What distinguishes dialogue?

Walked outside today at 6:00 p.m. after having turned the air on about 4:00. I was trying to leave it off, I really was, but coming in from picking Henry up at pre-school, I suppose I was heated from all that in-and-out-of-the-car stuff (we’d stopped at the gas station, his new favorite place), and I gave in to the urge. The cats and dog looked pretty miserable too, and they’ve perked up since. But I mention it only to say how great it felt to walk into the warmth of the early evening, and how, maybe because I was enjoying it so much, I noticed the apples and that they seem to have grown from little olive-pit-sized babies to full-out young apples in a matter of days. These are the kinds of things you notice when you get back from a long weekend at a hotel where the constant, inescapable, air conditioning gives you your first summer cold, the kind that each year’s initial prolonged contact with air conditioning always does.

It’s not a terrible cold, but it was at its worst the day I returned home to get ready to have my Norwegian guests for dinner, and couldn’t keep my nose from running. Having a tissue at your nose is not the way you want to appear at dinner, but such was the way it turned out.

I write of this only to say that I find I can’t go back and summarize the events of the weekend and that I ought to know better than to think I can. It is a shame I didn’t do it as it happened, and I’ve got a yen to share some of what I put in my journal, but still, no matter how charming were my guests or how significant the conversation, it is done and there’s no turning back. This is what I love about the blog.

And so, even though I announced an opening question yesterday, I can’t quite frame it in the context of my guests or my weekend, and it doesn’t need to be set there. It doesn’t need to be responded to. It’s just a musing that came out of the weekend – a musing about what dialogue is. I return to this question every few months or so and I don’t mind it. It’s like it’s in my nature to explore such questions, and it’s in my books too, “dialogue” proposed as the new way that will replace teaching, learning, evangelize and the like.

I took up my questions with a friend the other day and she said, “You know when you’re in it and you know when it ends,” and that’s surely true enough. I can speak of it as “sharing who we are” but that’s not exactly the thing about it, or it doesn’t seem so to me. It seems more as if, when you’ve entered dialogue, something new is born. Something that is not of one or the other but a third something. Dialogue takes on a life of its own.

There are tons of ways to share. Storker and Tone demonstrated a way of receptive listening that was truly beautiful. I can’t deny that it had something of the same effect – as if when one shared and the others quietly listened – something more was in the room. There was a powerful feeling of presence, as if by being fully present ourselves, we created both a spaciousness and allowed a fullness.

Perhaps the only thing missing was a feeling of movement. And the movement – the tumbling, jostling, being carried by a new current movement – is the descriptive feature that distinguishes dialogue.