Reflection About Dialogue

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There is much emphasis in our days on the concept of dialogue. Most people simply equate the word with discussion and more and more we hear about how the Church should dialogue with the world; but what is dialogue? For someone it means to put aside one’s identity, or rather one’s faith, in the name of a lowest common denominator or the quiet living, a symbol of a Church that compromises with the world watering down its doctrine. In this work I have committed myself to try to demonstrate that dialogue is not a new concept born from the necessity of coexistence. It is the very essence of our being Church, a concept rooted in the way in which God deals with humanity, in the logic of creation and redemption. I experienced in my personal life…show more content…
I learned that dialogue in not an easy task, it requires effort, perseverance and the availability of becoming a pupil in another’s school. Living in Jerusalem has been an enriching experience. I discovered that it is not only a place of conflict, but a city of encounters, a city of people with roots stronger than the secular tensions. Especially here, and especially from the situation of the Palestinian people, I realized that the lack of dialogue is the root of hatred, and that as long as one does not recognize that the other has our same dignity, there will never be…show more content…
The Tower of Babel The fourth step in the rupturing of the dialogue between God and man is in the often misinterpreted story of the Tower of Babel. Here the sin does not consist in the fact that they wanted to reach God: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky” (Gn 11:4a), to reach God is the aim of our life, a good thing. The sin that the people of babel commit is to think that they can live without God : “and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth” (Gn 11:1-4b). It is a twofold sin: making a name for themselves means to root out their father, to root out God, in fact no one names himself (God named Adam, Adam named Seth); avoid being dispersed means that they do not want to fill the earth, as God commanded: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28). A direct result of this closure is the confusion of tongues: “So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city” (Gn 11:8). If one closes the vertical dimension of the dialogue, even the horizontal one suffers. From that moment, man will continue to try to rebuild this relationship, but a full restoration of the vertical dimension will come only with the descent of the Holy Spirit, the anti-babel account recorded in the book of Acts of the

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