversation.


That conversation takes place in myriad languages and is acted out in myriad customs, rituals and traditions. The terms of an individual conversation among a people whose turf is the African bush or the Australian out-back or a Parisian café or a bierstube adjacent to Heidelberg University or in a yurt on the edge of the Gobi desert or in the nave of a Christian church or an unadorned Islamic mosque or a Jewish synagogue
or a Hindu or Buddhist temple - the terms of such conversations will differ, but the questions will be the same. Some of the questions may translate well among other languages and customs. Some will not.


And the thing to keep in mind is that all the questions, wherever asked, however sophisticated or naïve the askers, will inevitably be provisional. Not only do we human beings have no easy answers, nor access to easy answers, to the most profound of our questions. We don't even know some of the right questions to ask, and with the questions we do have, we frequently have trouble even formulating them in ways that make sense.


But that's the nature of the conversation. And that's why no one should ever walk away from the table or out of the room. The conversation needs everyone, and everyone in it. No single human being or group of human beings can possibly know enough to produce usable questions, much less answers.


I have spent a great part of my ministry trying, sometimes against very tough odds, to encourage the conversation and to discourage and fend off patent answers to questions that haven't come close to being crafted in a usable fashion. I have discouraged the confession of creeds, because sectarian creeds by their very nature foreclose conversation, or turn it in to rote, in-your-face recitation.


I have promoted sermon talk-back sessions because they turn the teaching part of the liturgy into a conversation of the kind Episcopalian Christians need to have with other Episcopalian Christians, and they together with Christians of other persuasions, and they together with people of the Jewish and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu religions and with people of any and all religions.


The conversation is everything. When we stop talking is when resentments fester and we start plotting in one way or another to do in our neighbors, when we can no longer envision following what may have been Jesus' wisest counsel - that is, to love both neighbor and enemy. It's easier to love either one and to help him love you when you talk with him, rather than to him, and keep on trying to figure out what questions to ask and then how to ask them. If no answers materialize, it's probably a good thing. So let's keep on talking, communicating and communing. In anyway you can think of, it beats the alternative.




© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.