Commence your prayers with the posture and mode that you find best. You can say a brief prayer: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your children”, or any other that you find good. Try to place all your being in the presence of God.

Topic: dialogue

To live together, we have no alternative but to have dialogue, we have to talk, to certain people, in a group; between nations, religions…

There is no problem that cannot have some sort of a solution. The only remedy is to try and build bridges.

The tragedy of many people, of many groups, is the lack of communication.

• Authentic communication. Today there is an avalanche of anonymous communication. A lot of talk without saying anything at all. To hear without listening. To meet people without making contact or avoiding contact!!!
• Authentic dialogue is always fruitful. It should be something normal and natural, above all between those who live together.

Proximity creates respect and sometimes separates. Too much familiarity can create withdrawal.

How sad that parents, brothers, in the same house, or people in their place of work: all day together and there is hardly any contact. What is more, when there is some contact and others don’t have it, it has a negative influence in everything; when a member is sick; all the members suffer: e.g. The father that finds out that his son has separated from his wife by a telephone call from a friend. Physical proximity and affective distance-reserve. Family ties without understanding.

The important thing about dialogue is the CLIMATE: that the other person doesn’t “bite me”: I have to respect the other, as a person and in what he is saying to me.

Dialogue is an exercise of FAITH: God is the one that can unite the distances between person and person: He is the “bridge”. Dialogue cannot be to condemn one and another, it isn’t and argument, it isn’t a debate; is isn’t about convincing the other. It is about trying to UNDERSTAND THE OTHER and that THE OTHER UNDERSTANDS ME.

With dialogue or conversation, I neither defend nor attack; I expound, I listen. To try “to feel what he feels”. To try to put myself in the skin of the other. To be glad that another person reveals himself, that he reveals to me his thoughts and feelings; to be glad to be able to reveal myself to another or others; my thoughts and my feelings; my troubles and my happiness. We are not talking about theories; it happens, more than we think. It is one of the most beautiful things that we human beings can live: to communicate with empathy, give and take with another or others. To create a climate of affection that is difficult to explain if you don’t live it.

It is a joy to be able to reveal oneself to someone who does not attack. I remember a lady who came into my Parrish office; she talked to me for more than two hours. I did not more that just look into her eyes, try to “feel in sympathy with what she was telling me”. When I saw that she was finishing, I asked “What can I do for you? NOTHING, she replied, “you have already done it: YOU HAVE LISTENED TO ME”. She gave me her hand and I haven’t seen her again since then. It was a great lesson for me.

Dialogue is the food of life together. It is indispensable in our Parishes, in our communities, in the family, in our place of work.

We must understand that the purpose of dialogue is not a common policy BUT TO SHOW US HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT ONE. It isn’t to make us all the same, but to accept our differences. And in this way, we will reach certain uniformity, unanimosity in some matters. A lot of differences will remain, but if we have to live together, we need to talk, to listen. Dialogue never finishes.. Of this the people who have real friends will know a lot.

I cannot convert dialogue and my testimony en proselytism, or my experiences in “projectiles”. To give testimony is good, but as smoothly, softly as possible.

In that we show that dialogue is an education of persons: it makes us more open, more attentive, And MORE COURTIOUS.
It is the best school of character. Where there is FEAR, there is no dialogue. “Others are not hell”.

Conclusion: Always question the answer to this question: With whom is it not possible to have dialogue, conversation?