“I wish to encourage you all, in as much as you are pastors of the Holy People of God, to have this primary concern in all your activities: prayer, spiritual life. It is the first occupation, no other goes before it.” These are words of Pope Francis to the members of the Permanent Synod of the Greek-Catholic Church of Ukraine on 5th July 2019 in Vatican. The Lord had asked of His apostles on the evening of His passion, to stay close to Him and to keep watch (cf. Mk 14:34). The pastors are duty bound to keep watch beside those who pass through the night of pain in the Church. The apostles had not prayed, they slept and fell to the temptation, the temptation of worldliness: the violent weakness of the flesh prevailed over the meekness of the Spirit and they succumbed to violence. They confronted Judas and the violent group with the same violence. At least one took to the way of the sword. The Church in her history has taken the way of the sword many times. Pope Francis told the Permanent Synod, “Not weariness, not the sword, not flight (see Mt 26:40, 52, 56), but prayer and the gift of self unto the end are the responses the Lord awaits from His people. Only these responses are Christian, and these alone will save us from the worldly spiral of violence.”

The Synod implies a journey of prayer and dialogue. The way of prayer is one of language and talking. Prayer is just one way to talk. E. Levinas wrote, “to pray is to speak in an unusual and uncanny manner. The mode of prayer is, perhaps, available to us as a phenomenon even though the object of prayer is not. So prayer is a mode of speech that can be considered phenomenologically whatever we may individually think about its spiritual value.’ Levinas also suggests that “speaking to the other is a form of prayer.”

For Levinas, “language is justice” and “the essence of language is goodness… the essence of language is friendship and hospitality.” To speak is to make the world common, to create commonplaces. Language does not refer to the generality of concepts. Speech itself is therefore a teaching in its founding of the world and community. To have meaning is to teach or to be taught, to speak or to be able, to be stated. In discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the Other, and this urgency of the response acuteness of the present engenders me for responsibility; as responsible I am brought to my final reality. It is to affirm that becoming conscious is already language, that the essence of language is goodness, or again, that the essence of language is friendship and hospitality.

The Church and the world is crying for holy language. Poet Hölderlin wrote: “What makes it needful that the poet speaks, is a Need. This is concealed in the absence of the presence of the divine… holy names are lacking.” The absence of the Holy is infecting the world with violence. The only hope in the spiral of violence is return to a holy communion of language. Pope Francis is calling every Church in West and East to return to Synodality of linguistic communion. This is the foundation of any democracy worth the name. Dialogue is a process of understanding. All understanding is a fusion of horizons, to understand means to come to an understanding with each other. Understanding is primarily agreement. Understanding itself enters as a dialogic element in the dialogic system and somehow changes its entire sense. Language is a social event. Monologue is finalized and deaf to other’s response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. Celebration of dialogue allows for unusual combinations: “The sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.” Take a dialogue and remove the voices, remove the intonations, carve out abstract concepts of judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that’s how you get dialectics. We in the Church have too much of dialectics and not enough dialogue.