Communicating Faith

23. Communicating Faith and Relating in Love

359 23 Communicating Faith and Relating in Love John Sullivan Through communication people express emotions and needs, establish identity, build community, exchange goods, construct a range of social structures, embark on projects, and transmit values. Through communication they also seek meaning, interpret behavior, celebrate key moments, and reach out to others. These all entail some form of sharing and connection. Communication is not so much about information; more importantly it is about meaning and the exercise of our human capacities. Meaning requires an addressee—someone the meaning is intended for—as well as the one (or the community) who addresses, the source or “from-which” of meaning. We should see communication as a channel for relationship, as a medium in which there is both giving and receiving. All communication either explicitly or implicitly invites others into some form of relationship. The invitation can, of course, be refused as well as accepted; it can also be accepted on terms different from those intended. The response in turn gives something back to the “sender” and modifies the relationship. The various modes and media for communication influence what we think, how we think, what we notice (and fail to notice); they affect how we 360 John Sullivan see ourselves and others, how we relate to others, with political as well as philosophical and psychological dimensions developing from this “seeing.” There is a huge and constantly growing literature on communication media, including oral, writing, printing, electric, computer-based, and digital technology communication.1 There is one overriding lesson that comes through to me from these works: central to communication is relationship. Communication assumes, depends upon, and builds on relationship; it addresses and seeks to influence relationship; it does affect relationship, even though this often occurs in ways that were not intended. Relationships in turn inexorably influence communication: what is given, how it is conveyed, and what is received. The sender might be said to be the subject or agent of communication. The sender envisages, with varying degrees of sensitivity and realism, a relationship with potential recipients. There is the target or object of communication , the receiver(s). They cannot fail to perceive a relationship implied in the act of communication, whether they welcome this or not. Communication has a topic or body of content. This will have implications for relationship , even if these implications are not explicit. The context has to be taken into account, with all its limitations and opportunities. Every context for communication carries the freight of concerns and questions, of hopes and anxieties. Relationship is integral to all these dimensions of the context. As we have seen, there are many media for communicating. Religious faith has been communicated via art, sculpture, and architecture, through poetry, dance, music, and drama, through law and politics, through literature and science, through philosophy and theology, and more recently via other media such as film, television, and the Internet. Each medium requires different kinds of engagement or relationship in terms of our energies, attention, priorities, responsiveness, and mode of being. Successful communication occurs where there is some kind of match be1 . For examples, see Gugliemo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert S. Fortner, Communication , Media, and Identity (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Ark, 1987); Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); James O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (London: Methuen, 1987); Alan Purves, The Web of Text and the Web of God (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). Communicating Faith and Relating in Love 361 tween sender and recipient and between purpose and method. I believe that, for all the technical difficulties there might be, the most important elements in miscommunication stem from failures in relationship. Despite all the gigantic leaps forward in our technological capacity to communicate, the effective communication of faith still depends on presence and relationship— being there with and for others really matters. It matters in terms of making a message understandable and accessible, by offering embodiment of what might otherwise come across as abstract. It matters in terms...