BBC Radio 4 2016-07-05

Good morning. When I was a university professor every student in the class would do an evaluation at the end of the semester. Reading the evaluations was best done after a stiff whisky. One student demanded what he calculated as the cost of the course not from the university but from me personally, because he felt my teaching was so derisory.

Few of us in regular life ever ask for that kind of rigorous feedback, so we remain in blissful ignorance about what people really think of us.
Like others, I’ve found the last ten days a revealing experience in discovering what people truly think about a lot of things. I’ve talked with neighbours I thought I knew well and it’s turned out some have profoundly different convictions from me on really significant things.

This coming weekend the Church of England’s General Synod is having conversations around human sexuality – conversations where people know that their profound disagreement about one thing jeopardises their ability to be civil to one another about almost anything else. It takes patience and humility to listen and learn rather than shun and call each other names.

Some years ago I had a terrible falling-out with a person I’d thought of as a close friend. There were raised voices, tears, dismay, fury and grief. But we found we couldn’t go through life ignoring one another. We couldn’t, hand on heart, maintain indefinitely that all the wrong was on one side. And we couldn’t, despite the pain, deny that our lives were impoverished without one another.

For a while neither of us could say anything. I guess that was a way of recognising that this wasn’t trivial – and it wasn’t just about head, or heart, or gut – it was about all three. But gradually we began to be in contact again, mutually acknowledging we were diminished without each other, and, without exactly saying sorry, beginning to talk about important things again. We set some rules: we wouldn’t say something negative to someone else that we ought to be saying to one another; and we’d always assume the best interpretation of each other’s actions rather than concoct a conspiracy theory in which we were the victim.

The amazing thing is that this has become one of the most precious friendships of my life. It’s no longer based on wishful thinking, or a na?ve assumption that we agree about things without needing to check first. And it’s also deepened my sense of God, because I realise to relate to God I can’t rely on wish-projection, but must test my perceptions every day.

We’re told, ‘You’ll know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ But that doesn’t mean the truth is easy to hear – or that the truth is ever all on our side.