Communication 3

Dolores Umbridge

The Pope

Martin Buber

Flipping the Bird on the 580

What's the connection?

I escaped for a mini-mental health break yesterday to watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. As I left the Bayfair Movie Theatre and merged onto the 580 I had an "ah-ha" experience. As usual the crowd at the last stoplight was thick. When I finally got onto the on-ramp I was side by side with another car. They were in front of me, so obviously (to me at least) they should pass in front of me in the merge. They hesitated and I looked over and made eye-contact with the driver, waving him forward ahead of me. As he merged and sped ahead I saw his right hand reach up into the air. Suddenly I was pissed, expecting to see him flip me off - yet what he did was wave generously his gratitude for our merging encounter. I had expected a rejection, and yet the wave seemed to be an invitation to dialogue and relationship. It got me reflecting on urban life, communication, the Harry Potter Movie I'd just come from and some of the recent sharing around "communication" on the blog.

In the Order of the Phoenix the bad gal is Dolores Umbridge, a quasi-fascist governmental official who takes over the Hogwarts Wizadry School. She assumes control with the goal of purging the school community of the impure, the dis-obedient, and what she considers "hateful lies" among the words and thoughts of the students. She asserts her power by coercion, manipulation, and even physical abuse. She's interested foremost and entirely in achieving the results she expects, not in any way in the people she's been called to serve or with whom she lives, works, and exists. Having never shown compassion, humility or any desire for relationship, she falls - rather is taken down violently - by the children of the school when they get the chance to overthrow the shackles of her egomaniac power regime. At the end of the film she mutters to herself, "I hate children." It's in her downfall that we discover the foundation of her self-righteous, persecution-based, power-tripping: she doesn't really care about anyone, she cares only for what she perceives as "order", the "common good," and that things return to the way that they've been, the way that they should always be. She has no interest in relationship. She has no relationships. She - having taken over the school community - has neither an intellectual idea of what community is nor an experience of community.

I read of the Pope's recent comments about the Catholic church being the only true church, asserting that she alone has the apostolic succession needed, and required, in order to be the truth, authoritative church within our world. While it seems archaic, elitist, divisive, destructive, and out-to-lunch in terms of the post-modern organically connectional world in which we live (and it is) it's based upon his notion that there can only be one relationship format in the world Christian Community. It has to be based upon the primacy of the Catholic Church. That's what legitmizes his power, place, and purpose. So how can he say that and at the same time seem to place such emphasis on relationships with other Christian Communities, the community of Islam, and other religious contexts? Can he really be in relationship with others that he treats as objects, while demanding that he and the Catholic Church be the subject of and in everything. A good sumamry article is on sf gate "Pope: other Christians Not True Churches"

In an earlier communication entry I talked a bit about the work of Jewish philosopher/theologian Martin Buber and his seminal book entitled "I and Thou." He talks about relationship - community - between two subjects, in which "I" addresses not "it" but "Thou." His idea that he develops across philosophy and into Theology is that God seeks to develop, empower, and birth in and between us such subject-to-subject relationships. Such community is the essence, purpose and passion of life. It is not possible when we objectify God, each other, or ourselves. It is not possible with anonymity, for it's all based on knowing each other and being known as a subject, a creature that acts, speaks, creates, listens, responds, and constructs with others.

In the car merging onto 580 I expected the driver to flip me off in a Dolores Umbridge-sort-of-way, to treat me as an object, or as less-than-equal. I was surprised by the opposite reaction. Having done several marriage counseling sessions this week talking about the importance of communication, I was taken aback when someone actually was initiating communication in an "I and Thou" way when I had expected the opposite. Maybe we all have that expectation. Someone in one of the communities in which I live has several times told me to "F*%@ Off" whenever I had a different opinion than them, or asserted my own opinion. That person has no desire to be in relationship with me. In fact they're the closest thing I know to Dolores Umbridge in the flesh - a person with no relationships with anyone except themselves. Maybe that's what we're use to in our urban life in which we have to react before we're treated badly, assert our will before we steam-rolled by others, flip off that driver in the other car before they flip us off - or worse pull out a gun. Maybe we're communicationally-challenged because we often don't know what we most long to have: relationships, living in an "I and Thou" sort-of-community.

Maybe that's what Paul is talking about is 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a
noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

Maybe we've become so use to noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, both around us and coming from our own communication, in our urban lifestyle and survival needs, that we have forgotten what Community can be like, what life-in-relationship is about, and how we're incomplete in our isolation.