Dialogue of the deaf

Irshad Manji has a must-read column in Friday's Globe and Mail urging a dialing back of the dialogue of the deaf between believers and self-styled new atheists.

What's especially delightful is Manji's presentation of herself as a believer in God who yet respectfully insists on reason and reasonableness as part and parcel of a life of faith.

"The point is whether, in the name of God or godlessness, dogmatists commit barking mad atrocities," she writes.

Her admonition to temper our tongues and our torts is something Manji has lived out in her maturation from an enfant terrible of Canadian journalism to an international thinker who appears on stages with Salman Rushdie and gives lectures at Oxford where Richard Dawkins is a heckler.

Her call for fresh reason and freshened arguments in the theist-anti-theist debate, then, is as wise as it is welcome, though she stops short of offering what I think is the most reasonable argument of all: silence. Not silence in the sense of simply cutting off the discussion with all sides retiring behind their barricades still equally grumpy and dissatisfied. Rather, silence as the acknowledgement of faith as a necessity for sanity. To avoid going barking mad, after all, we must occasionally be able to stop ourselves from barking.

Believers, of course, live their faith by proclaiming, exhorting, calling, converting. Anti-believers feel compelled to dispute, disprove, debunk and even disparage. A point of common ground for both camps is the demonstrable truth that there is a point—call it the silence point—beyond which language cannot go but knowledge never stops. The silence point is essential to the functioning of the mysterious and the mundane alike. How would music, art, and poetry work without the necessary silences through which their knowledge is conducted, and which language cannot compute?

Mathematics can be seen as a whole language of silence (think how algebra usurps the alphabet) whose history is one of constantly inventing new forms of mathematical language (new silences?) to ultimately explain eternal reality.

Even something as ordinary and ubiquitous as commercial marketing, though, is predicated on the faith that a particular "promise" will take it beyond the limitations of our ordinary understanding of the word promise. We normally mean a promise as something that will be done as specified. But marketing is about branding and branding is not, by definition, about specific deliverables. It is about the generalized intangibles we "know" are being silently promised to us by a given brand.

That is not an argument for placing our faith in the promises of marketers. It's just making the point that faith is evident in all we do and, more, exists at the point where language stops and knowledge continues—in other words, in the silence that is the sine qua non of human existence. To deny it would define insanity.

We do not need to retreat into monastic life to find this silence. We do need to actively listen for the opportunities it provides. Several months ago, I had the opportunity to meet a Protestant pastor named Bill Hybels at an event hosted by two of Cardus' wonderful and generous supporters. As head of perhaps the largest mega-church in the U.S., Bill Hybels runs an organization that makes a lot of noise inside and outside the Christian world. But at the breakfast where I met him, he sat quietly at the end of a board room table and told a story about a close friend of his whose journey to God involved sitting each morning on a patio chair saying nothing, praying nothing, doing nothing but staring into the silence all around him. There was the sanity he desperately needed in his life. There was faith. There was God.

I've thought about that story a lot over the intervening months. It recurred when I read Irshad Manji's column in Friday's Globe and Mail. Perhaps to her welcome call for a dialing back of the dialogue of the deaf between believers and anti-believers, we might respectfully invite all involved to try the experiment in reason of being still until they know there is a God.