By Carrie Graham

I was recently training facilitators around bridge building, and one participant asked a central yet very astute question: What IS the bridge?

If we are peacebuilding, a.k.a. "bridgebuilding" with one another, exactly what is the bridge?

Here are a few thoughts on this that feel timely:

First, what it's not: Building a bridge does not mean building consensus or persuading effectively. These are worthy efforts in many scenarios. They are simply different pursuits than what bridgebuilding refers to here.

The bridge we are building allows us to understand each other more fully, allows us to love our neighbor for all of who they are, for where they are the same and where they differ, for their sense of humor and taste in food and care for others just as much as the beliefs that contradict with our own.

Why do that? What is building this bridge for?

There are many reasons. The one most compelling to me personally is that it's transformative. Oftentimes, we go into a dialogue hoping others will be changed. Dialogue is a process of becoming true friends with people who differ from ourselves, which changes us. It changes everyone involved in unexpected, unpredictable ways. More touching to me is that it changes us toward growth, toward a maturity we did not suspect possible. It moves us from a posture of defense to a mutual posture of vulnerability, from a sentiment of holding one's ground to a freedom to be sincerely curious about the lens through which a person so different than us sees the world, understands it, cares for it.

In so doing, it also provides a space for us to exist as our whole selves, free to be curious, to express ourselves without fear and with kindness and directness, to connect, to play, to be more whole than when we started.

Ultimately, on this bridge, we learn to freely welcome and be welcomed, somehow in the face of - rather than the denial of - mutually exclusive beliefs. We are invited into a spiritual maturity which allows for this paradox to exist in our minds, hearts and interactions.

The shorthand for dialogue is indeed making friends. It's just with people we might never think we'd become friends with, joke around with, delight in, reach out to when a need arises.

When we find ourselves in friendships with others with mutually exclusive beliefs, this then helps us to imagine the humanity of strangers with different beliefs. It shifts how we interact with others at work and even how we engage with our loved ones at home.

When social and political tensions rise and we have already invested in these bridgebuilding tools, they come to our aid. It is not a perfect scene, but we find ourselves being more thoughtful about the purpose and utility of what we share not just with other dialoguers but in any environment, as well as in what we ask, where and when and how. We find our voice, too; we know its worth and can let it ring both clearly and compassionately at once. Here is where the bridge becomes a place of community service and leadership.

With division at an ever heightening climax, where burning bridges with others feels like the best thing to do to preserve and protect our own dearly held convictions, there is a long-term tragedy embedded in this scene that is converting into an ever nearer threat of reality. Insistence on distrust of others -whether nearby or seemingly far away from us- by nature escalates and moves to speaking without listening, shouting for a way of life in a way that insists that others are at best wrong and at worst a real and present threat to our own way of life. This process is both sadly reinforced, and the downward spiral of it is exacerbated, in our online engagement.

In some cases that said threat is true and real; our opinions and policies threaten to, or already do, in some cases impinge on some citizens' way of life, their values, their beliefs. It is a deeply affecting, deeply emotional experience to watch this happen before our eyes. The bridge's purpose is not to be an impediment to standing up for one's beliefs, for activism which involves us exercising our voices and expressing our convictions. The bridge is a companion and anchor to any such efforts.

History tells us, however, that louder and louder shouting -when the ingredients are centrally anxiety and fear and not care and love- leads to violence. We have already seen that. Escalation leads to war, to death; it doesn't lead to a better life for anyone. It doesn't accomplish what we hope it will. It feels smart to choose "might makes right." It feels pragmatic, realistic. Unfortunately it is none of those things.

The bridge can be, though. Leaning into seeking to understand before being understood, as the prayer of St. Francis of Assissi states it, is not at all naive work, as it seems to some. It is, if anything, the opposite. It is hard, urgent-yet-long-term work which faces directly what many of us are afraid to confront: the neighbor status of the person who we feel threated by, and the difficult road of finding a way to honor each other that is accomplished not by shouting or hoping others will change, but being willing to be changed alongside neighbors of difference in a long-term commitment (-this time frame including years beyond our own time, as an investment in future generations) to this bridge. Here is where we find solutions, here is where we find our better selves, a better life for all of us, a platform of compromise that upholds the greater good and nurtures a paradigm for precisely that. It is a more nuanced way of holding one another with the insistence that we can, after all, love our neighbors as ourselves.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

-Rev. Carrie Graham

founding pastor, The Church Lab