Patience--Dialogue Part 3

Patience in dialogue refers to patience with the dialogue process. If a person commits to dialogue, they commit to humbly learning from their dialogue partner. Such learning takes time. To begin with, we must learn how a person thinks. Each of us learned to think in certain ways. Mechanics learn to think in ways germane to mechanics. Poets learn to think in ways germane to poetry. These two ways of thinking are not the same. Even if the mechanic and the poet speak to one another about something other than their area of expertise--say religion or politics--they continue to speak as a mechanic or as a poet. Since they are following different rules of thought, they may not initially understand one another. For them to truly enter into dialogue. They must either learn to think as the other does. The poet must learn the rules of thought which the mechanic follows. OR they must learn a new way of thinking that is particular to their subject matter.

I see this frequently in religious work. Ministry involves learning to think according rules of theology, biblical studies, pastoral care, ethics, and practical theology. Each of these sub-disciplines have their own assumptions and rules and they have difficulty speaking to each other sometimes. For a minister who has attended seminary, some of these patterns of thinking become second nature. But we work in churches where we do not communicate often with people who share these patterns of thinking.

Once we've learned to share patterns of thinking with our dialogue partners, then we must learn about the actual subject at hand. For example, I may know the rules of theological thinking but if someone wants to discuss the writings of Paul Tillich with me, I'll have to learn about Paul Tillich. Patience is required to both learn and re-learn patterns of thinking and then processing the actual material.

Another place where patience is required is in the area of persuasion. Ethical persuasion is committed to persuading people on the merits of argument. It is very hard to truly persuade someone. It is much easier to manipulate or coerce people than to persuade them. In manipulation, a person intentionally uses social-psychological cues the induce behavior. For example, when buying a car, the car dealer will attempt to get your own car key from you as quickly as possible. This becomes a subconscious cue that you are relinquishing your car to them and getting a new one. Even before you have been persuaded to buy a new car, they try to manipulate you to buying a car--the actual number of manipulative techniques used by car sales people is too large to catalogue here. People resort to manipulation and coercion because they lack patience with persuasion.

In the first instance, we cultivate the patience to learn OR patience with ourselves and how quickly we can come to understand things. In the second place, we cultivate patience with other and how quickly we can influence them. There is of course a final context in which patience is involved. Patience with the relationship. Just as we are trying to learn, our dialogue partners are trying to learn. Just as we are trying to influence them, they are trying to influence us. Dialogue requires a mutual willingness to expose ourselves both to learning and teaching, persuading and being persuaded. Or as in the line from the Peace Prayer by St. Francis, "To be understood as to understand." Along the way, we risk becoming angry, getting hurt, mishandling intimacy and a host of other things that can go wrong in relationships. Impatient people take one mistake as unacceptable and withdraw from dialogue. Patient people know that dialogue may take several wrong turns before reaching the hoped for destination. Obviously, there are relationship which simply need to end. They become mutually destructive beyond repair. But more often than not, patience in dialogue will yield a fruitful outcome.