Results at Half-Time

Last night I had a genuine revelation.

I know people often say that kind of thing, and it isn’t always true. But bear with me - I truly think that some of you good readers will see yourselves in what I’m about to say. And I think it might help you.

I’ve been so occupied lately with concern to understand what’s going on in the world and how to respond that I’ve had to slow down my reading and focus on people I know to be trustable sharers of wise answers, or at least wiser questions. An accumulation of ideas, care, lament, fear, courage, and reflection provoked a rush of insight just before I went to bed - I think it’s important enough to share here despite not yet being a fully “refined” thought. And if what I share below sparks some light or life in you, please come to the Porch Gathering next month - we’ll certainly talk about it, experiment with it, live it there.

For decades I’ve looked at the peace movement in northern Ireland as being just that: a movement toward making peace between diametrically and violently opposed enemies, culminating in a formal political treaty that largely ended the violence, established a cooperative form of government, and set the stage for a new way of being northern Irish, Irish, and British too.

But it hit me last night: the communities of peace-making, peace-thinking, peace-praying, peace-learning, peace-sharing that I grew up around and in were in and of themselves a magnificent intervention.

The fact of their existence was much more important than “the results”. (And the “results” are not limited to a treaty signed by politicians.)

Communities committing to nonviolent creativity were everywhere when I was a teenager and young adult. They had been there before I was born - indeed there were people committed to the common good-transformation of northern Irish society long before the modern iteration of our centuries-old civil conflict began. They were always there.

People were building bridges, considering ways of belonging without othering, asking ourselves what we could do to meet the needs of the vulnerable and hold boundaries against oppressive behavior without harming anyone. But despite being everywhere they rarely get credit for the structural-level “political” change that occurred.

I don’t know how many minds permeated by bigotry were truly changed by the thinktanks I worked with. But I know those thinktanks created a community of people learning to think about these things with profound depth and complexity, and who loved each other in the midst of a crisis.

The less-tribalist political parties were often condemned for being “traitors”, or “not the real people of Ulster”. They never topped the polls at election time. But they offered a vision of a society in which idolatry of a piece of land would be transcended by a diverse and interdependent people rather than carved up for one side or the other. And that vision, in the end, won.

I can’t accurately measure the impact of faith-based peace communities, ecumenical dialogue, and prayer amidst religious diversity. But they gave people solace who were suffering. And whether you believe we are made in the image of God, or come from stardust, or both (and I definitely recommend the latter - it will radically expand the good you see in yourself, and your sense of the beauty of life itself), they audaciously asserted the value of every person, at a time when many powerful people were loudly asserting that some lives should count more than others.

All of these groups were a gift to the people who participated - they changed my life, and are the foundation for why three decades after I attended my first dialogue across lines of difference, I keep thinking about the need for spaces that embody the kind of world we want to see - whether or not those spaces produce “results”.

I was born into a state of emergency, and for the first nineteen years of my life the story of that emergency was the one most frequently told. Sometimes the emergency demanded an urgent response - I know someone who literally ran toward a bomb to help people, and he wasn’t the only one. But I am more convinced than ever that the duration and intensity of the emergency was reduced in untold ways by individuals and groups exploring and embodying a different way of being than the terms of the emergency dictated. These communities which I was privileged to know, often participate in, and sometimes help lead believed and practiced the actual meaning of Gandhi’s be the change you want to see in the world. They took the risk that because oppositional energy always recreates itself, the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better might be one of the most true claims, and they found by experimenting with creative ways of living that it was.

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Many of us involved in peacemaking work regret that it took so long, or - like Oskar Schindler - rue that we didn’t do more. And surely it can be useful to honestly evaluate how we can learn more effective strategies for helping the beautiful world heal the broken world.

But I think the grass roots peace movement in northern Ireland has too low an opinion of itself. Rethinking identity, building bridges, holding boundaries, binding the wounds of the brokenhearted, and yes - praying for a better world absolutely made room for others to think differently - even just a little bit - which meant they might also live differently, and love more too.

We are not helping the broken world or ourselves if we conceive of life as activism and activism as primarily about “results” - especially if the “results” are only spectacular or dramatic. Sometimes baby steps are the best response to Godzilla’s; and sometimes the benign dramatic happens when we least expect it.

But the work and the life of creative audacity, lived between the common and cosmic good are an end in themselves. They are an intervention in a story that says there can only be winners and losers or “us” and “them”, that we are living in a time of impossibility, that only what has worked in the past will work in the future, and that in the midst of crisis there can only be panic.

But you already know that round here we are compelled by the notion that the current global crisis is a crisis of storytelling, and that it’s possible to respond to a crisis, and to the panic it stimulates, with tenderness toward the fear and action to protect the vulnerable without setting the crisis in concrete.

This is a “middle time” - we’re not at the beginning of the story of the crisis, and I suspect we’re not at its culmination either. There are, of course, red-letter days, moments when dramatic change seems to occur overnight. But most of life is lived, as they say, between the steeple and the gargoyle. In middle times. We have to find ways to be in the middle, never denying or neglecting any legitimate need. But one of those needs is the need for a way of life worth living when the current crisis has given way to whatever comes next.

I’ll say it again: the work and the life of creative audacity, lived as individuals and in community between the common and cosmic good are an end in themselves. In a middle time, the very fact of their existence may matter even more than their “outcome”.

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If the life of creative audacity calls to you, join us at The Porch Gathering, three weeks from now. It’s one answer to the middle time, and for anyone who wants to learn, embody, and share a better story beyond separation, scapegoating, and selfishness.

While we will keep registration for the Gathering itself open for a while longer, the deadline for booking accommodation and meals at the conference centre is tomorrow, Tuesday February 18th. So if you want to stay onsite, or eat meals during the Gathering without having to head offsite, today is the day to book accommodation and meals. Details are at www.theporchgathering.com