A Promise Made Under Texas Live Oaks

Mark and Ariane are married. They exchanged their vows shaded by ancient live oaks on July 3. Even at 7pm the Texas sun kept the temperature hovering in the high nineties. In a touch of thoughtful creativity, the order of service was printed on fans. 

A guitarist played Bach's Air on the G String. Parents read Letters to a Young Poet and Pathways  by Rainer Maria Rilke; two Celtic prayers by David Adam; Blessing for a Marriage by James Dillet Freeman; the Prayer of St Francis; and Litany by Billy Collins.  

Susan and I now have a second daughter-in-law and we are thrilled beyond words to welcome Ari to the Corcoran clan. As the mother of three sons, Susan appreciates the increased female presence in the family.

The day before the ceremony, seventy family members and friends gathered for a rehearsal lunch at Torchy's Tacos at the Trailer Park Eatery, one of Mark and Ari's favorite Austin haunts. It was a joyous multicultural, multigenerational celebration.

Despite the odds, marriage and faithful relationships based on mutual trust are still the ideal to which most of our sons' friends aspire.  Mark and Ari’s promise and commitment to each other:

“Loving what I know of you,

Trusting what I don’t yet know,

With respect for your integrity

And faith in your abiding love for me.”

The day after the wedding I came across a column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times entitled More Perfect Unions  “Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature,” he writes.

"A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos….The hardest promises to keep are often the ones that keep people together."

During the wedding festivities Andrew, Mark's brother and best man, warned Ari of certain genetic Corcoran traits: selective hearing, endless capacity for argument, and obsession with sports (watching, that is). "Don't blame them, it’s not their fault; they were made that way." But he concluded with one important Corcoran quality: "We find the greatest women in the world and we never let them go."

I say amen to that.

America Healing

In March, I wrote about my experience at a retreat with fifteen practitioners and some program officers from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation where we shared personal stories of racial healing. Last month, the same group served as facilitators for the America Healing conference in Asheville, North Carolina, when the foundation convened 250 grantees, racial justice advocates, and leaders of national civil rights organizations.

We spent the first day in “racial equity healing dialogues.” For the most part, people in my sharing circle had spent years, sometimes decades, in the struggle for racial justice, yet for many it was a unique experience to be in a group where they could tell their stories. As one activist said, “For the first time I felt like I was not alone.”

One participant described a turning point in his life when someone had simply been willing to listen to his anger and pain and then had the humility to say, “I can have no idea what it was like for you.”

A senior African American, who grew up in the segregated south and went on to a distinguished corporate career, recalled hearing his father having to answer, “Yes, sir” to a 9 year-old white boy. “Healing is a journey that is not over. Even today most of us cannot live in America for a full day without something happening that reminds you of what color you are. How do you take hate and turn it into love, turn it into good?”

Other themes and questions surfaced: How to work with people who will not change? What to do with our frustrations? How to deal with multiple realities and identities in our increasingly multicultural national community? How to be part of the system and not be tainted by it? How to do the work and take care of ourselves at the same time?

The second day focused on hard realities of race and class in America today. Here is one stark fact: People who live in safe, typically white neighborhoods can expect to live up to 20 years longer than those in impoverished ones. 

Through panels and workshops we exchanged information on systems change, policy, community organization, and strategies for racial equity in education, health, and economic security. A powerful movement for racial healing may be gaining momentum. A new generation is embracing blended racial identities as seen in the extraordinary diversity of the conference attendees. But, paradoxically, many agree that the election of President Obama has actually made it harder to talk about race.

Speakers noted an insidious reframing of the racial issue in national politics, the media, and in some court decisions. In this “reactionary color blindness,” considering racial impact in order to avoid potential discrimination itself constitutes racial discrimination. In this Alice in Wonderland view of reality, to take race into account, even to avoid discrimination, is discrimination. Talking about race is racist.*

I was moved by the story of Mee Moua, a Hmong American who came as a refugee from Laos and was elected to the Minnesota Senate. She framed the immigration issue in the context of the larger story of all Americans and told how the Jewish community in her state, some of them holocaust survivors, had supported the rights of Latinos. She said, “We will not resolve the immigration issue until it is seen as more than a Hispanic/Latino issue. Those of us who could ‘pass’ must step up.”

Gail Christopher, Kellogg’s vice president for program strategy states: “Achieving racial equity will require changing hearts, minds and deeply held (often unconscious) beliefs that manifest in and through persistent residential segregation patterns and related disparities in access to opportunity.”

Perhaps the most interesting evidence of this change of heart came from Harvard professor Mark Warren, author of Fire in the Heart: How White Americans Embrace Racial Justice.  In interviews with white people who are making a difference in their communities, he discovered that what engaged them was not analysis or education. Nobody said, “I read about racism” or, “I took a course.” What got people moving was “direct witnessing experiences when they saw with their own eyes the hard realities of racism.” Motivation comes from a “profound moral and spiritual process” as they build “meaningful relationships with people of color and when their values and interests are directly addressed.”  

*A special issue of The American Prospect, April 2011, entitled Color Blinded contains important articles by Shirley Sherrod, Randall Kennedy, William Julius Wilson, Ian Haney-Lopez and others. http://prospect.org/cs/colorblinded

 

What Happened to True Friendship?

In January, 1998, I was in Washington working with a team recruited by the White House to design a dialogue guide for the President’s One America initiative on race when the media erupted over Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky. There was gloom in the room and groans of, “There goes all our work down the tubes.” No question, the initiative as a whole – along with much of the Administration’s work – suffered hugely from this distraction. It cost the country dearly.

I thought of this again in the wake of Dominique Strauss-Khan’s arrest on charges of attempted rape of a New York hotel housekeeper and the admission by Arnold Schwarzenegger that he had fathered a child with a member of the family’s household staff. Both men, like Clinton, were known as womanizers. Schwarzenegger was described in some reports as a serial groper and Strauss-Khan had a notorious reputation as a seducer. 

My question is this: Why did no-one hold these men accountable? Why did those around them enable these destructive patterns of behavior to continue? In the aftermath of every scandal, psychologists and behavioral experts fill the airwaves. But where was the friend who might have said: "You need to stop this.”? Or, “This is a really bad idea.”? I often reflect on this when public figures – whether a Tiger Woods or a John Edwards – are embroiled in situations where personal lifestyles have fatally damaged brilliant careers and caused untold pain to families.

Because of the pressures they live under and the intoxication of power and popularity, public figures in particular need friends who are not afraid to confront them with uncomfortable facts. But all of us in ordinary life need people around us who will hold us accountable. Yet in many situations where a dose of common sense might have saved a marriage or prevented a dishonest and ultimately disastrous financial transaction, we have delegated moral authority to professionals. It used to be that friends would offer simple home truths. Now we defer to counselors, therapists, or life coaches. 

Of course, there are many times when professional help is essential. But have we become too hesitant to challenge one another? Is our desire to be liked stronger than our care for those whose approval we crave? Perhaps, most importantly, do we fear being seen as judgmental in a culture where relative morality is the accepted norm? 

Paradoxically, in recent decades, as Rushworth Kidder writes, “as moral relativism grew in strength, so too did a countervailing social consciousness,” a desire for universal values: for human rights, for rights of women, and codes to stop corruption. Relativism is therefore in conflict with widely acknowledged social values of respect, quality, and honesty.*

Tolerance has become a preeminent value of our age; and thankfully we are moving beyond many prejudices of the past. But a true friend is also a truth teller. Cicero wrote that a friend must have “the courage to give advice with candor,” and the relationship demands “frankness without which friendship is an empty name.” 

A true friend calls it like it is.  As a song goes, “He looks right through you and he loves you just the same.” Do we need more honest conversations on friendship and accountability? I look forward to comments from readers. 

*Rushworth Kidder, “Rape, Relativism, and Respect: Duke University’s Dilemma.” Ethics Newsline, newsletter for Institute for Global Ethics, 10 April 2006.

Changing the Narrative

Amid all the negativity in our nation’s capital, I was encouraged and inspired last week to meet with several people who are working constructively in various ways to bridge divides.  

“The walls are high but they are not held together by very strong nails. People are willing to think beyond party lines if they are not going to be exposed.” This is the assessment of Mark Farr, the recently appointed president and CEO of the Faith and Politics Institute that aims to encourage reflective leadership among members of Congress and their staff. He adds, “I’d love to impact the M.O. in Washington, to change the narrative.”

That’s one goal of The Trust Factor 2011, a week of activities set for October 10-15. Initiatives of Change is convening it along with other organizations that are building trust at the local, national, or international level. Partners will host or co-sponsor events – forums, dialogues, workshops or brown bag lunches – where we’ll look at elements that make up trust and what to do when it’s broken, explore case studies and learn some tools. The planning process is creative and organic.

One key partner is Amy Lazarus, the executive director of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network. The organization’s mission is to “engage differences as strengths to improve campuses, workplaces and communities.” Founded by Harold H. Saunders, a former Assistant Secretary of State, who has worked with citizens and communities in conflict for over forty years, the network is active on a dozen campuses. As the alumni move into the workforce, SDCN also offers programs for businesses. Saunders likes to define dialogue as “listening deeply enough to be changed by what you hear.” 

Amy is teaming up with Rebecca Davis, the coordinator for the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at American University’s School of International Service to host an “intergenerational dialogue” as one feature of The Trust Factor 2011. Their idea is to have folks from diverse backgrounds and different generations talk with each other about their personal perceptions of trust. In keeping with the focus of the week, participants will look at issues of trust in race, religion, politics, and economics.  

Also on the planning team is Jeanné Isler at Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an organization known for its creative approach to conflict resolution in many parts of the globe. Jeanné, who heads Search for Common Ground on Race, wants to explore how film and other art forms might provide a context for dialogue on trust across racial divides.

Harold Vines sees the need to build trust at the neighborhood level. He’s an African American in his mid-seventies who until recently served on the board of the Servant Leadership School. It’s part of the Church of the Saviour network of independent, ecumenical Christian faith communities and over 40 ministries aiming to recover something of the vitality and life, vigor and power of the early Christian community. Vines, who grew up in segregated North Carolina, read Trustbuilding. He says, “It asks the question: ‘Am I trustworthy?’ I want to sit with that question a while.” He and his colleagues hope to engage neighboring faith communities and residents.

I also met with Theo Brown, a veteran consultant and trainer with extensive experience of working with national and local dialogue projects. He imagines using The Trust Factor 2011 to convene many of those who are doing the work of trustbuilding, to celebrate their work and to mobilize for sustained action. He recognizes that this is the start of a process to figure out “how to make it real in Washington, DC.”

The planners are eager for everyone’s input, so please comment on this blog or be in touch with our office.

We hope that The Trust Factor 2011 will encourage participants to think of themselves as trustbuilders. As Amy Lazarus says, “It’s not just a week, but a way of life.” If enough of us put our energy into this, we might begin to change the narrative in Washington.

Taking the Jump Together

I was struck by a remark by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s about trust,” he told a group of businessmen in Richmond. “It’s about making sure that, at the end of the day, you are going to have to link arms with somebody and take a jump.”

Warner was talking about his work with a handful of Democratic and Republican senators – the “Gang of Six” – who are striving behind the scenes to develop a sensible bipartisan proposal to deal with our massive structural budget deficit.  This approach must necessarily include both a reduction in spending and an increase in taxes. It’s a tough job and they are encountering strong resistance from leaders of their own parties who are in denial about what it will take to get the country back onto a sound financial footing. 

Across the country, at local, state, and national level, painfully hard budget choices must be made. There are no easy options. Leaders who recognize the need to reach across the aisle face the disapproval of their peers, media attacks, and the furious opposition of special interest groups. Without the trust Warner speaks of, it will be virtually impossible for groups like the Gang of Six to sustain their work and to generate the necessary will for change.

How can people of diverse political, racial, or economic backgrounds build the trust needed to work together for the common good? In my experience, trust does not require us to agree on everything. We may not even like the people we must journey with, or at least we may encounter moments of intense irritation. It does mean that we know we can count on each other and that we are prepared to share risk equally. It means a commitment to stay the course.

I worked for many years with a visionary and outspoken African American woman. Our temperaments and backgrounds could not have been more different.  We had several major rows. But we were both committed to the cause of honest conversation and racial reconciliation. We both knew that when the chips were down we could trust one another absolutely. In challenging situations, dealing with racially polarized groups, we always knew that we had each other’s back.  

Mari Fitzduff, the Northern Irish peacemaker, says that the greatest need in the world today is for leaders who can transcend the needs of their own group. Such leaders, she warns, risk becoming "strangers in their own land." Our public officials need to know that there are citizens who will offer moral and spiritual support for courageous, selfless leadership.

What if each of us were to think about a risk we are prepared to take personally in order to build a more inclusive, more just, and sustainable community? Is there someone we might approach as a potential ally – perhaps someone of a very different social or cultural background, or political viewpoint?

Are we ready to link arms with somebody and take a jump?