“After the hurt, who will restore wholeness?”
It’s not a rhetorical question.
It’s a question I asked myself after I read the text, “I don’t feel comfortable doing this. Honestly, it’s her responsibility.” when I asked a friend to mediate a conflict between myself and another. Of course, it’s not my friend’s job to mediate and it’s an unfair thing to demand of someone. But, the question remains, if not her, then who? And whose job is it to even ask the question? And, if no one takes this upon themselves, if the conflict is ignored, do the consequences of it go away?
Often, when asked to be involved in the conflict on another, the sentiment of ‘I love you both too much to get involved’ is heard or ‘I don’t want to take sides’. But why does our love for two people in a conflict with each other so often incarnate itself as our stepping away? Why doesn’t it appear as stepping in?
Of course there are times when are times when it’s too painful to step in, where the issue involved cuts too close to the bone for us and involvement would be excruciating for us. If that issue isn’t healed for us, we might not be the bet candidate to try and help heal it between two people.
That much is true.
But, it’s so remarkably consistent, this opting-out; even on issues which don’t carry charge for us. Why don’t we often hear people say, “I need to ask gently to be involved. I love you both so much. I want to support your both in finding healing and complete understanding and resolution.”?
After the hurt, who will restore wholeness?
It’s the question that everyone has asked at one point when they were hurt by someone and the other person walked away without consequence.
It’s the question that every everyone has asked after they have caused harm and sincerely wanted to make amends only to find out that not only was there little interest in that happening but that there were no ways to make it happen even where interest appeared because no one was willing to step up and ensure it happened.
It’s a question that married couples ask when the distance grows between them, sudden and firey like a volcano or as slow and cold as a glacier and all those people who showed up at their wedding and promised to help are nowhere to be seen or don’t want to interfere or choose sides and slip quietly away into the shadows.
It’s the question that many ask after their beloved communities have been torn apart again by a relationship gone wrong.
After the hurt, who will restore wholeness?
I don’t have any answers but I have some thoughts.
Amongst the most damaging of privatizations in this world is the privatization of relationships. Relationships are no longer held in the container of community or offered up in service to the community.
We treat relationships, and the conflicts that emerge in them, as our business and nobody else’s. We get angry when people put their noses in our business. We are told that we should be able to work it out on our own.
And certainly, there must be times when privacy is respected and solitude ensured. Certainly there is such a thing as my business and your business. But I think this culture’s sense of that has become deeply skewed.
This is the poverty of our time masquerading as freedom. This is the deep irresponsibility of our time masquerading as adulthood as it swaggers around like a bull in a china shop saying, “We do what we want.”
But while we’re obsessing about the property we own, who is tending to the commons? Whose business is that?
It’s impossibly hard to resolve your own conflicts. When there is pain between two people, they are largely disqualified from working things out between themselves.
They’re too close to it.
They’re too triggered with guilt and shame or the pain of violation.
Or both.
To ask the one who was hurt to take it upon themselves to arrange the circumstances under which amends could be made is too much to ask. Imagine asking a woman who was raped to reach out to her rapist and go for coffee to ‘work things out’. Or imagine asking the rapist to do the same.
No. It doesn’t often work like that.
The resolution of pain between two people almost always needs to presence of a third party.
Or more.
When there is hurt between two people there is a deep vulnerability to each other and an inability to hear each other clearly. There needs to be a medium between them through which messages can flow and be translated. They will need help seeing what they couldn’t see before. Asking them to do that on their own is too much.
But where is that third party these days? Where is that council of elders and community who will make a ceremony of deep listening and healing and help those in the conflict determine a way back towards each other? Where are those trusted ones? What is the physical place to which we can go?
But perhaps even that is the wrong set of questions because, again, it puts the onus on the hurt ones and those who did the hurting to go there.
So let me phrase it in another way, where are the elders and trusted ones in the community who will see hurt, division and pain and who will intervene for the good of the village? Who will put the well being of the community above the preferences of the individuals to let it fester and move on? Who will be willing to step in and say, “This unresolved conflict is causing trouble in the wider community. It needs to be dealt with. If it’s not it will divide the community into gossiping factions. We will be less whole and more fractured. We will be less strong and resilient.”?
It’s hard to resolve our own conflicts. This is important to understand. If we don’t, we can be incredibly hard on ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with you when you can’t stop the crumbling. It’s too big a job for one or even two people.
I once asked an elder, “Are you saying that marriages fall apart primarily because of a lack of village?” He nodded, “Basically, yes.” It was the only short answer I ever got from him.
Your conflicts may be private but the consequences aren’t. I was once asked to help a school move through a conflict between two teachers. For the first meeting, I told the administrators that I wanted at least twelve people there.
“They can be other teachers, board members, administration or parents. But we need people there.” And, when we gathered that afternoon, after months of attempts to pull the meeting together I asked everyone in the circle to share what the impact of the conflict had been on them.
And share they did.
It was exhausting them.
They were terrified it would tear the school apart.
They felt helpless.
They loved both teachers and it hurt their heart to feel like they had to choose sides.
I wanted the two teachers to know the wake that the speeding boat of their conflict was leaving. I wanted them to hear stories of the waves they made eroding the shoreline. I wanted them to know that the impact of their conflict was not private.
In activist circles, a phrase one will hear often is “privatize the profits, socialize the costs”. It’s used in reference to companies that make a lot of money but, when they collapse and people are unemployed and the land is polluted, who picks up the tab? The tax payers.
When we privatize relationships, a similar thing dynamic can occur. Our unwillingness or, likely, incapacity to resolve difficulties in our relationships puts an enormous psychic burden on the rest of the community.
And so, a few thoughts…
Conflicts are a chance to strengthen the village or the guarantee of their destruction. This culture is steeped deeply in punitive justice. If we approach conflicts in this way, we get the illusion of security while the top soil of community is eroded. The symptoms are addressed but the root causes are not.
If we decide to approach conflicts from a restorative justice stand point then more is asked of us but, in the end, if all goes well, the community is stronger than it was before. That things get broken in a community is not news. That they can be mended to be more beautiful, as the Japanese do with their art of Kintsugi, than they were before the conflict is.
It takes a village to resolve a conflict. Asking the two people most triggered by each other to take responsibility to figure things out is a guarantee that it will never be worked out. It asks too much. It would be like asking the broken shards of pottery to mend themselves back together with gold. It takes the presence of others, rooted in their commitment to keep both people in the community if possible and willing to roll up their sleeves and get to the hard work of learning. It takes others willing to share the emotional load of what has happened and help discern the most redemptive and healing path forward where nothing is swept under the rug.
I recall a meeting held in my living room years ago. It was to debrief a New Years Festival we’d hosted. Tension arose between the cook and someone who had been working under him and escalated quickly. It was clear it would not be resolved that day and so myself and another offered to see if we could help them bridge what was in between them. A week or two later we all met at the cook’s home. He’d made us a meal. Small talk ensued, and it was already clear that time had soothed things some. After eating, and compliments to the chef, my friend and I began by asking each to speak what was in their heart and for the other to listen and then to repeat back what it was they heard the other one say. They both did this, perhaps two rounds, and then we invited them to wonder what might be done differently in the future so that such bad feelings wouldn’t arise. And, in the space created by this re-found goodwill, those ideas flowed easily and were clear. They couldn’t have done it on their own, but it wasn’t hard to do when they had a little help.
Your love of the people in conflict doesn’t absolve you. It obligates you. Why is there so little community in the world? Because when someone is in a conflict with someone and there is a friend who ‘loves both people so much’ they do not intervene to help them find a way back to each other. It doesn’t even occur to them to do. We think our truest expression of love for them is to be neutral; to not take sides. But then who is taking the side of the community? Who is taking the side of healing? The world does not divide up neatly into victims and perpetrators. That is a false dichotomy. Our love for people doesn’t let us off the hook of getting involved. It deeply obliges us to become involved. And what obliges us most deeply is our love for the community or what might, one day, become a community.
Each conflict is a chance for the village to be a village. One of the core functions of a community must be about working through difficulties with each other. The idea that there is some Utopia where there’s no conflict is a child’s vision of the world. No, our personal conflicts and troubles, if opened up, allow the community to appear. What’s the fastest way to kill community? Be self sufficient. Don’t need anything or anybody outside of your relationship. Or tell yourself that you don’t. The combination of our deeply entrenched views of punitive justice mixed with our insular approach to relationships is what keeps us from knowing how to help others who are struggling. The turning inwards and shunning the world from one or both parties in the conflict might just be what creates gossip in the first place.
It’s not a village until a real conflict has been worked through. In the absence of any meaningful pain, grief of conflict worked through it’s a network. It’s a ‘scene’. It’s convenience and comfort. It’s the word ‘we’ used prematurely. It’s tit for tat. It’s ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. It’s quid pro quo. It’s Facebook friendships. Conflicts, grief and loss worked through together are the crucible in which true community is formed. It’s the initiation into an adult community that most of us would rather avoid but, in avoiding it, our community never grows up.
Each conflict is a chance for the village to learn how conflict might be handled differently. How are we supposed to learn how to support each other if we never have the chance? If we never see a conflict worked through in a healthy way, how are we supposed to know how to do it? If we’ve only ever seen ‘lock’em up’ justice, how are we supposed to trust that another way might work?
And so, I think all of the above have truth in them, but it only deepens the question: To whom do we turn in such moments? Who and what institutions might we trust enough that, when they come to us and knock on our door, hands full of gifts and a heart full of deep courtesy to insist upon the resolution of that which is causing such heart-ache for so many, we open the door and let them in?
Who will make the first step to open these moments up - the one who was hurt or the one who did the hurting? I’m trying to make the case that it’s neither; that it’s anyone but them.
This lack of a place to go or be taken to, this lack of a village to help us through the inevitable struggles woven into human relationships may be one of the deepest poverties of our time.
Another question that must be asked if we can’t answer the first one is, “If no one will, then what will happen to the culture?” and also, perhaps, “What has already befallen us as a result of no one stepping in?” and, perhaps most potently, “What befell a culture that there is nowhere to go, and no one to turn to and no one to insist on that turning?”
Come at from another direction, we are asked to consider, “What is missing that makes this kind of sought after support and resolution impossible now?”
I don’t know the way forward on this but I know that, if we want to create communities alive with culture, there’s no other way to go.
“After the hurt, who will restore wholeness?” isn’t just a question. It’s one of the seeds from which all deeply rooted, beautiful human cultures have sprouted.
But who will plant it?
“Your love of the people in conflict doesn’t absolve you. It obligates you.” <— this.
Yes to all of this!!