Loving conversation

A few thoughts are coming together here, but need to be fleshed out more. I’m thinking about how we love one another in the way we speak and converse. First from my brothers blog ‘reimagining science’:

“…we have a tendency to think that when we speak, we are just transferring information. However, it’s all a lot more complicated than this…”

“Speech acts belong to the twentieth philosophy of language. The main point is that in speaking we also do certain things. Words do not simply label; sentences do not merely state. Rather in using language we do any number of things: question, command, warn, request, curse, bless and so forth. A speech act has two aspects: propositional content and illocutionary force, the “matter” and “energy” of communicative action. ” [from First Theology]”

Paul is using these to talk about creation, but on my current thinking I want to apply this to loving one another. And to begin with this starts with know when to be silent, when to listen, and when to speak. Two quotes have brought this home to me from inward/outward:

A gesture of love is anything we do that helps others discover their humanity. Any act where we turn to one another. Open our hearts. Extend ourselves. Listen. Any time we’re patient. Curious. Quiet. Engage. Conversation does this — it requires that we extend ourselves [By Margaret Wheatley]

So we can love by being careful with our speech. By being disciplined in this way we can allow for further freedom which allows the other to ‘become’. In the process we may find the very things we want to criticize slip away, by the transformation of us both.

It must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.
Where this discipline of the tongue is practiced right from the beginning, each individual will make a matchless discovery. He will be able to cease from constantly scrutinizing the other person, judging him, condemning him. Now he can allow the brother to exist as a completely free person, as God made him to be.
Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me, God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God’s image should appear in others. [By Dietrich Bonhoeffer]

_ conteplative space

Loving conversation

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