This is about communication, silence and lost opportunities.
Putting words into the mouth of someone else, let alone the resident CEO is a task that a communications underling approaches with some trepidation and not a small measure of due consideration. So it was that when I recently crafted a statement on behalf of the Primate to mark the death of Yasser Arafat, the words, though brief to the point of terseness, were not without consideration. But the statement did not matter. I wrote a headline on it that said “Primate expresses condolences on the death of …”
With more than three decades of this type of thing under my belt, I should have known better, should have known that so many people never read beyond the headline or that even when they do the words in bold type at the top have colored their reception of the message; I should have known that there would be some who would take the word “condolences” as meaning that the Primate was saying Yasser Arafat had been a splendid fellow, which is exactly what he had told me not to say. I should have known that the subtle distinction between a pastoral expression of sadness directed to the Palestinian people would be read by some as a statement to the effect that … well, that Yasser Arafat had been a splendid chap.
I got emails. Now Peter Blachford, the new treasurer of General Synod and a man who thinks about these things, has said that the social importance of and major difficulty with email is that it has created the expectation of an instantaneous response. An email is something that zips through the ether and I imagine there is a substantial number of people who, having hit “send” remain seated at their computer awaiting a fresh message. The ability to meet the expectation of instantaneous response, sadly, is something that diminishes in direct proportion to the number of emails received. This means that email is not necessarily a very friendly medium. I get a lot of emails, not all of which, sadly, get answered. There is, for one thing, the sheer volume of them, but there is also an attitude in me when I read bluntly critical messages, that there is no point to a reply – that my critic's mind is firmly made up and all conversation is futile. This is almost always a mistake. I know this because now and again, especially when there is a flurry of negative comment over something, I focus on a single writer and attempt to get his or her attention. I attempt to communicate … just to see if we can sort things out and get beyond the innuendo of the initial communication.
On the Friday after the death of Arafat, I got an email, addressed to “Sir:” and that tore a strip off me and my headline. I answered. My response, likewise was to “Sir:” and I firmly expected that to be the end of that. It wasn't. Over the following three days, there was an exchange that got more and more civil and that eventually mellowed, like a sweet marinade, both my critic and me. On Monday morning, the farewell-this-is-now-enough email I got was addressed to “Dear Sam…”
This, then, is about communicating and the opportunities that it provides.
It's not the first time that something like this happens. Some of my closest friendships by correspondence have been created from vitriol that dissipated and dissipated and metamorphosed through an exchange of sentiments that convinced both me and the person writing that neither of us were ogres or insensitive to logic and the breadth of vision that exists among human beings.
Andrew Hutchison, the new Primate, has said a lot about this kind of thing and the way he puts it is to underscore the vital importance of drawing people into the conversation. People who feel alienated, he has said, usually do so because decisions are made that affect them and on which they are not consulted. Andrew's primacy is less than a year old and already, this vision he has of Anglicans actually in communication with each other – speaking and listening to each other everywhere in the church – is emerging as a hallmark of his young primacy.
Where we let things fall silent too quickly, we are forever after denied the knowledge of what might have been. We are denied the wisdom that might have flowed from that knowledge and we are denied the experiences and the richness of another. We are denied the opportunity to listen and learn.
Riding to work on the subway early one morning recently, I watched a woman sleeping across the aisle from me. A lot of people sleep on the subway. The train lurched to a stop and the woman emitted a snoreful snort, and she looked up and our eyes met and she smiled briefly as though she's been caught in the act of something, and then she left the train, gone. I wonder who she was…what she is like … what, if anything, we have in common. … I wonder what she had to say about things.
When I was a university student, much younger in years and outlook, poetry used to pour out of me like water from a leaky faucet and although most of these things are mercifully lost or forgotten, a few lines have stayed with me across the decades. When I was much younger in years and in romanticism, I wrote:
I wonder how we can know
That any of the people
Who brush by us in this city
Were not meant to become part of us
forever. …
