Well, looks like our division in fact COULD get more divided in short order after all.
As a dialogue facilitator and trainer of 17 years, here is why I believe in dialogue now more than ever:
By dialogue, I mean investing intentionally in friendships who have substantive differences from ourselves, engaging ongoing conversations about how we understand the world differently, and learning and growing significantly from this experience.
There are a few things we refuse to ignore when we choose to participate in dialogue:
We refuse to ignore our interdependence.
Whether we like it or not, or find it easy or not, the reality is that we are interdependent on many levels as neighbors and as a society. Dialogue is a way to acknowledge this reality alongside our need to be able to be in constructive relationships so that we can function and flourish on basic levels in any given community. Giving up on interdependence is a version of forsaking an inconvenient truth. Dialogue keeps us seated in reality, which keeps a pathway open for solutions.
We refuse to ignore the inconvenient reality that we are all human.
Dialogue does the opposite of what polarizing algorithms usher us into: it leans into always understanding better the ins and outs of what makes people who they are. We complexify. We do not oversimplify, because we know that leads to false sense of who we all are, which makes it easy to dehumanize, bully, even hate and feel self-righteous in the process.
We refuse to give our power away.
There are always people with more power or control over systems and institutions than what we have. There is much beyond our sphere of influence. But there is something that we always have power for: how we treat ourselves and others. That is to say, rather, we always have power for this unless we give it away. People with lots of power often understand that polarizing messages that pit one another against each other is a classic move to not only gain power, but to gain power that nobody was ever forced to give them. If we lose power over how we treat ourselves and others, it is because we ceded that power. In dialogue, we exercise the muscles again and again that claim the parts of our lives over which we have agency. In so doing, we are less likely to find ourselves surrendering power which belongs to us.
Right now I’m having lots of conversations with folks who feel lost about what to do or how/if/whether to engage various goings-on in our communities and systems. Dialogue is something localized and uplifting, even as it is challenging and grows the participants involved. As such, dialogue is a worthwhile investment of time and energy to return to again and again, even as news cycles shift and possible other (re)actions fluctuate.
Even more so, when it comes to those feeling lost or paralyzed, even if you don’t know what to do, it can be helpful to have a clear understanding of who you are. Dialogue helps clarify our highest values, as we both hear from others and are asked to express reflections on precisely this. When we clarify our highest values, we remember who we are. We remember which hills are worth dying on for us outside of the dialogue room. Affirming and reaffirming how we understand ourselves in terms of faith convictions and values is a sturdy hub and headquarters for discerning how to decide when, what and how to respond to community needs in destabilizing seasons.
Finally, when we dialogue, we are not reactive. We are inventive. We are clever, resourceful and resilient, together. In dialogue we are not living in the shadow of someone else’s vision of the future. We are mapping a way forward together. We are acting like the future we want. We are modeling it and showing to ourselves and others that it is possible, and in showing that it is possible, we gain hope and even practical steps for moving in the directions needed to actually make our vision of the future. This vision for our future becomes a reality not only in the dialogue room, but more and more it becomes a part of our communities.
Whether you feel up to trying a Church Lab dialogue, or another dialogue, in your neighborhood or not, I encourage you to take this posture into your conversations with people in your family and friend group where variations exist in worldview.
Dialogue is often criticized as ineffective and a waste of time, as “talk is cheap.” But it turns out the currency of collective well-being must involve civil exchanges which promote nuanced listening, understanding and decision-making. It turns out the shortcuts we want to take to transformation don’t work, and the polarization we are so tempted to give into lead to escalation and destruction. It turns out the gravitational pull to conclude that massive swaths of our own neighbors are stupid, hateful, or both, is gratifying in our own grief but does not show us a way forward. Dialogue, as it turns out, is in itself a way forward. What we gain from the crucial conversations in that room, over time, are taken into our crucial conversations in our day-to-day about how we live.
Please don’t ignore our interdependence, our complexities. Please don’t give your power away. Lean into a vision of the future that you can get behind. Map a way forward among people of various perspectives; create the future you want, and begin practicing that future now. For what it’s worth, I am here to cheer you on every step of the way!
*These thoughts were greatly helped in developing through a conversation with my friend and colleague who has solid experience in international peacebuilding work. So thankful to and for her!