81

Dialogue with literature is essential to theology. J.P. Jossua, G. Ringlet and K.J. Kuschel have amply demonstrated this to be the case. Such dialogue can, in particular, help preachers and catechists in their quest for a language that strikes the right tone and is able to engender new insights. Applied to the homily and to catechesis, theoretical reflection on language by the German poet Hilde Domin (1909-2006) has proven extremely fruitful, both for the foundations of the homily, the personality of the preacher, the text and its elaboration and for the preacher’s audience. Summarised in seventeen theses, they show that preaching, like poetry, is an ‘interruption’ at the heart of daily life, making it possible to address the problems of society (prophetic and political dimensions) directly; by its ‘indeterminate precision’, homiletic language, like the language of poetry, contains a ‘portion that is unsaid’ that enables the listener to apply his or her own life experience (exemplarity, authenticity and originality); the preacher, like the poet, exhibits a threefold courage: to be himself, name the experience in truth and believe in the capacity of listeners to allow themselves to be moved; a poetic language gives preaching the Kingdom and its justice a transformative power here and how; finally, the preacher, like the poet, is inhabited by a ‘but’ that protests against all forms of inhumanity.