Conflict and the Too-Busy Life

Life has been too-full of late, including a weekend in Des Moines, Iowa filling the pulpit of a colleague on sabbatical, and a weekend in Cincinnati for the Heartland UU District Board of Trustees, on which I am a Member At-Large.

This doesn't mean I haven't been writing, but it does mean that until my laptop got fixed (It is now, hurrah!), I haven't had the capacity easily to post. I'll post a few thoughts in the next couple of days, but for now I want to share my latest newsletter column from The Flint Unitarian Universalist.

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Dear congregation, our members and friends,

You may know that I have a somewhat split personality when it comes to matters of faith. I’ve told you that my working faith understanding is one of humanism, an understanding that the natural world contains all that is, and that we don’t need the supernatural to reliably live with one another—and the earth—morally and ethically, joyously and aesthetically. Still, the religion of my upbringing ties me to the stories of Jesus, teacher, brother and friend, organizer and rabblerouser, and—mystically, impossibly—the savior and redeemer of all that is.

The task of resolving the conflicts among these understandings is mine. That’s what I believe, and that’s what our liberal religion promotes. Each of us uses this religious community to help us on our spiritual growth, letting us create provisional answers for life’s large questions. We seek universal answers even as we expect that we must remain wide open to the unexpected, to the challenging, to the diverse.

We say we want to behave with one another in ways that allow for a multiplicity of provisional answers to our many questions. We say that we want to welcome the stranger, to encourage each other, to allow for difference. Still, we get into trouble with each other because—well, because we are human. Our human differences, the differences of our experiences, the differences of our self-assessments and our assessments of other people’s capacity (or incapacity!), our brokenness and alienation often leave us in bad behavior and conflict.

Conflict is not a bad thing. Understood and addressed, it can be a motor for improvement, evolution. When those of us who are in conflict bring, face-to-face, our differences; when we listen as well as speak; when our interaction causes us to better refine our own positions, we may learn better who we, ourselves, are and what the specific contribution is that we might make to our common life.

Conflict that is avoided can cause us to look at the world around us not as it really is. Conflict that is avoided can send up that marvelous river “Denial,” and leave us adrift. Conflict avoided can harm us.

By the same token, conflict that escalates—and conflict can escalate quickly!—can be very harmful and hurtful. Conflict escalates when, rather than bringing a question or problem to the person who can help resolve the question, it is spread around through rumor and gossiping and further avoiding the real problems and personalities.

Speed Leas of the Alban Institute identifies five levels of conflict in congregations:
I is “A Problem to Solve”;
II is “A Disagreement”;
III is “A Contest among Parties”;
IV is “Fight or Flight”; and
V is “Intractable Conflict.”

When we have confusion or disagreement about something, we can resolve it in the first two conflict levels and decide how to act together. (Sometimes we vote. Sometimes we figure out who is supposed to be responsible.)

When we get into that difficult place where the conflict is not about the “issues” but about the people or personalities with whom we disagree, or when we begin to threaten to leave, or when we know that the only way out is the annihilation of the opposing party, then we are stuck in a place that requires some outside help to work things through and find a resolution—one where, usually, not all parties will be happy!

Our interactions with one another reveal plenty of places where we there is lack of clarity about process, and some confusion about responsibility for programs and decisions. Some places we find that we don’t all agree with the decisions we’ve made with one another. This is normal. We keep talking, trying to listen more completely and speak more precisely. Sometimes we learn just to be quiet and listen to the sound of our own hearts.

We have times set aside this month. An “after church conversation” on Mar. 2. The “Open” service on Mar. 30. Additional times which will be set for small group interaction in a more relaxed setting.

When the conflict we face is larger, (Level IV? Level V!) we may need to ask someone outside to help us talk through our differences. We may need to look at other congregational “right relations” policies to address challenges that we have. We might need to ask a consultant to help us express a radical honesty about our differences. We might have to unearth our fears about the church, its direction and future.

Maybe it is here that I’m happiest that I have this “Jesus loving” side. On the Christian side of my split personality, I know that there is a God—and it is not I!—and that there is a resurrection hope beyond the pain of change and conflict. I know that there is, somehow, a way that everything can be saved, redeemed.

My practice each spring in the weeks leading to Easter is to set aside time daily to be quiet, to study and meditate, even to pray. I’ve been blessed to do this, since Paczki Day (thanks for the Polish pastries!), in ways that make sense to my spiritual quest: watching a video class on great ideas in philosophy, reading the biblical prophets, listening to devotional music, leading interfaith chanting among colleagues . . . and keeping you in my heart.

“Morning by morning new mercies I see,” says the old evangelical hymn, and my quest for mercy has you at its center. I long for ways for us to more fully embody our liberal religion with each other, to be the community of right relations which honors our faith. To embrace conflict well. To change. To grow.

Happy (Humanistic) Easter, one and all.

Love, just love,

(Rev.) David Carl Olson
minister

P.S. Please join members of the Greater Flint Interfaith Community on Tuesday, March 18 at the Life Enrichment Center for a Peace Service on the evening before the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This non-partisan service is an expression of our deep desire to end not only this war but all war, and asks us to call on our spiritual resources to imagine ways out of this war and all war. The Peace Prayer Service is sponsored by the Genesee County Committee for Community Peace, and members of the Life Enrichment Center will lead the service itself. Leaders of the congregations of Temple Beth El, Woodside Church, Lou’Helen Baha’i Center and the Al-Saddiq Institute & Mosque have indicated interest in attending. I hope you can be there, too, at the corner of Lennon and Dye.

Where Did the Week Go?

I wish I could figure out how to download a photograph from my cellular telephone. Last Tuesday morning, I got a phone call from Amy Derrick, Director of Lifespan Learning at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Flint, Michigan. She sounded radiant, and announced the birth of Alexandra Elizabeth Derrick that morning, a little before 3 a.m., a few ounces short of 8 pounds. Within a few minutes of our phone call, she had taken a photo of a little agnel sleeping peacefully, and sent it to my cellphone where it sits in my "saved messages" folder . . . but where I can't figure out how to e-mail it to myself or otherwise download it.

That morning, I was in Loveland, Ohio at Grailville, an intentional community that was hosting a three day meeting of the Heartland Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. The Heartand includes most of the UU congregations in Michigan, a few congregations in western Ohio, most of the congregations in Indiana and all of those in Kentucky. Parish ministers, ministers of religious education and community ministers, as well as retirees and ministerial interns and students, are members of the Heartland Chapter, and we are all part of a continental Association of UU ministers.

Each year, we meet three times. In the fall, we convene for three days near where the states of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky meet. In the winter, we spend five days together where the states of Ohio, Indiana and Michigan meet. In the spring, me meet for one day before the Annual Meeting of the Heartland District of the Unitarian Universalist Assocation, which meeting moves around the district. (in my first spring, it was in Indianapolis; last spring it took place in Grand Rapids, next year it will meet in Louisville.)

The Grailville meeting begins on Monday evening. Because I am teaching a course in our Monday School, and because Amy is on maternity leave (!), I felt I needed to miss the first evening of the Grailville meeting, and drove with my colleague Rev. Jane Thickstun, minister of the Midland, Michigan UU Fellowship after class, leaving Flint a few minutes before nine and arriving in Grailville a just before two a.m. And a few mimutes later, Alexandra was born, and a few hours later I got thr call!

Throughout the day on Tuesday, my ministerial colleagues and I shared hours of sitting and sharing around the Four Divine Abodes of Buddhism, metta (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (appreciative joy) and upekkha (equanimity). We shared in a style like the Covenant Circle small group ministry of my congregation, sharing readings and stories of our own lives, attentively listening to each other and sitting in silence, noting questions raised by our being with one another, and then leaving. The format of the day reflected an aspiration of our chapter: that we not only meet and learn together, but that we practice our spirituality with one another in a sustained way.

I have been without a laptop since I used my Powerbook as a toboggan in mid-August and broke its hinge. (I continued to use it as a desktop computer through the end of the month when the display began to flicker. Then I bought a shiny new iMac for my desk at church, along with this old iMac at home.) Had I had a lapotp in Grailville, I might have used it to blog. Instead, I took a few notes on paper (which are now in my study at church). But it is probably more important to me that I actually stopped for a day, sat still, let my emotions (fears and anxieties, you know) be present and then followed the breath to another, deeper place. That place, so distant in my everyday life. With even the feeblest intention, and a few very deep breaths, that place becomes imaginable.

I love maps. On the way down to Loveland and back, I wanted to be sure about where we were on the map, to be sure that I knew where Jeffersonville and Indianapolis are, places where I have colleagues whom I'd love to visit. I used to have an atlas by my bed. At night, as I prepared to dream, I loved to look at that atlas, to see the latitude of Mosow and l"Anse aux Meadows, of Reykjavik and Santo Domingo. I loved to see where I'd been in the world, places to which I longed to return, places I wanted to visit for the first time. I love maps.

Sitting with my colleagues, I longed for a fuller map of the soul, of my soul. For a richer, more descriptive pattern and plan for achieving some kind of illumination. Not that there haven't been moments on my life of deep "knowing," but how often they have come to me in dramatic, unexpected ways. I speak of the majesty of the world often, of the large bodies of water that put me in touch with everything, of the train-trek to Pilatus to enjoy a snowball fight in July, of the Grand Cayon where I sat and stared and wondered.

But I haven't shared with anyone, that I can remember, my story of being overwhelmed "by everything" when I visited the basilica of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre in Paris, or my varied experiences with pentecostal worship, or even the step by step climbing to the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal. How do these experiences fit into the map of me? How does my desire to study maps of the St. James pilgrimages in France and Spain mirror and more fully explain my desire to delve mor deeply into my spiritual path? And what does it mean that I "know" that my "knowing" has much to do with walking side by side with janitors and nursing hme workers and undocumented immigrants in their quest for full humanity and justice.

Wednesday brought the long ride home, and on Thursday lots of catching up. The study, e-mail and phone messages. The calendar. A delicious dinner with Marion Van Winkle and Dr. Van. A distinguished lecture at Mott Community College by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Friday morning (on my day off) I met with Dr. Rayna Bick to cover last minute arrangements for Sunday's service, a special report by our congregational volunteers who went to New Orleans to do post-Katrina rebuilding. More tasks! Then on Saturday, the March for Peace in honor of Gandhi's birthday; and a wedding; and technical preparation for Sunday morning; and too short a night of sleep; and then a full Sunday.

And then some exhaustion.

What stops on the map of the week? Picking tomatoes. Watering newly planted birches. Harvesting a dozen gladioli, and sharing them with a neighbor. Walking to work this morning. (I'm just about to do this!)

And watching the sun rise. So late! Nearly eight o'clock before the sun is really up. (Almanac says sunrise was at 7:40.) Muggy morning, with the sound of buzz saw in the neighborhood. The "white noise" of the expressway in the distance.

And me breathing. Hmm.

Good morning.