To be loved by God and to be able to love Him in return – this is a human experience as real as it is mysterious.

This divine and human exchange is actually the essence of what Christians call The Good News and what Muslims mean when they refer to God as the Merciful (Al-Rahman) and the Loving (Al-Wadud). To hold and believe it is faith. To announce and proclaim it is an integral part of the mission of Christianity and the da’wah of Islam.

Any good human activity such as preaching and teaching can be a vehicle for communicating the good news about God’s love. The nobler the activity, the more credible the message. We become more fully human when we relate the love of God in true communion with one another. This is dialogue.

In the best of times during earthly existence, given peoples’ thirst for growth and perfection, one needs both to proclaim and hear about God as the Loving One. Every gift received from God is good. Every good must somehow be communicated. Belief in the Divine Mercy and Compassion must be shared. This sharing is dialogue. When brothers and sisters tell one another how good God has been to them, the bonds that are thereby created are really new gifts, fresh manifestations of the Divine Largesse.

In today’s situation of conflict, sharing the experience of God’s love through dialogue becomes all the more imperative. Where deep chasms and high walls exist, the divine Goodness can hardly begin to be proclaimed, much less heard and understood. Dialogue is a way of building bridges and breaking down walls.

In a situation of prejudice, dialogue means an abiding and genuine search for goodness, beauty and truth. This search is based on the conviction that no one person has a monopoly of these. For are not goodness, beauty and truth emanating from one and the same source, God? Who or what can monopolize God? Thus, each person must be open to the fact that one can be enriched by the goodness, beauty and truth found in the other. Each must be ready to discover the face of God in the other’s faith.

In an atmosphere of animosity, dialogue means powerlessness and vulnerability. From a position of weakness, one can truly communicate trust in the other. Trust is most real when there looms the possibility of betrayal. To dialogue means to open wide one’s arms, to lay aside one’s defense, and so, to open one’s heart. This is a position of vulnerability. This is a high risk which must be taken by anyone who wants to enter into genuine dialogue.

In a situation of elitism in all aspects of human life – social, political, economic, cultural and even religious – dialogue demands a preferential option for the poor, the voiceless, the powerless. The vast majority of the population is marginalized even in the core element of their existence. They are not allowed to define their meanings, to assert what things can have real value in their lives. To this vast majority, God’s love and mercy must come as good news and an inspiration in their struggle to liberate themselves. In them must the explicit believer discover the face of God. To them must dialogue be first offered.

To the wounded in the act of loving, to understand in a climate of misunderstanding, to trust in an atmosphere of suspicion – these are no light burdens to bear. Dialogue therefore demands a deep spirituality which enables people to hang on to their faith in God’s love, even when everything seems to fall apart. This spirituality is such that what is believed in the heart becomes alive in one’s style of life.

This same dialogue demands a deep respect for the faith of others, for the way they understand it, and also for the manner in which they express it. The faith of the other may not be judged from the perspective and categories of one’s own faith. Thus, dialogue also demands serious study of the faith and religion of others, as well as one’s own.

In an area where Muslims and Christians live together, the dialogue described above is an offering to both. It is an offering because though it is a demand on the believer, one should not force it on those with whom one must relate with.

It is an offering because it is ever extended not only in the pleasantness of appreciation but also in, and even beyond, the pain of rejection. Dialogue is an offering because it respects the antipathies of both Muslim and Christians and the pace with which they strive to ease their hurts and to heal their wounds. Here, dialogue is compassion.

Besides being an offering, dialogue is a challenge as well. It asks of a believer whether one’s faith requires her or him to rise above prejudices, even those that stem from real pain. It is a challenge to scrutinize the pain-filled past, yet hope still to start a new chain of happy memories of tomorrow.

Dialogue is above all, a communion of people in total surrender to God, who persist in the hope that all can have a change of heart and participate in the building of God’s Kingdom whose completion He alone came to bring about.