The Table of Reconciliation
By Charles Rush
October 3, 2010
Matthew 5: 24
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.0Mb) ]
m back to watching two and three year olds share toys. I love those darting eyes that check left and check right to see if anyone sees them. The quick snatch of the toy, the fleet feet into the living room, the shrieking cry of injustice that has been perpetrated, the clutching sense of ownership by the thief, the stammering explanations of what just happened. Most everything you need to know to work at the State Department you can learn right here. Most everything you need to know to understand human nature, you can learn right here. And there are weeks in my Adult life when I feel like I've really done is spend most of my time, in truth, getting people to share their toys and play together cooperatively. You have weeks like that too?
St. Paul taught
us to think of the Eucharist as a table of reconciliation. Jesus said, “Take,
eat… do this in remembrance of me”. What we are remembering is that the Christ
brings reconciliation between us and God, between neighbor and neighbor. One of
the fundamental markers of Christians, Paul said, is that they are “Ambassadors
of Reconciliation”.
And on our best
days that is true. When Christianity came to the British Isles, almost
literally from the very beginning, they started a monastery on the Island of
Iona, off the western coast of Scotland, in between Scotland and Ireland. The
place was significant. The Druids had used it before Christianity came to the
area. The Druids were priests in the ancient Celtic religion, sometimes depicted
as Wizards in popular folklore, like Merlin the Wizard in the Tale of King
Arthur. They used Iona as a place to make peace between the warring Celtic
Clans.
The Christian
missionaries wanted to communicate that their religion was a religion of reconciliation,
so they started a monastery at Iona, from the very beginning. By the way, a lot
of our liturgy at Christ Church comes from the community at Iona.
Early on, the
Christians were also very effective at reconciliation in a rather admirable
way. The Irish actually brought Christianity to the English which required
quite a spiritual leap at the time. At the time, the English were continually
at war with the Irish, destroying their villages, and routinely enslaving the
Irish that they captured in battle. For the Irish to make a humane gesture
towards an enemy like this in any way required an incredible leap of spiritual
imagination, probably more difficult than a member of Hamas reaching out to an
Israeli settler in the West Bank…
But St. Aidan
reached to the family of one of the English kings, the beasts, the enemies and
eventually gained their support and he opened a school and a monastery on the
island of Lindisfarne, in the north of England, just
off the eastern coast. The year was 650. You can walk to the island at low tide but you
don't want to time that wrong. It is also a place that is basically cut off an
it became a place of refuge, a place where people came to broker peace between
two disgruntled parties, two disgruntled clans that had let a feud get out of
hand.
On our best days, that is what we were, people of reconciliation. Got a
dispute, I know who can help solve that…
That is
literally the meaning of the word ‘sanctuary'. It literally means a place of
refuge, a place of protection, safety, where reconciliation can happen.
It is a small
miracle that happens every time we gather around the table together. Here, as
I've shared before, I really felt it one week when we had two candidates
running for office against each other, just before the election
day, competitors all week, but as we approach the table of
reconciliation, we transcend our competitiveness, as we stand shoulder to
shoulder in human solidarity as pilgrims. We come here in our hunger and our
need.
It is true for
all of us. 6 days a week, we compete with each other as hard as we can in the
marketplace, and on the 7th day, we transcend our competitive
differences in reconciliation around a table where grace is broken and passed
one to another.
We have to have
both for balance in our lives. I was interested to read this summer that
intellectuals believe this virtue is likely to grow in our life time.
Robert Wright,
the philosophy professor at Princeton, wrote a book a decade ago entitled
“Non-Zero Sum” in which sets out the modest ambition of explaining “the logic
of human destiny”. Yet again, modesty eludes a Princeton Professor.
The book is a
broad brush look at why our societies evolve into an evermore complex and
differentiated social world. That is our destiny, to become evermore
complex and differentiated.
He points out
that all advanced societies are advanced precisely because they utilize
competition to produce social cooperation that benefits all of us. This week,
our Airlines are merging for competitive advantage,
Southwest is buying AirTran, so that it can compete
better against Jet Blue and Continental.
He points out
that the external competition between these corporations is matched by an
internal ethic of cooperation within each corporation. The corporations that
are able to work as a team internally, where everyone gets enough benefit that
they have ownership and are self-motivated to give their best and win together,
these are the corporations that actually win.
What we are
doing is harnessing competition in socially beneficial ways, so that not only
are the families of the employees are taken care of financially, but all of us
are able to travel cheaper, faster, and in comfort… Maybe THE AIRLINES ARE NOT
THE BEST EXAMPLE TO USE : more expensive, slower, more
cramped every flight…
There are
negative trends but viewed with the lens on wide angle, they don't last very
long. The least efficient get relegated to the dust bin of cultural evolution.
What you see over and over is the eventual triumph of those complex societies
that leverage the social surplus that comes from us working together in
coordinated fashion. Witness the fantastic power of the internet. Our
collective, coordinated gathering of information puts an array of knowledge at
the hands of a 3rd grader that would have taken a Ph.D student a month to collect only a half generation ago.
We have this tremendous collective power which has always been the source of
our strength as a species.
Like a lot of
thinkers today, Professor Wright believes that we are at the front end of a
fairly dramatic time of complexity socially. Like a lot of thinkers today, he
can't quite articulate what that is because we have never been at this place of
human development before.
One thing that
is clear, the virtue of reconciliation will become prominent in the near-term.
It is a function of having more and more reciprocal relationships and being
more and more interdependent around the world. From the ease that we connect
with people around a single interest to the breadth of our international
markets, we are becoming global citizens of one earth rapidly. I love those
articles in “The Economist” that detail how a pension fund that tanked in
California ends up having dramatic implications for a small village in the
Ukraine.
His point is
that as this world converges in interdependence, people that can be reconcilers
will be valued more because war has more and more collateral damage. We will
continue to have wars but the societies that will succeed will figure out how
to evolve into reconciling communities, where leaders understand how to involve
people meaningfully so that they own the challenges and the solutions, and they
can build consensus. His argument is not that this should be but will be,
speaking as a cultural evolutionist, trying to understand how societies evolve.
Churches he
predicts, will play a bigger role in the future? Why? Because we form people
around the values of reconciliation… that will be the value of spirituality in
the future, to produce a community of leaders who are reconcilers.
In another
stack, I'm reading books on marriage, how to be a great spouse to live a
meaningful life, day in and day out… Long story short?
Try becoming a person that is fundamentally oriented around reconciliation.
Become a child that can share your toys and get along with those around you. As
someone observed about marriage, it is not ‘marrying the right partner', it is learning to be the right partner.
John Gottman can predict divorce with 91% accuracy after
studying couples for 25 years. He'll be the first to tell you, it is not rocket
science. They just made detailed notes watching couples on the weekend. Over
time, he figured out that how you argue as a couple is fairly critical,
particularly since what he also noticed is that most of the things we actually
argue about as couples are not reconcilable. Like what?
1. “Meg wants to have a baby, but Donald says
he's not ready yet- and is not sure if he ever will be.
2. Walter wants to have sex more often than
Dana
3. Chris is lax about housework and rarely
does his share of the chores until Susan nags him, which makes him angry.
4. Tony wants to raise the kids Catholic.
Jessica is Jewish and doesn't know what she wants but “Catholic” is not even on
the short list.
5. Angie thinks Ron is too critical of their
son. But Ron thinks he has the right approach: Their son has to be taught the
right way to do things.”[i]
These irreconcilable because you were arguing about them four weeks
ago, four months ago, four years ago. And they account for exactly 69%
of our arguments in case you were curious.
So how do you
get along? Good question.
It is actually
easier to answer the question how don't you get along? We can chart that and
you can turn on almost any episode of Reality TV and watch it acted out.
Professor Gottman just looks for four things. He calls them the 4
Horsemen of the Apocalypse because, like the 4 Horsemen from the Book of
Revelation, when they show up together, bad stuff happens. Here is what they
are:
1. Criticism- We can have complaints about
specific issues like “I'm really angry that you just left the dishes and went
to play golf”… Criticism takes it a step further like “You are such a slob,
what is wrong with you?” or “You never fill the car up with gas”.
2. Contempt- You don't
stop at the criticizing; you add “sarcasm, name calling, eye rolling, sneering,
mockery or hostile humor.”[ii]
You have a well of “long-simmering negative thoughts about your partner. You
introduce a couple of phrases, never helpful, “You always” and “You never”…
3. These attacks produce, no great surprise,
Defensiveness. Your partner, if you've noticed, can't or won't actually
apologize under these conditions, so it doesn't produce the desired effect, so
to speak. Instead, they either argue the case… (‘that's not true, I picked up
the whole kitchen yesterday') or they counter attack defensively, (“if you
really cared about order, maybe you'd clean out your car once in a while”)
Defensiveness is punctuated by a lot of sophisticated body language (you speak
slowly, you pepper with questions to make your spouse squirm) to counterattack…
4. You stonewall. One or both of you feel
flooded with anger. You either get up and leave or
what a lot of men do is just turn on the Giants game and tune out. Physically
or spiritually, you are in separate space. [AA- or drink slowly]
Most of the
time, these arguments start harshly. Someone barges in, so to speak, and it
takes off like a rocket. Turns out that most of our engagements end the way
they start as humans. If you blow in and blow off, your spouse will blow out.
If this cycle is left un-checked… If you find yourselves
falling into this routinely and you don't do anything about it, people
eventually become lonely in their separate spaces and they do something about
that lonliness.
If you are just
a little anxious right now, I have some good news. Usually, Professor Gottman,
says this is a toxic brew and will do couples in. However, you can actually
periodically engage in several of these toxic behaviors as long as… you are
really good at ‘repair attempts', the technical term at the moment.
Can you apply
the brakes before this car hits the guard rail? Can you calm yourself down? Can
you soothe your spouse? Can you change the subject to remind each other of what
you have in common that you value together? Can you let your spouse know that
you have absorbed their frustration, even if you don't accept the way that it
was delivered? Can you work through a process in communication, so that if it
is not completely resolvable, both of you can learn to steer around it? Can you
be…. a reconciling person? That is really the key.
That is why we
come to the Table of Reconciliation. We really want to become reconciling
people. We don't want to live in isolation from each other or from God. We want
to improve here. We want to grow.
On our best
days, we want to be loving, empathetic, and to share each others
burdens. We come together with all of the prayer requests, shoulder to
shoulder, and that takes away some of the lonliness
that we have with grief, which can be so isolating in a completely different
way than anger.
We want to be
better at this. We really want it. The truth is, we
are hungry for it. We are thirsty for it. We want to get this right. We want to
love and we want to be loveable. We need to turn again to our higher selves.
And some of us need to get really creative about how to break through an
impasse and love our spouses or our close friends more meaningfully.
So we come to
the table. We join, in this hour, with millions of people up and down our time
zone, and with tens of millions during the course of this day,
that will stand around the table for healing, hearing the same words now
spoken every week for 104,551 some odd Sundays, “Take, Eat… Do this in
Remembrance of me”. Reconciliation… It is that important. Amen.
[i] Gottman, John
and Nan Silver. “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (London:
Orion House, 2007), pl. 130.
[ii] Ibid. p. 31.
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