Trouble the Waters
by Rev. Colin Bossen, December 6, 2009
"Nothing endures but change," wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. These words offer an eternal truth--the world is in constant flux. Each day is slightly different, longer or shorter, than the next. Tomorrow you will be older. Birth will have brought new people into the human family. Death will have stricken others from our ranks. New technologies will emerge and change society's shape. The ground beneath us only has the appearance of being solid; stripped of illusions, it is constantly shifting sand.
Living in a world of constant change can be stressful. Occasionally we discover that institutions and people are no longer quite what or who we imagined them to be. New vistas open and the world becomes rich with possibilities. Doors close and we have less or different opportunities than before.
"All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born," the words of the poet William Butler Yeats capture the raw emotions we sometimes feel when confronting change. In such cases conflict emerges. Conflict, like change, is inevitable. Often conflict stems from someone trying to stop a change. Sometimes it develops when someone tries to make a change. Either way conflict is a frequent companion of change.
Throughout our lives the questions we face are not whether change will occur or whether conflict will erupt. Rather the questions we must answer are: How will we respond when we face change? How will we act when confronted with conflict? To help us explore these questions I would like to share a story from the Zen Buddhist tradition.
It seems that there were once two monks traveling together. One monk was an older man, well versed in his spiritual tradition and experienced in the world. The other was a novice.
One day they came to a shallow muddy river. There they found a wealthy young woman engaged in a violent argument with her servants. The servants were weighed down with the woman's belongings. They could not put her possessions on the ground for fear that the mud would ruin them. The young woman was dressed in elegant silks and she did not want to wade the river. She feared her expensive gown would be destroyed by the turgid brown water. The woman was furious that her servants could not carry both her and her belongings at the same time.
As the woman violently heaped abuse on her servants the older monk went over to her, picked her up and carried her across the river. The younger monk quickly followed. The woman shifted her anger from her servants to the older monk. She complained that the ride he gave her was too bumpy. She yelled at him when she almost got wet. She whined that he was moving too slow and that she was uncomfortable. The older monk said nothing. When he arrived at the other side of the river he set the young woman down. And then he and his traveling companion went on their way.
The monks shared silence for several hours. Finally, the younger monk burst out, "Doesn't that woman just make you angry? You carried her across that river and she couldn't even manage to say thank you!" The older monk turned to his companion and said, "I set that woman down hours ago. Why is it that you are still carrying her?"
It is easy to carry anger long after a conflict has ended. Some times when I have an argument with someone I stew in my thoughts for hours afterwards, rehearsing what I could have said differently, remembering the wrongs I suffered and, if the issue is unresolved, planning what to say next time to score the point needed to win the argument. I know that I am not alone in such behavior. Occasionally people share with me their rage over a past wrong committed thirty or forty years ago. It might be anger at a parent, a former partner or spouse, a childhood bully, a sibling or a past employer. Decades after the incident that person is still carrying around their anger.
The power of story allows anger and hurt to be carried across the generations. Ethnic tensions and wars between nations are often based upon slights that occurred hundreds of years ago, long before any of the actors in the current conflict were born. The pain and the anger gets passed down from generation to generation as each new generation in turn shares the memory and the accompanying emotion with the next. Think of the legendary family feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys and the Capulets and the Montagues. In such cases the arguments between the families went on long after the original antagonists were dead. Putting down anger, even if it did not originally belong to you, can be very hard.
In our story from earlier it was only the older monk, presumably a man who had engaged in spiritual practice for years, who had the sufficient self-awareness to leave anger behind him. Most of the time most of us are not that self-aware. Like the young monk we carry our anger with us. Sometimes we carry it so far that we are still holding on to it when enter into our next conflict. At such times we are often more in dialogue with the person who committed the past wrong than the person we are engaged with at the moment. Patterns of behavior can be very difficult to break. If you are mad at your father and I do something during a conflict that reminds you of your father suddenly we might not be arguing at all. Instead you are directing all of your past anger at me and it is the conflict from thirty years ago, not the present one, in which you find yourself engaged.
There are resources that we can draw upon during such times of friction. We can seek outside help. We can learn to communicate better and speak about the past wrongs we have suffered and the angers we carry. A burden shared can be a burden lessened. We can cultivate self-awareness and realize when we are present and when we are reliving past wrongs. And we can practice forgiveness.
None of this is easy. I believe all of it is possible. One historical event that speaks of its possibility is the Truth and Reconciliation process that took place in South Africa after the fall of the Apartheid government. Apartheid, as you may remember, was a social system that segregated people by race--black, white, colored (that is mixed race) and Indian. The minority whites held all of the political power and most of the resources under the system. They held the other racial groups in check by legalized discrimination and state sanctioned terrorism and police brutality.
For many years the African National Congress led a struggle against the Apartheid regime. Though the ANC did use non-violence in their campaign they also resorted to violence. During the Apartheid years many people died on both sides. In the early 1990s the Apartheid system was finally ended and longtime ANC leader Nelson Mandel became President of South Africa.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to help ease the transition between the old Apartheid government and the new ANC government. The objective was to put the nation on the path to healing. Unlike other war crimes tribunals this was not to be victor's justice. Instead the process recognized that in the new South Africa all parties of the past conflict would have to continue to live together. Those who committed the most egregious crimes were to be punished. Anyone else, providing they that they were willing to face the victims of their violence, prove they acted on orders and tell the whole truth, was to receive amnesty.
The hope was that this process would allow victims to receive closure and the opportunity to forgive their oppressors. In doing so both victim and perpetrator would be able to put their anger down and continue on their life's journey. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of the commission, described his hopes for the process in the commission's final report, authored after it had completed its hearings: "Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door on the past--not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us."
The commission has been both lauded and criticized. Proponents claim that the commission pioneered a new process that allows communities to face difficult and violent periods of their histories without reopening old wounds. Critics believe that the process let many violent actors off the hook and in many cases failed to uncover the full truth and provide victims with true closure. The arguments of both sides have their merits. The truth and reconciliation process appears to have worked well in some instances and poorly in others.
The movie "In My Country" uses a fictional romance between Anna, a white South African poet, and Langston, a black American journalist, to explore the successes and failures of the process. The movie contains dramatizations of several actual cases that came before the commission. In one a former security operative justifies his involvement in the brutal murder of an anti-Apartheid activist. He says that if he had not killed the man as instructed he would have lost his pension. In another an elderly man--who has been castrated and left largely paralyzed--confronts his torturer. He wants to know why his torturer did what he did and why he was left so damaged. The torturer pleads incompetence and claims that he did not know his torture techniques would inflict such lasting damage. Watching these encounters the viewer is left skeptical about the utility of the truth and reconciliation process.
Another scene provides a fine counter point. A young boy of perhaps ten years comes before the commission. An advocate explains that the boy has not spoken a word since seeing his parents murdered before eyes by state security forces. Two former security officers stand in dock and begin to describe how they killed the boy's father. They began by trying to strangle him but when he proved too strong they shot him in his bed. Only after machine-gunning the father did they realize that the mother had been hiding under the bed. They had killed her too. And then they saw the boy standing in the corner of the room. "He was staring at me with those eyes," one of the security officer says.
Tears in his own eyes the security officer rises. He turns to the child and says "forgive me, I am so sorry." He looks up to the commission, "I will do anything. I will pay for the boy's schooling. I will look after him. Anything." The boy stands up from where he has been seated, walks over to the security officer and embraces him. The embrace suggests that healing is possible and that maybe a weight has been set aside.
It is, perhaps, an extreme example. Certainly I hope that it falls far beyond the experience of any of our lives. Yet it contains within it some important tools for moving past conflict and even accepting change. The first is that conflict can only be addressed if there is communication. The Truth and Reconciliation process could not work if those involved lied to each other. Without honestly communicating what about is happening or what happened it is impossible to get to the root of the issues involved. Communicating also lets us share the burdens we carry, in the process lessening them and lessening the damage they may cause others. Imagine you understand that every time you say or do a particular thing you remind your partner of your partner's abusive former lover. You may come to realize that when you do that thing your partner is not engaging with you at all. He or she is still stuck struggling with his or her ex.
In addition to communication, honesty is necessary for successfully navigating conflicts. Without honesty communication can quickly become meaningless. Telling the full story can help the parties in a conflict understand each other's history and motives.
Full disclosure is necessary for our third tool, forgiveness. Once we understand the motives for someone's actions it becomes possible to forgive them. But forgiveness is not easy. Often it requires some sort of act of restoration--taking care of the boy after his parent's murder, for example--to be meaningful. Without the act of setting right and without the truth telling it can be meaningless to ask for forgiveness. The parties in the conflict have done nothing to repair the damage that occurred.
Forgiveness also can require significant internal resources. As our reading from the Tao De Ching advised us earlier the first step to cultivating harmony is to "Cultivate harmony within yourself." Only once you have done that can you cultivate harmony with your family, your community, your culture and the world.
Cultivating such harmony can require serious work. It was only the older monk, the one who had been part of the religious community and engaged with spiritual practice for years, who was able to set aside his anger. The novice lacked the self-awareness necessary.
One of the benefits of participating in a religious community like ours is that one can find mentors and companions to help us along on our paths. Within this community there are many different people who have long been engaged in various kinds of spiritual practice. If you think you need help cultivating your internal harmony, building up the internal resources you need, I suggest you ask someone else here for that help. Whether you want to learn about prayer, meditation, journal writing or earth centered spirituality there is someone in the congregation who can probably help you. And if you just need someone to talk to the community can provide that to. I am always available to listen and to offer what spiritual guidance I can.
Which brings to me my final point. Sometimes when we are faced with conflict we need an outside party to help us resolve it. In the Truth and Reconciliation process this was the role the commission itself played. In our own lives the outside party might be a friend, a spouse, a social worker, a co-worker, a minister or a therapist. Really it can be anyone that both parties trust to listen. The role of the outside party in such cases is really just to help those in conflict better talk to each other.
The end of "In My Country" reminds me of the price that can be paid when conflicts are left to fester. In the final scene the American journalist Langston witnesses his friend and guide Dumi gunned down on the streets. Dumi is ambushed by former anti-Apartheid activists who are settling old scores. Dumi, himself a participant in the struggle against Apartheid, it turns out, informed on at least one of his former comrades, leading to the man's death at the hands of the security forces. Having failed to acknowledge his role in Apartheid it appears that some of his old friends decided to take matters into their own hands.
When the world changes and we face conflict we need not let the conflict spin out of control and cause damage. As Heraclitus wrote, "No man ever steps in the same river twice..." Change is a constant. When the river becomes turgid there are tools that we can use to navigate the troubled water. We can communicate, speak with honesty, learn to forgive, cultivate our internal resources and, if necessary, seek outside help. And then we can learn to leave the rocky obstacles of the rapids behind, we can lay our burdens down by the riverside and we can continue our journeys onward, through more tranquil streams.
May each of us, in our own lives, seek and find the wisdom and the strength to make it so.
Amen.