“Canon” means one thing in religious studies, but its primordial, organic, even mystical meaning is the commitment one Friend makes to another as they talk.
Canonicity is the entrance into Conversation. Because I love you, your words are canon to me. My responses will embrace your thought, affirm it, subsume it, build on it, and I will go where I couldn’t have if you had not spoken. Your thoughts are canonical for me, and mine are for you.
This is our first discipline and baptismal font. This one commitment draws shut the outer doors and starts us speaking in tongues. We will soon share tears.
Since your thought is my canon, and each pericope advances upon the last, no-one in a conversation is wrong. This is not to say, of course, that there is no right or wrong, nor are we saying that the friends somehow become special and beyond the law. It’s just that when someone must be corrected, the talk of the friends instantly shifts ground and becomes a spiritually, rhetorically, metaphysically distinct thing. The shift is not subtle. The adept sense it like a click of a light switch. It is no longer a conversation. Pericopes are not building. Forward motion has stopped.
Correction is not bad, it is just different. The session has taken up a different task. Correction is not bad, so it can’t feel bad. There is no bad within love. We have to acknowledge that the type of person who experiences correction as even slightly bad will not have entered into Conversation.
Though correction is not bad, friends who must correct much will not be friends who are conversing much. So these two will have come to the place with each other where they seldom feel the need to correct.
A certain discipline is required. You, the Friend, have the ongoing responsibility of never allowing yourself to be wrong, and of never allowing your friend to be wrong. Canonicity is not only a stance, but a discipline and a practice.
TimothyOne 