Sign and signification : networks of discernment in the Church

Abstract

I sincerely believe silence is the stuff of sharing, yet I have to use words. There is always this meshy, unending flow back and forth between silence and speech! It is not an easy endeavour especially when you to want to journey into the unquiet imagination of the heart and soul, and when the locus of these words has to deal with what is naked, what is not yet exposed and unchecked, what is between connections and sometimes unwelcome, and what might be locked in chambers with safety screens. These are echoes of neutral voices which are free from the luxurious cells of eloquence and prudence, from the usual arranged affairs of our old logic, waiting to be unblocked. Tt is not an easy choice to select from these voices. They have been buried inside me for a long time, yet there is still a distance. Their echoes me too many, unending and I am afraid they are bursting into haemorrhage. A spiritual one! They are whispering, sometimes screaming to be relieved, to be heard and shared. They have been faithfully quiet, waiting to be collected. They do not want their pains to be rejected or worse smashed. However, they are not afraid of being mocked. Some of these voices are ambiguous and complicated, others are rather innocent, smooth and settled. They want to encounter truth, to be in touch with depth. They do not want facile answers. They are not interested in formal, well defined or accurate definitions. They are aware that there is no particular moment where they can find the necessary resting place. They want to breathe new air and to meet the unimaginable, the immeasurable, the incalculable and the unfamiliar. They want to experience a new home. I will attempt first, to name some of what I consider the most disturbing voices. I would prefer they remain locked in chains. They are filters of our own pride and arrogance, of our unwillingness to deal with the implications of our understanding place and unfortunately they have the tone of miscarrying speech. They are traces and fragments of the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the blinkered categorizations, the academic straitjackets, the restrictions and suppressing of uncertainties, the notion of fixed perspectives, perceptions and assumptions, the concealment of meaning, the manipulations and subtle yet strong conditioning, the arrogance, the power and the violent submissions, the imposition of sameness, the violence, the settled dispositions, the definitive systems, the boundaries and their consequences: exclusion and bracketing, the pressures to power and closure, the unreal stability, the maintenance, the illusion of mastering texts, the messy reality of interpretation and meaning production, the denials, the disguising of identity, the fixed trappings, the temptation of self-sufficiency and the illusion of a totalizing grip of the world. [...]