“Exclusion and Embrace”

Generating real connections across lines of difference is a lifelong journey.

Reaching across what is sometimes termed “the racial divide” involves two distinct movements. The first must be a step backward, to take a time-out to realize that I have actively promoted separation and prejudice, both unawares and in full awareness, all my life. The second is a step forward, into authentic embrace, person to person, that is meaningful to both.

I am talking here about all whom I have experienced as other—all those persons I have found to be uncomfortably different from my self at different times of my life. Persons with black or brown skin. Person’s whose religious dogmas and practices feel alien to me. Persons whose physical or mental abilities make me uncomfortable. Persons whose cultural values seem bizarre to me. Persons whose LGBTQ+ identities differ from my own. Persons who see violence as a fitting means of gaining control over others. Persons who use institutional wealth and power to subjugate those trapped in poverty.

What I now know is that any cultural divide that makes me uneasy is first and foremost about me. It is about my fear of otherness. It is about how I might have to change in fundamental ways to be in affirmative relationship across any separative divide. I might have to overcome familiar habits. That calls for a lot of personal work. And that’s intensely uncomfortable.

I see no simple and final answer in this work. I see a journey that moves forward in courage and trust, never quite closing the gap. I see many half-way jumps. Each jump a bit closer, but still with more work to do. Never enough.

Many years ago, when I was being evaluated for my fitness as a Unitarian minister, I was asked, “Is race biological.” I was a bit flummoxed by the question. I ended up saying that what we call race is primarily based on cross-cultural perceptions, even bias, and that this also includes what we see of biological differences, like skin color. I wasn’t completely satisfied with my answer. After the interview my questioner contacted me by email. “I liked your answer,” he wrote. “But it was a trick question. Race is defined only by perception. It isn’t real except as it is projected upon another person, whose characteristics we have learned about in our own personal history of prejudice. What is real is racism, when projected qualities lead us to identify and act upon a perceived threat—an enemy. An institution or nation that structures itself on these perceptions of threat is a racist institution or nation.”

The title of my reflection today refers to a book by Miroslav Volf, a teacher at Yale Divinity School, with the title, “Exclusion and Embrace.” I read the book in my own course of study in seminary, and what I have been able to internalize from Volf’s teaching has been one of those half-way jumps forward. More on that in a moment.

The instilling of prejudice began very early for me. My family was a relatively normal, white, middle-class family living in the city. Until I was five I was mostly at home, but I heard about the wide world from my older siblings who went to the school near us. It was an integrated Seattle public school in 1950, before integrated schools were a thing. Five-year-old boys are a naïve lot, and I was particularly inexperienced in the ways of the wider world. When my siblings were telling me what I needed to know to succeed in my first day of Kindergarten, they told me to “watch out” for the colored kids. The tone was a bit threatening, and so I was anxious on that first day of real school. All day long I looked warily for colored kids, and when we all got home that afternoon I told them that I couldn’t find any. With their “help” I began to understand who they were talking about, beginning my formal training in prejudice.

I don’t blame my siblings. The doctrines of prejudice were inculcated in them before me. And whom shall we blame? Parents? Grandparents? For how many generations? How many centuries? Where did it all begin? All I can think is that prejudice against the lesser other was built right into the fabric, reinforced generation after generation. This understanding doesn’t remove my fault. Actually, I feel it intensifies the fault if I don’t do the self-work to counter the age-old, deeply ingrained catachisms of culture.

We moved from that integrated neighborhood two years later, fleeing the multi-cultural pressures of city life and seeking security in the suburbs. No longer confronted with multi-cultural difference, the problem went away. Or did it? Of course I aligned my deepening prejudice with what I heard and read. But with the help of certain teachers in high school I began to realize the harms of my silent bigotry: to myself and to other. That was the early 1960’s. So began my inner journey toward reconciliation.

College and medical school did not increase my cultural competence very much. I became more associated with a progressive agenda, protested the war, and volunteered in so-called “free clinics” in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Perhaps there was some increasing comfort with a diverse team of colleagues. When I hung up the proverbial shingle, it was in a multi-ethnic, multi-soeio-economic neighborhood in South Seattle. Our provider team was ethnically diverse, matching the community’s own diversity. My professional manner was respectful and accommodating to all, and folks from the neighborhood, black and brown, Asian, South-European, were friendly with me. Real experience with people whose lives differed from my own in so many ways led to greater comfort working with all kinds. But an important error of understanding crept in over the years.

My operating assumption with patients, fellow providers and community leaders was this: basically we are all the same. There are no substantive differences among us. Our common purpose brings us together as one. I learned to suppress my awareness of very real dissimilarities in culture and values—as if they didn’t exist, or didn’t matter.

After twenty-five years of medical practice, I felt a call to ministry, and I attended a Jesuit seminary in Seattle for four years. The course of study was more about personal transformation, evolving as a pastor, than it was learning the technical tools of practicing ministry. And there was nowhere to hide. Suppressing prejudice doesn’t make it go away. In fact, maybe nothing expunges that early-life orientation to pre-judgement. As my awareness rose, in the tough love of teachers and mentors, I began to realize how established in privilege I was and how much harm it caused. My entire professional life had been about the power of privilege, not achievement born of merit. How often had I claimed for myself an opportunity that might have rightly been taken by another? How often had I stepped aside, opening the path of opportunity to the other person?

I was proud of all that I’d achieved. And yet, at the same time, I was ashamed.

Enter, Miraslav Volf. He challenged the notion of “sameness” that seemed to work for me in the past, if incompletely. Reaching across a cultural divide is not about adopting the intention that we are all alike. Quite the opposite. If I hope to find real connection with others across the line of our differences, the first step is to become acutely aware of the differences. An intention of sameness obfuscates all possibility of a real connection, grounded as it must on the distinctive background, vision, culture and goals of both parties. Tell me how it is where you come from. What was it like for you growing up? What do you hope for, for yourself and your cultural community. How do you love? What are you afraid of? How are you less than safe? Where do you find your joy?

This search cannot be a manipulation, to move collaboration forward in a false way. If our eventual connection and expression of common purpose is to be authentic, the understanding and acceptance of our differences must itself be real. And that takes time. Do I trust you enough to declare my fear? Or my joy? Do you trust me enough to declare your multi-generational anger toward me and where I come from?

This work across the so-called “racial divide” is first and foremost personal work, between me and me. Then, in small steps, within the context of growing trust, we learn the little things that we need to know if we would be understood by each other.

The final step in bridging the gap is something like friendship. Knowing what I do about you, and esteeming the very qualities that once caused me fear, your beauty and your intrinsic value emerge as the fundamental reason for our dialog. Something like love, for its own sake, becomes the vehicle for our work toward common purpose. For me this work is between one person to another, before the possibility of any connection with an entire community can be genuine.

And yet there is one more task, context perhaps for it all. In what way is it meaningful to seek forgiveness, or finally to forgive myself. Because, when I allow myself to be aware of the magnitude of the harm over so many decades, harm in which I participate daily in my privileged way, I feel great sorrow. Another great teacher has helped me understand my work here—Marshall Rosenberg. I met him a retreat called “Compassionate Communication” many years ago. If we offer words that ask for forgiveness, what we will get back is just more words. For a deep harm, those words, even “No worries, it’s OK,” translate to, “I’m not ready to forgive, and you are not ready to be forgiven.” So how about declaring that I’m sorry. We do this every day in our relationships. The age old, “I’m sorry!” usually contains more anger or lingering defensiveness than true sorrow. So Rosenburg suggests this: feel your sorrow actively, without any intention regarding the other person. He calls this sorrowing. Almost like a meditation, feeling the emotion and feeling where in the body the emotion resides. In time something like true humility arises, which may some day spontaneously invite forgiveness, and which sets the stage for self-forgiveness.

I am sorrowing the wrongful death of George Floyd, the more because I know I am part of the problem. I feel it in my heart and my throat. I know that it’s my work to sorrow in this way.

In most of the journeys I’ve taken in this life, the goal is to get there. But there is not the answer. In this work of owning the reality of unearned privilege, overcoming overt and covert prejudice, and replacing the fear of otherness with appreciation for the unique beauty of otherness, there can be no there there. It is here and now, daily striving to get beyond categorical thinking. It is direct, honest inner work. It is witnessing the harms I have caused to others and to myself by my privileged position as a member of the dominant culture.

We who have wounded others are in turn wounded by our own actions. The law of Karma says that the harm I cause will finally harm me. This is not a self-pity party, nor should we glorify whatever wounds we bear from our past actions. It is a chance to feel the feeling of those wounds, in our emotions, in our bodies, as a step toward healing those wounds. As a step toward authentic, beloved community.

I invite you to a deeper look at Volf’s inspiring work, I recommend the book, Exclusion and Embrace, available at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501861077/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_iTr2EbJZ8J60N . For an audio interview with the author https://youtu.be/M8nGeuomFpM . For a brief interview with Marshall Rosenberg https://youtu.be/DgaeHeIL39Y