Points of Connection
Picture of the author by Vanessa Julye.
When we forty-three Friends from many different meetings affiliated with Friends General Conference came together Martin Luther King weekend in Pittsburgh, we brought many different hopes and fears, understandings and needs. We each brought our history, our life with racism, and these elements provided the backdrop against which the days unfolded, the lens through which we filtered the experience. We came with the shared expectation that something potentially important would occur during our not quite 96 hours together. Some of us may have anticipated that an important event would be personally transforming, while some came with a thrust for the “how to” information that would provide a springboard to further anti-racism work in the world. Some others hungered for contact and connection with others who are doing this work. For most the anticipation was multi-facetted, and so was the outcome.
FGC’s Committee for Ministry on Racism conceived this long-weekend training session in response to our conviction that there was much to be done to fulfill our intention to eradicate racism in FGC’s affiliated monthly and yearly meetings. We believed that bringing together representatives from our meetings for a shared experience confronting racism would energize a group of catalysts for the process of change in attitudes about racism throughout the FGC. We recognized that a skilled facilitator like Niyonu Spann could help us all to do the work that was needed to move further along the road toward this goal.
If we are to address the ills of racism in our culture, I believe we must rediscover our ability to eschew stereotypes and to look at each other as individuals. The “shorthand” of judging based on appearance and the assumptions which have grown from this habit may seem to exonerate us from the need to look deeply at each other and listen with an open heart to each other’s truths. I do not believe we ever can be released from the need to look and listen with the desire and willingness to seek true human connection without preconceptions. This is a central element of my faith, a necessary outgrowth of my belief that there is that of God in everyone. There were many moments in the weekend, much that preceded it, and many experiences and reflections which have followed which strengthen my view that this is a path we need to walk. I would like to focus here on one small piece of the experience which provides a vital example of the work to be done.
Before we arrived in Pittsburgh, we had been asked to spend some time doing two important activities. First, we were asked to spend some time writing about our understanding of our essence. Second, we were asked to spend some time in developing awareness of how difference shows up in our community, to be especially aware of race and to attempt through media or more direct contact to interact with people we do not identity as “of our people.” These activities served both to ground me in a deeper sense of myself and also to make me think about whom I identify as “the other.” These understandings provided a backdrop for one of our first group exercises which gave us the opportunity for seeking to see and to connect with another person. Wrapped in self-knowledge, we were asked to form two concentric circles, facing each other. After a few moments looking deeply at each other, each person in the outside circle told the person facing them in the inner circle what they “knew” about them just from looking at them. Although some of us were well acquainted from other contacts, many of us were meeting for the first time. It was a powerful experience to hear many people “seeing” the same things in me and to know that those comments resonated with truths I knew in myself. It was equally powerful to see selfrecognition register in the faces of others as I spoke the things I “knew” from looking at them. And I heard those moments of connection echoing around the circle throughout the exercise.
Why is this important, this few moments of a contrived interaction—a party game? This exercise was a reminder of what we often fail to do in our usual contacts with others. Many of us tend to look at the surface and to write an entire script for the other person’s life. All too frequently we see and respond to “the [any stereotype here]” as the person.” We categorize people as being “like me” or “not like me” on the scantiest data. We assume that we know who people are, what they have experienced, what we can expect of them. And, so very frequently, we discount “the other” and identify them as alien to us and to our experience before we have taken even a moment to “know” them.
When we do take just a moment to risk the connection with “the other” we can transcend the surface and often defy the stereotype. What this exercise emphasized for me was how much we can learn about important essential characteristics of other people when we are open to look and listen to them as unique, precious individuals and when they are able to allow us to do that. Most of those present were able to do this within the protected and circumscribed setting of the training session. What would it be like to do this all the time, or even some of the time—just in our meetings or when we encounter other Friends or potential F/friends?
One of the many messages I brought away from the training session is the reminder that our task is to provide the necessary “safe spaces” in which we can connect with each other in deeper, more open and direct ways. This is the first step in allowing us to learn to make these connections with each other. Although we cannot undo the injuries and injustices of the past, we must acknowledge, learn and move on informed but not limited by these past iniquities. We can begin to be authentically available to each other to discover and celebrate our precious human essences, to understand and accept the world each of us experiences as valid for each of us, and to find those points of connection which go deeper than stereotypes and labels. This is one hope for the future which I believe lays Beyond Diversity 101.
FGConnections Spring 2003 Home
