Letters as Dialogue

Chris sent me this letter several days before his trial. I prompted him by suggesting he and I trade letters specifically aimed at helping him reflect on his experience. This was his first grappling with the idea. Stay with it!

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Dear Anne,

In letter writing I am a caudillo. My purpose defies authority with Thucydidian justice. Consider the battle of Thermopole and I am the incongruous Spartan at odds with the Persian Empire. Except for might making what I write hardly fits the genre of letter writing and so I am one of those generals on the battlefield who writes the Constitution after the fact of depotism. I betray all treaties, forget the sacred rituals, and am not above slaughtering the innocent. In writing my move from thought to thought comes with my whim, of no account in the academy but nevertheless a Custer charging ahead of the battalion into the fray. My word means only what suits my interests.

Do you say otherwise? I invite with a sincere question, curious whether your writing will put forward your own terms of engagement. Already you speak of eliciting my reflection, and what, I wonder, will your values discern? Each value is like a crystal, which, when held in the beam of light acts to fracture into the spectrum of color red orange yellow green blue violet. The curiosity you will bring to bear on my experience will reveal all, or else tender counterfeit. But stop, and ask with me just how to select the points of concern. We humans are evaluative animals, blessed with the reason to critique according to criterion of excellence. Should we pretend that our letters would illuminate God's truth, could we do better for criterion than that spelled out in the Book of Genesis?

Each story of the Book of Genesis contributes to one theme: the return of good for ill. Through the Old Testament the covenant relationship established in the Book of Genesis must have renewal again and again. Walter Brueggemen, renowed biblical scholar and author of The Prophetic Imagination, writes that the role of the prophet was not only to denounce the behavior of his contemporaries. The task of the prophet was to nourish his or her generation by making retrieval from the ancient testimonies of God's presence. In current social teaching of the Catholic Church the encyclicals of the Holy Father Pope Benedict likewise retrieve from the sacred texts the authority of moral proclamation. And while always privileging the sacred scripture of the New Testament portraits of Christ as the New Adam and the New Moses again and again percolate through the History of Catholic Teaching. Perhaps most mysterious of portraits of Christ, is that of him "In the beginning" the eternal Word of God. This reverence of Christ in the Johanine tradition evokes the Creative authority of God from the Book of Genesis. Christ, Word of God, in the Book of Revelation comes again at Judgment to suspend and unite, to finally evaluate all Creation, just as we read in the Book of Genesis that at the end of each Day God judged the goodness of Creation. Christ is the purifying Word spoken by the prophets, who came in the form of a slave born of a virgin in a Bethlehem manger. Christ purified human race through the eternal hope incarnated in Jesus most fully human upon his crucifixion between two thieves. Just as we pray the prayer of Jesus to Abba, our Father, we plead for a part in the divine community making possible love here on earth through economy of conscience. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, primarily through lives relinquishing the debtors to whom we give credit. That is, in so far as we render our hearts merciful, so we fulfill our covenant with God. All the possibility of our calling to love was shown in the Book of Genesis by the mercy of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. At every ill turn of the human race, Godself reconstitutes the bonds of love. In our day then, a criterion for the goodness of action could at best illustrate the unifying goodness of God. But how? As our Church teaches, we let God make known the wondrous creation; we do our part in praise and reverence of all that we have in signal hope, namely our human dignity as ones made in the image and likeness of God. So, does our communication reveal a resemblance to the truth of love? The gift of the Spirit continually bestow us with the grace to speak our piece of the truth and therefore bring about the Kingdom of God within us.

A letter is a way of speaking, informal, flowing, anticipating an intimate audience. In contrast to an epistle, the letter would not pretend to teach. Yet, in so far as we make known our desires in the name of Jesus Christ, so a dialogue of the Word may occur according to the gift of the Spirit.

Chris