Agree or disagree?

“There is no future without forgiveness.”

“All violence terrorizes.”

“Violence is never justified.”

“Men are better drivers than women.”

These were some of the purposefully provocative questions posed to us toward the end of the week at the Corrymeela Peace Center in Northern Ireland, where a group of 14 Americans and “Islanders” met to experience and learn about Conflict Transformation.  The questions were designed to draw debate and to tickle a bit of real tension and conflict out of a group of people who share no history with one another.  That it succeeded in doing this became clear in the “check in” round after the heated debates took place.  The aim of the exercise was to lead us into our own experience of Deep Dialog, a core element of the Journey Through Conflict, which is a venture of reconciliation which Alistair Little and Wilhelm Verwoerd (definitely worth looking them up!) are inviting people from communities of deeply rooted conflict to participate in.  On this particular occasion, we were learning from their experience as a short intensive course within the M.Phil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation program offered through the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College of Dublin.

I shouldn’t have been as surprised at how easy it was to uncover some friction even among a group who hadn’t been together longer than a week.  For those of us who get stoned off of this kind of frenzied, back and forth probing of issues, with each round getting louder, messier, more invested, it could have gone on for hours.  Others tuned out rather than elbow their way into the fray, and others still were more than a little annoyed with such unrestrained bantering and domineering personalities.  I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the very reason I have embarked on this particular Master’s course is that I have come to the fervent conviction that conflict is a ubiquitous part of our lives, not to be gotten around by anyone, anywhere, in any way.  After breathing, sleeping, eating and relieving oneself, conflict is the very next aspect of our being alive which we cannot escape.  So of course we could find something to do deep dialog around after just a few days together: we’re humans!

I bring this up here, because I see the danger of continuing a bad ‘family’ trait even into this new emergent generation.  I grew up in a non-christian home and a Christian extended family, both of which pretended that if we didn’t talk about conflict, it meant that we didn’t have any;  I studied theology at an inter-denominational college where conflict as a theme in and of itself was never addressed theologically; and I spent years in churches, seminars, conferences, retreats and missions (Evangelical, Charismatic, and Lutheran; in America, Sweden, Australia, PNG and Germany), where, besides an occasional reference to Matthew 18:15-17, and the ever-present lapel to forgive, there was no strategy and no underlying concept for helping their communities deal with conflict constructively.  The cardinal assumption being that good Christians don’t do conflict!

But rather than fostering fraternities exuding peace and justice in the world, this refusal to take conflict head on theologically, exacerbates the friction inevitable in any human plural, and conditions cultures to fester and fracture over matters both profound and piddling.  Of greater consequence even than the personal stories of disillusionment with Christian fellowships that abound, as grim as that is, however, is the general disconnect that many faith communities and institutions have toward complex societal ills, the prolific number of armed conflicts around the world, and trans-global injustices.  With the exception of my brief time in Church of the Savior, DC, of which Sojourners Magazine is a part, nary a mention of these realities in the Christian sub-cultures I’ve experienced in over twenty years!

Praiseworthy is the relatively recent attention that Evangelicals are paying to creating clean water supplies, catastrophe and famine relief and AIDs, but even these efforts are consistent with a ‘messianic’ self perception to ‘save’ the perishing ‘victims’ and allow us to wear a super hero cape without unmasking the fact, that we still have no viably creative alternatives to dealing with our enemy other than to kill them or send them to hell.  While some Emergents (Bell books and bloggers) are gaining prominence by questioning the latter alternative (the Christian concept of eternal punishment for God’s (our) enemies in the after life), those who are trying to apply a Christological lens to real world conflict in this life receive less attention in Christian popular culture.

One could become suspicious that our fanaticism with hell, either for or against, is mostly a misplaced projection of our unresolved ambivalence about the quandary that we should “love our enemies” in a world of enmity and often unspeakable evil without condoning it or encouraging a culture of impunity.  The fire and brimstone crowd compensates for a present powerlessness to execute justice by postponing judgement until the end of time, when the unrepentant will reap their just reward.  The ‘Love Wins’ crowd squirm their way out of the predicament by postponing the hard, and perhaps in some instances impossible, work of reconciliation between perpetrators and their victims until the afterlife, when God will just magically make everyone get along.

But not everyone has the luxury of delaying the question of reconciliation until some future trumpet wakes us from the dead.  There are too many in our world who must live side by side with those who have done the most unimaginable and unspeakable things to them and their families.  Just last night I saw Leymah Gbowee, Nobel peace prize winner and newly appointed head of a national reconciliation committee in Liberia, tell John Stewart about what is unfortunately not an anomaly in many war-torn countries.  A mother wrote to Gbowee asking for advice about her family’s dilemma.  Her son was murdered.  Her daughter fled to a refugee camp.  The daughter wrote to her mother ten years later, that she has married a pastor and has two children, and would be coming home with her new family.  The husband pictured in the photograph she included with the letter is the man who killed the mother’s son… his wife’s brother!  Should this mother, who will have to live with the murderer of her son, tell her daughter the truth about her husband, the father to her grandchildren, whom they adore?  Gbowee has no answer for this woman.  She admits to Stewart, that ‘reconciliation’ is a mostly blank page, which they will begin to fill with their experiences and first efforts to work towards it.  It is from courageous people like Gbowee, and many others like her, that we must learn… that is, if we can stop speculating about the after life long enough to do so.

When I am able to whittle away some time from being a full-time mother of three, full-time grad-student, part-time community organizer and part-time committee mom, I hope to contribute periodically to the conversation here in provokEtive.  When I do, I will be inviting readers to journey with me through the conflicts we face in this world here and now, hell enough for some people, and will be passing along the questions, insights and experience which I’m gleaning from people like Little, Verwoerd, Gbowee, as well as Miroslav Volf (Exclusion and Embrace is a foundational and profoundly relevant book) Paul Lederach, an experienced practitioner) and many others who are not shying away from tackling this conundrum of Christian ethics, but who are searching for ways to transform conflict from the divisive contest it most often is into a constructive process of change, growth and flourishing that it can become.

 Photo Credit: Illya Kondratyuk