A credo
First is G*d. All flows from here. That is saying something, since it could be viewed the other way: that G*d arises from the human. G*d is in the human to be sure, and the divine and the human inter-exist. Yet the divine is larger, has leakier edges.
G*d is relevant because we are of this community. We are seeking to grow this community, make it whole and healthy, and this entails embrace and confirmation. The dialogical is of G*d. G*d is the conversation: G*d converses and is this flow between.
We are nothing alone. We cannot exist without reference points. We cannot know ourselves until another knows us. This is why we seek love—not just something to hold, but someone to know us and hold us as just us. Neither can we be together if we do not exist as individuals. Both are needed.
Dialogue is both our existence and what we do. We are beings in our doings.
Our purpose is to stir things up. The stirrings are the living edge of us. Where we leak into others, there we create new life. This is the work of conversation: to create new life.
Dialogue then is not a mere tool, but the fountain of life. Drink from each other’s mouths and ears the stuff of life.
The between is life. The between throws off life. The between lives. The between gives life. We meet in the between. We live in the between. What we do separately is done only to serve the between. The between is life.
Giving is what feeds the creation of new life. Trusting allows us to give and to receive. Asking opens our ears to the asker, to the between, where we know without reason that we are.
The more life we give, the more we live. We are here to live this life, not to withhold it, for giving is living. The measure you give—pressed down, shaken together, overflowing—is the measure of your living. Trusting the people means we know them as others, persons: persons like us, with dreams and schemes and fears and pains, with the desire to make things better, to live. To live! It is what each and every one of us wants and needs. We can trust that need, and all that works towards that, when persons are trusted. Asking is the way—into the between. It creates relationship, it drops shields against trust, it leads to giving each to the others. Here is life. The work of conversation is approached through these three doors. The working of conversation is life. This living creates life.
The work of conversation is creating life.
This is what we are about.
:- Doug.
