DEHONIANS COMMUNICATING

“A word fitly spoken is likened to apples of gold in settings of silver.”(Prov. 25:11).The Jews commented that that the gold here is Scripture and the silver refers to the blank spaces between the letters and words.And one commentator… said that the golden apples in a silver setting means that in every sentence of Scripture(and surely in every object or event in the world) there are two faces, the evident face and the hidden face, and the evident one is silver, but the hidden one is more precious because it is of gold. And he who looks at the picture from a distance, with the apples surrounded by its silver, believes that the apples too are of silver, but when he looks closer, he will discover the splendor of gold”.

Umberto Eco,The Island of the Day Before

PREMISE: COMMUNICATION IS A GIFT

The topic of communication is a broad sea, an immense ocean, surrounding us on all sides.We can begin our reflection with the dictionary, looking up the etymological meaning of the word.The meaning of the word “communication”[1]is not only to place in common (Coramina); the Latin word “communicatio” hasa prefix, a suffix and, first and foremost, a central root that gives the word its full meaning.The preposition Cum means “with”, Actiomeans Action, an event; and the central root comes from the word munuswhich means duty, office, charge or responsibility, but in the sense of a generous collaboration with others;therefore munus also means gift, grace, homage (to people or to gods).[2]

In our re-discovery of the word “communication”,we can ask ourselves: just what is this gift that we offer in communication? What is the most important thing we can share?

Those who want to use communicationfor buying or selling know quite well that their “munus” is gain. Their communication is business.

Those who want to use communicationfor power or some other benefit will find in their “munus” something like what they want to obtain.

A large part of the negative image surrounding the world of communicationcomes from this distorted idea of the “munus”, which we also must share.

Doubtless, for those who have a clear ethical mission in their life, the goal of this action-event of communication will be rather clear.

“The moral intrigue, 'being for others’ that constitutes the background of any communication… This action-eventis situated in the ‘preliminary exposition to the other, in the non-indifference for the other’,which is, as Lévinassays, not simply the intention to send a message.[3]

It is in this context, one so very rich in meaning, that I believe it is important to situate this gathering which we have called “ comunicare Dehonian” (Dehonians communicating).

To what point is our involvement in the field of communicationfounded in and does it bearwitness to this great (eminently Christian and Dehonian) “munus” of understanding all of life as a gift and oblation?

Because it is in the difficult yet ordinary effort to translate daily living into a project of life shared with others thatcommunicationis born. This is the birthplace of the communicationthat we dream of, a fullness and communion of sentiments, ideals and actions. Communicationthat is, as Lucine Sfez expresses it, “ a new theology…”[4], in this process of globalization—and, at the same time, fragmentation— imposed on us by technology.

It is easy to discover in every communicationbetween persons indications of a celebration. One celebrates or performs a war, a judgment, work or some sporting activity.Doubtless the word “celebration”, which etymologically means “to take part in, concur, or frequent [5]does not indicate festivities.

In order to indicate something more than a celebration, the Greeks used the word synaxis (meeting or assembly) and eoroteh (festivity, “ compliment”). For its part, Latin speaks of conventus (assembly) and festum (feast), to indicate an important qualitative leap.Every type of communication implies the possibility of a personal encounter or interchange, but it does not always achieve that qualitative leap to the level of a festival of communication.

“Every festival isan affirmation, ayes to life,a favorable judgment of our existence and that of the whole world.Therefore, in order to celebrate a festivity in life, it must make sense; if one thinks that life is meaningless, a mere frustration, celebrating it becomes impossible.Festivities are not born in a vacuum; it expresses an abundance that is the result of a warm esteem for the usual. To “fete” something, therefore, means to recycle one’s daily approval of life into a special occasion and an extraordinary form”.[6]

A festive gathering is an encounter-gift, something that we might call a Communication-Feast; it is a communicationthat has its foundation in the very principle of a life seen as a gift for others. However, in order to formulate such an important thesis, we cannot fail to analyze the specific contribution of thescience of communication; or look at the substantial contribution of the (globalized) forms of mass mediathat have been so powerfully developed in the last fifty years.

Therefore, to have the basis for constructing an ideal formulation of Dehonian communication, we would do well to analyze and ask ourselves what challenges are in play in the process of communication in this last half a century if we want to discuss in our work groups and come to some agreement on the dynamics of SCJ collaboration which is the objective of this gathering.

A quick glance at the major challenges facing us today from the globalized mass media will help us to understand a reality that is becoming a daily challenge for all.

1. TWO CIVILIZATIONS CLASH ….

We members of a literate society cannot imagine our life without writing because it is a tool we use every day. Certainly the primary oral societies satisfied their communication needs with the spoken word and they attributed a special power to it: not everyone could speak, but everyone could hear; true wisdom was to be found in the living “memory”. Writing is not a mere appendage to speech since it transfers the speech of an oral world into a new sensory world, that of sight; ittransformsboth speech and thought.Literacy restructures consciousness.

The appearance of writing marked a breakdown in the ways of understanding the word because, as we are told by the scholar Walter J. Ong–it allows us to establish outside of thought something that in reality exists solely within it.[7]Although its origins are due to decisively practical needs deriving from accounting, its functions expanded. Today writing is a privileged activity of contemporary societies.

a) THE CIVILIZATION OF LITERACY AND PRINTING

“Writing, according to Ong,“is the technology that shaped and moved the intellectual activity of modern man.” Various societies used different means to help the memory, but writing is something more than this. It was not simply a signal but a codified system of signs by which a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would find in the text.Writing was and still is the most transcendental of all human technological inventions.

Printing:of course, for thousands of years human beings used various systems to impress designs on various surfaces, but the decisive development in the civilization of literacy was the invention of movable type and the printing press in 15th century Europe. It was printing that brought about writing’s full hegemony over speech.

The arrival of printing places the word in space in an unrelenting way.Writing transports the words from the world of sound to the world of visible space, but printing fixes it there.The printed text is the fullest and most paradigmatic form of writing and contributed to the development of the concept of personal privacy that characterizes modern society.The production of smaller books, more easily transportable than manuscripts, prepared modern man for solitary reading, something that was not known before, since it was a community activity.

b) THE CIVILIZATION OF THE NEW SPEECH

Several decades ago, that is in the 20th century,Marshall McLuhanstated that the era of the “new orality”had begun.The Canadian theoretician, a pioneer in the study of the impact of the media, held that the great technological innovations generated a “before” and “after” in history: the invention of printing and the arrival of television. The first of these marvels fully ushered in the age of literacy which for some centuries had imposed itself on the primary orality—a cognitive change was brought about in what he called the |Guttenberg Galaxy.The second, in the 20th century, brought about what McLuhan calls the passage to a new orality, which Ong calls the “secondary orality”.

One of the fundamental characteristics of this orality, as in every orality, was a sense of belonging to the tribe.When I read a book, he said, I am performing a solitary act (and thus printing unleashed a strong sense of individualism). However, when I am watching a television program or the finals of an international sporting event, I know that at that very same moment there are millions of people all over the world who are doing exactly what I am doing.This sensation, according toMc Luhan, was the sense of belonging to the Global Village. From these studies we inherited the word “globalization”.

There was no lack of people who enthusiastically accepted these ideas, just as there was no lack of skeptics. The latter hold that shortly after McLuhan’s death a new phenomenon was born and spread, a phenomenon that would have changed forever the so-called “secondary orality”: the fax, the computer and ultimately the internet have enabled the population of the whole planet to read and write more than in any other age. However, in reality that is not how things went, because this analysis was based on a preconception, the idea that literacy is superior to orality because it belongs to “civilized” and “evolved” societies and “highly-cultured” individuals.

Ong believes we should go beyond this view, because in literate societies the functions that achieve locality and literacy are complementary, and we cannot hold that either is superior to the other.

The computer monitor requires us to interact, something we do not do when we watch the television news. Through the use of satellites we, like all the inhabitants of this planet, are connected to a single means.This new application in communication allows us to have a planetary citizenship through the web.Our message can arrive at its destination almost at the speed of sound and it allows us to interact (buy, send, receive and modify contracts, write to one another)) in a way that is superior to the classical means of communication. Certainly some experts continue to support the primacy of the written word and they claim that literacy is increasingly necessary and that today it is harder than ever tosurvive illiteracy.

On the other hand, other scholars support the arrival of a new era of illiteracy and non-writing.A decade ago Mihai Nadin (in his book The Civilization of Illiteracy, 1997), speaks of an“aphasiathat replaces the age of linear writing, with a multiplicityof languages that that unravel traditional writing and give rise to the civilization of the illiterate, of those who “do not write”.

We must take a position on these views if we want our “communicationof the message”, of the Good news, to be effective.

2. THE GOSPEL AND THE NEW ORALITY

What is missing in the majority of the analyses of the Church’s situation today is a profound consideration of the meaning of the “paradigm shift” that presented itself with the coming of the “cyber culture.”

Some believe that for a Christian to be seriously involved in the globalized communications media means to risk prejudicing the integrity of the Christian faith. Indeed, many people feel that faith and culture are two distinct entities, connected of course, but substantially identified in separate ways. In their view the electronic media represent a serious threat to Christianity, which they believe is the only area that can guarantee security and definitive answers.

In the closing years of the 20th century Doctor Peter Horsfield, Chair of the School of Communications in Melbourne (Australia), conducted a study of the various theological texts addressing the theme of theology and culture. Only one of these mentioned the role that multi-media communications plays in today’s society and culture…[8]

There is still no communications theory relative to the field of culture that we can base our ideas on in order to demolish the instrumental ideologies supported by the majority of pastors and theologians. One of the causes is that the theory of communications has a certain complexity that ends up favoring the choice of an instrumental point of view since it is the simpler and more serviceable.

First of all we should challenge the metaphor that instrumentalizes the means of communication and propose the metaphor of communication as a cultural network, in whose sphere all other activities and cultural institutions are localized and constructed.

This new metaphor could be accepted easily because just about anyone can imagine and have a first-hand experience of the enormous development of the internet, the net of worldwide interconnectedness.

Surely the changes in the new electronic communications technology are having, in the social experience and in the structuring of religious faith as well, a considerably greater and more profound impact than what can be seen with a superficial glance.

How can we explain that these changing patterns of the cyberculture are causing important consequences in the proclamation andindividual living of the faith, as well as in the institutional practices developed in earlier cultural-and media contexts?

The structural blindness of the thinkers and pastors concerning the constructive social role of the electronic media says that the religious institutions, which are per se being so greatly influenced by these changes, do not have an analysis on which they are able to base their reflection. An important provocation can came from the well-known work of Water Ong on “Orality and Literacy” and from the theoretical foundation represented by the rise of a “new orality”.

We have seen that the present high-tech culture is living rise to a new orality that is modifying the human experience, giving birth to a new “forma mentis”. Thus one could say that the changes towards an audio-visual electronic culture are causing a similar change, antithetical to the devolution of writing, a new orality” that is reclaiming some aspects of the primary orality without failing to benefit from the age of literacy. The fleeting word of the audio-visual era is a return to the evanescence of the spoken word that exists only as long as it is fading away, now taking on the character of an event, like the Hebrew word dabarthat means both word and event.

a) FROM ORAL TRADITION TO THE MEDIATION OF THE WRITTEN TEXT

Jesusbelonged to an oral tradition.He was an itinerant and backed his words up with deeds:expelling demons, healing people and performingmiracles. His lessons were improvised and adapted to the situation. The first prophets e Christian spokesmen followed Jesus’ teaching and style of operation. They traveled about, expelled demons, healed people, preached in the name ofJesus, and pronounced new sayings as if they had come from the mouth of Jesus himself.

The resurrection was proclaimed as a real experience in the present moment.They did not remember Jesusas someone from the past, whose life had come to an end.The prophetic form proclaimed him as one who is living and working among his people, Jesus, who died but is now living. This Jesuswho died was equal to this person who was speaking and doing important deeds among his people.

The first sayings and stories about Jesus circulated in Palestineand passed beyond its frontiers as oral accounts, not written texts. These oral accounts shared the characteristics common to the genre of oral communication of stories and narratives: they spoke about past events, adapting them and making them continually real in the present by way of the person and actions of the narrator or the oral prophet.

There were many advantages to this way of communicating the faith.It situated the faith among the people by means of the richness of presence, voice and physical actions that produced physical effects. It also allowed for the continual adaptation of the past to the present by means of the process of recalling with creativity and returning to narrate the story.

However, it also presented a few problems: the power of the word depends on the ability of the “ witness”, the prophet who performed dramatic deeds; the confirmation of the communication depended on these deeds.Another difficulty is that if Jesus continually said new things by means of the prophet, how could the continuity of Jesus’ instruction and original words be maintained among the new disciples?

It is also obvious that the prophets might not be worthy or might be lacking in confidence.Guided by the spontaneity of the spirit, they frequently disappeared when they were most needed.

The disadvantages of the oral tradition created the practical necessity of situating the faith in something more stable.Writing seemed to be the means by which they could achieve this stability.Jesus’ original sayings and stories began to be written down in order to preserve them.The past was stabilized and fixed in the written word.