In our polarised culture, when opposing sides can be so self-righteously entrenched in their views that reconciliation seems impossible, Dr Sarah Bachelard argues that hope can be found through meditation. It offers, she says, a transformative encounter in which the essential dignity of every person, even the perceived enemy, is revealed. Dr Bachelard, whose latest book is ‘A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time’, is the founder of Benedictus Contemplative Church, in Canberra, Australia.
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ final prayer on his disciples’ behalf is that they may be brought into union with each other and with God. ‘I ask … that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us’. This plea for unity, it’s said, is ‘so that the world may believe that you have sent me’. It’s a bit like that earlier passage in John’s Gospel, where Jesus says: ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13.34-35). According to John, the unity, the harmony and mutual love of the community of Christ makes visible the nature of God; and the promise is that discipleship of Christ makes this unity a real possibility for human beings.
But then, we look around us. At the enraged and implacable faces of those in the armed mob storming the Capitol in the United States, and hate-filled trolling in the Twitter-sphere; at bombed out buildings in Syria, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and random terror attacks in France and Nigeria; we witness what seems like the active enjoyment of the so-called culture warriors in hurting their ideological opponents and deliberately polarizing communities. Rather than experiencing disunity or disharmony as painful, in need of healing or redemption, there are whole swathes of the human population that seem to relish antagonism and division, to be spoiling for a fight, wanting something or someone to be against.
In the past, I have assumed ‘reconciliation’ to be a more or less self-evident good – something that anyone would agree matters, that everyone would want. But I wonder if that’s an assumption that needs questioning? Could it be that for many people ‘reconciliation’ doesn’t occur as particularly desirable? And if that’s so, what makes us believe that it matters, and that we are called to practise it?
The word ‘reconciliation’ is interesting. ‘Conciliare’, from the Latin, means to be friendly, to bring together or into harmony. The prefix ‘re’ means ‘again’. And I think this is telling. Because built into the notion of re-conciliation is a presupposition of the loss of harmony, loss of friendliness. Reconciliation means ‘to restore to union and friendship after estrangement or variance’ says one dictionary. So the word itself presupposes a breach, an alienation, a falling out. And the New Testament seems to assume that the state of being unreconciled is a built-in risk, if not a built-in feature of the human condition.
In the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed again and again as coming upon those who, for one reason or another, find themselves alienated from themselves, from God or from others in their community. He acts again and again to heal divisions, to restore and reconnect – to make possible mutuality and unity. Think of all those dinners where those deemed not to belong were welcomed along with everyone else. Ultimately, by returning to his disciples in peace after his betrayal and death, he reveals that there is nothing in human being – no breach, no transgression or hostility – that is beyond God’s desire or capacity to reconcile. In Christ, wrote St Paul, ‘God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them’ (2 Corinthians 5.19).
But this raises the question of why reconciliation matters so much to God. Why is it not OK to settle for divisions within and between ourselves, self-righteous factions toughing it out in contexts ranging from the playground to the boardroom, from the bedroom to the streets? What is so damn good about being reconciled – especially with those idiots over there who are doing so much damage and who are self-evidently WRONG??
Well, in finance, when a balance sheet is unreconciled, it means there’s some kind of mismatch or inconsistency – something doesn’t tally or add up. And if you continue operating on the basis of this mismatch, this lack of structural integrity, sooner or later, your business comes to a standstill; affairs are snarled, and become unworkable. When human beings are unreconciled, it’s not so different. It begins with some mismatch in understanding or sympathy or expectation, some wrong or wound that isn’t put right, integrated or healed. And if things continue on that unstable basis, sooner or later, they stop working; life stops flowing.
For where division, misunderstanding and injustice persist, then inevitably they increase. Differences tend to be weaponized, the distorting stories we tell about ourselves or each other become entrenched, hurt and trauma are inherited by succeeding generations. With the result that ethnic and religious conflicts ignite on the slightest provocation; racism, sexism and homophobia blight whole societies and are perpetuated through state sanctioned violence; democracy itself is brought to the brink of collapse, as any sense of a truly common good or common interest evaporates.
On the other hand, where reconciliation can be achieved, where alienation, hostility, division and misunderstanding are resolved, there comes a profound release of life’s energy. Mutual frustration and futility give way to mutual flourishing and the release of creativity. There’s a new future to live into. Reconciliation matters to God, I think, because it’s about the unsnarling of life and the possibility of abundance for all. It’s what Jesus comes to make possible at every level, and it’s the heart of the ministry entrusted to us. The question is, what does it mean to practise it?
Rowan Williams has warned there can be sentimental and unreflective appeals to reconciliation – it can be, he says, ‘such a seductively comfortable word’.[1] But the truth is that the work of reconciliation is often profoundly uncomfortable, if not downright painful. It requires being honest about what’s not OK, being willing to ‘hear’ the pain in ourselves and in one another without resorting to defensive tactics like minimizing, self-justifying, blaming. Even if we’re convinced the other is in the wrong, even if we have been hurt by them, the possibility of reconciliation requires that we be willing to hear from their point of view. My image of this is as a kind of inner shock absorption – a spaciousness and malleability that allows what feels deeply unwelcome to be received and its energy dissipated, enfolded, potentially transformed.
At the same time, however, it is essential that we hear our own truth, hear the truth, as well as being open to the truth of the other. A commitment to reconciliation does not mean laying ourselves open to constant abuse, capitulating to coercion or falsity or the premature shutting down of dissatisfaction, protest or grief. The prophet Jeremiah decried those who sought to keep the peace at all costs by glossing over injustice: ‘They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, “Peace, peace”, when there is no peace’ (Jer. 6.14). Whether in difficult personal relationships or unjust social arrangements, the refusal to patch things over and go along, the expression of protest and unrest can be a necessary movement in the practice of reconciliation. Black Lives Matter, school strikes for climate, #Me Too, the protest of those disenfranchised by neo-liberal economics and globalisation – all are instances of ‘the wound of my people’ being named, of the refusal to acquiesce in injustice any longer.
So there’s a kind of tension here which requires discernment. On the one hand, practising reconciliation requires the willingness to forgive. Rather than continuing to vent our spleen or discharge hurt towards the other; it requires us at some point to let go what we have against someone, to absorb hurt without paying it back so as to transform it and restore connection. On the other hand, reconciliation is not about cheap peace or cheap grace. It is a commitment to genuine harmony, mutuality, communion. And in practice, this may require the willingness to disrupt false peace.
But this brings us to some of the particular questions facing us at this time. For we live in a moment where the willingness to disrupt the status quo seems particularly marked. It’s a moment, in fact, where the expression of dissatisfaction, then necessity of protest is felt so deeply that it’s liable to become a defining feature of the identity of whole segments of the population. Sometimes this radical identification reflects the accumulated injustice suffered by particular people and groups, such that there’s a need powerfully to claim one’s identity and assert one’s interest as black, Indigenous, female, LGBTQI, as economically marginalised or culturally despised. Sometimes this radical identification is a function (at least in part) of the deliberate fomentation and manipulation of hurt, anger and difference by other forces, acting in their own self-interest. I’m thinking of the machinations of far-right political organisations, dictators and populists, of crony capitalism and social and other forms of media, which deliberately intensify certain kinds of grievance to inculcate a strange mix of victimhood and entitlement.
I’ve said that protest and the refusal to go along with an unjust status quo may be a necessary movement in the practice of reconciliation. But in the current climate there are times when this protest seems to operate not so much in the service of reconciliation, as to entrench polarisation between world-views and persons. You are with us or against us, you are one of us or not. In this climate, the end-game becomes not reconciliation but cancellation of the other. When this happens, the possibility of real discourse is itself increasingly ruled out – because to enter into discourse is tacitly to acknowledge some legitimacy in the person (if not the world-view) of those to whom we’re opposed. Some have lost patience with or given up on the very possibility of mutual listening and acknowledgement, such that (as I said at the beginning) for many people ‘reconciliation’ doesn’t even seem particularly desirable.
So what does this mean for those of us who continue to think that being reconciled matters? How may we be committed to a good cause, without increasing polarisation? How do we become capable of engaging with those whose views we find repugnant, or with those who judge us to be insufficiently ‘woke’ to be worth bothering with? How do we participate in enabling, at the very least, the possibility of civil discourse, let alone the possibility of peace and friendship in a shared world?
Well, there’s a vast literature engaging these questions – historical and socio-political analysis of the causes of division, the psychology of polarisation, and a whole field of study and practice concerned with non-violent social transformation and peace-making. In none of this literature or practice am I an expert – though let me mention that soon I’ll be talking with Michael Wood, an Australian facilitator of non-violence and practices for peace who is also a member of the World Community for Christian Meditation. Our conversation will be posted on the WCCM website, and will focus on some of the fundamental dispositions and skills that support a commitment to the work of reconciliation in contexts of chaos, polarisation and violence. And of course, there are many other resources. For now, in the last part of these remarks, I want to touch on what I understand to be the essential connection between contemplation and this ministry of reconciliation. The heart of it, I think, is to do with the question of identity.
John Main wrote: ‘What we discover in meditation is the power-source that enables us to live without the anxiety of having to protect ourselves; it is established right at the centre of our own being, in our own hearts, “God is the centre of my soul”’.[2] The human default, by contrast, is to establish ourselves at the centre of our souls. We seek – not consciously, but as a built-in feature of the human operating system – to possess and sustain our identity, our meaning, our value, out of our own resources.
Sometimes the identities we live from are intrinsically violent and falsifying –based in stories about our worthlessness or weakness, for example, or about our racial or ethnic superiority. At other times, the identities we live from can be rich and – at least to a point – true. And particularly when my humanity has been dishonoured and subjugated in a given culture (because of blackness, or gayness or femaleness), it can be enormously liberating and empowering, a gift to ourselves and others to come to know, honour and accept ‘who I am’. Yet even here, the danger is that as long as my sense of self is wholly given by an identity I control or need to assert, it also becomes something I need to defend against attack; it’s something that can be threatened by the words and actions of others. As John Main said, our ego-ic identity is always fragile, incipiently anxious, self-protecting, competing for acknowledgement and for being.
And this means that when I am threatened, I tend to be hooked into responding in kind. Someone criticises and disvalues me, and my immediate instinct is to find something to criticise in them. Someone blames me, and I blame them right back – or at least energetically justify myself. Violence begets violence. I may sincerely abhor the intolerance and self-righteousness of the mob, but I respond intolerantly and self-righteously in my turn. Maybe I don’t use physical violence, but I’m quick to deploy my weapons of choice – words, cleverness, parody. I deplore the racism, homophobia and climate denying intransigence of certain people, but in such a way that I tend to write those people off as surely as they write off me. Theologian James Alison speaks of the notion of the mimetic double – where I become the mirror image of what I oppose and condemn in the other. And I imagine all of us knows what this feels like.
And this is why, said Howard Thurman, the African-American pastor, civil rights leader and theologian of non-violence, ‘A nonviolent approach to racism and violence is possible … only on the basis of a transformative encounter with God. Only in that encounter does the soul open itself to a new way of living, [of being]. In the mystical encounter of prayer … people are driven to confront the core issue of violence – the self-righteous and egoistic self. The ego is thereby displaced from its throne, replaced by the desire for union with the beauty of God. Our false selves are undone, and we realise the dignity of every person’.[3]
Let me be clear that this shift in no way implies soft-pedalling on our work for justice. The source of polarisation is not the depth or radical nature of our commitment to a good cause; the key question is to do with where that commitment is sourced. Is it sourced at the level of my egoic identity, that fragile self that seeks first itself and its own righteousness? Or is it sourced, am I sourced, in deeper ground, in the One who makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, the One whose unreasoning love for all people somehow penetrates and transforms the quality of my own responsiveness? Is God the centre of my soul, and so creating within me the spaciousness and desire to talk to the difficult, the enemy other – leading me to want to know them, be reconciled to them?
Writing from the transit camp at Westerbork on her way to her death in Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum wrote: ‘There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves’. Commenting on these words, in a reflection he offered before the US election last year, Richard Rohr said: ‘Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Centre by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out, no matter who wins the election or who is on the Supreme Court’. Abiding in this deep well, connecting to this little piece of God in us, this centre, is not just a matter of sincerely believing in the brotherhood of man, hoping that in some distant day there may be peace on earth. It involves the slow, painful, patient work of being displaced from my own self-centredness, being so yielded to God that the love of God grows within me.
There’s a moment in meditation, John Main said, when we discover its absolute demand, when we realise that saying the mantra means really letting go all our thoughts and self-talk – and not just imagining ourselves doing so. I think part of what can happen in the process of this realisation is experiencing that our thoughts and all the sound and fury of our opinions and desires are actually not as interesting as the mantra. We get to the point of being bored by our incessant self-talk, and it’s this that enables us to yield ever more fully and whole-heartedly to our word.
I wonder if there’s an analogous moment in our becoming capable of radical love – a moment when our enjoyment of self-righteousness, outrage and judgement, our guilty pleasure in condemning and mocking the enemy other starts to feel sterile – a moment when we’re genuinely overtaken by the desire that all should know mercy, should live, should be loved. When that moment happens, no longer are we just trying hard to be nice to those idiots over there, or mustering a condescending, patronising ‘loving the sinner’ kind of mentality; rather, we undergo compassion, loving kindness, as a felt experience. We know at the level of our bones that our liberation and theirs is bound together, that we are – as Jesus said – truly one. That’s what our prayer is about. Martin Luther King put it this way: ‘With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community’.[4]
In practice, I think, there may be relationships that cannot be wholly reconciled here on earth – people so damaged or destructive that it’s dangerous to be near them, wounds we’ve suffered that make it impossible (at least for now) for us to sustain openness. Yet the mystery proclaimed by our faith is that, underneath everything, despite all the pain and division of this world, the Spirit of God is at work for the reconciliation of all things and the abundance of life. We know the truth of this faith from our practice of silence. Because the more we yield ourselves to the One in whom we live and move and have our being, the more we find ourselves being reconciled, at home and at peace with ourselves, ever more capable of sharing this active and energizing peace with others.
Just and merciful God, Jesus prays, ‘the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I have made your way of being known to them, and I will keep making it known to them, unfolding it within them, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them’. In our divided world, in our polarized culture, this is where the ministry of reconciliation commits us to be, the peace we seek to inhabit and to share.
This paper was presented on 21 January, 2021, as the first in a series of monthly online talks at Bonnevaux Centre for Peace, the international centre of the World Community for Christian Meditation. For more details see: https://bonnevauxwccm.org/updates/all-programmes/speak-series/
For more details about Benedictus Contemplative Church, see: https://benedictus.com.au/
[1]Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p.266.
[2]John Main, The Heart of Creation …
[3]Myles Werntz, ‘Howard Thurman’s contemplative nonviolence’ in The Christian Century (August 15, 2019), https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/howard-thurman-s-contemplative-nonviolence
[4]Martin Luther King, Strength to Love © 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr. (London: Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1986), p.54.