11

The Courage to Connect and Trust in Each Other

What I want is the impossible. I want as much diversity in things, in people, in places, in ideas as possible. But I want unity among things and people and places and ideas. I want that unity without anything losing its uniqueness.

—Emil Antonucci, illustrator and publisher

If you were to sit down in the campus dining hall at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, you would find yourself talking to students with a wide range of cultural, language, and theological backgrounds. When Lallene Rector became the new president in 2014, she wanted the school to live even further into its promise to be a place of welcome, inclusion, and diversity. She announced an institutional priority to focus for years to come on matters of race, antiviolence, white normativity and privilege, and competence in cultural diversity, so that these would become a lens through which they did all their work. One of her first matters of attention was one of focusing on creating welcome to LGBTQ persons.

Lallene’s vision goes beyond having a safe and diverse campus culture. She aims to equip leaders and graduates so that they can promote understanding, dialogue, and justice in their communities. Even more important, she hopes that in the near future, more denominations will ordain ministers regardless of their sexual orientation. Those hopes and her big vision had to start with new policies at the level where Lallene holds influence as president of the seminary.

“While we had some statements from 1997 about nondiscrimination in grading policy, they were old statements and not strong enough. We could do a lot better.”

Lallene also knew that new policy had to start at the personal level. So she decided to hold a dialogue process to address LGBTQ welcome and inclusivity. It would unfold in four twenty-five-person circle sessions, each with a cross-section of students, faculty, trustees, and staff. The touchstones created firm boundaries for how people would interact: Extend and presume welcome. Set aside judgment and try compassionate inquiry instead. Avoid fixing, saving, or advising others. Speak your truth and honor others’ truths. Leave room for silence . . .

The dialogue sessions began with open, honest questions to guide the participants in examining their own experiences: Turn to two people next to you and talk about a time in your life when you felt different. What did that feel like?

Out of one hundred people, only one man (a white man) answered that he could “never” remember feeling different.

Then people talked about issues that mattered to them personally. Topics ranged from mentoring United Methodist students pursuing ordination to gender-neutral bathrooms to reexamining curriculum, and more.

“The point was not to get people to agree about the morality or rightness of how LGBTQ persons live. At the very least, we have an obligation to be welcoming and inclusive of all persons. And we need to be on record with that. I also wanted the community to go through a process to speak to this concern in safe ways, ways to let people who had different opinions speak and be heard. I knew we couldn’t come to an institutional statement without a process.”

“With a topic as volatile and provocative as this, with such strong feelings, it had the potential to blow up. I was determined we should do something respectfully, but also that we should absolutely do something.”

As a result of the dialogue sessions, a set of formal recommendations were presented to—and affirmed by—the board of trustees. That formal approval laid the groundwork for the next actions the school would take. Convening those dialogue sessions was not the only thing Lallene needed to do, but they were a beginning. It was important to start by recalling a personal experience around difference to create a sense of empathy and understanding, and also to create buy-in for change initiatives.

An institution that truly embraces Diversity as a Value commits to not only moving the furniture, but also remodeling the entire structure if necessary.

—Sherry K. Watt, professor and facilitator

Designing Spaces to Connect Community

One of the first things Sigrid Wright did when she became CEO of the Community Environmental Council was to change the furniture and knock down walls. “It’s ironic that we work hard for the environment from inside an office eight to twelve hours a day. What’s worse, our space was designed like a rabbit warren with dark corridors, poor air flow, and a sense of separation.”

One room they call the West Wing got a lot of natural sunlight, but a solid wall separated it from the entire east side, and it had become a place to stash people and things out of sight. So Sigrid knocked down one wall and put a hole in another, installed big French doors so that light can extend to the rest of the office, added a couple of “living walls” of plants, and created a high-visibility bike parking section to emphasize the organization’s commitment to alternative transportation. “The remodel improved everyone’s state of mind,” Sigrid said. “The West Wing is now an integrated, visible, flexible work space with bright colored movable furniture. This has been game changing for our associates, interns, and partners, who now want to be in the office more. They’re more visible when they’re here, and are collaborating more because they have a place in which to creatively gather.”

The remodel also helped Sigrid shift the way she holds staff meetings, moving out of the conference room with its long rectangular table. “In the conference room, whoever is leading the meeting is forced to sit at the head of the table because it’s the only spot where you can make eye contact with everyone. That’s fine for many things, but I wanted to bring a different tone to staff meetings.” The new flexible West Wing has become the meeting room where they sit in a more casual circle; it’s not unusual for one staffer’s new baby to be on a blanket on the floor in the center.

The next change was more strategic in terms of inviting and welcoming a sense of shared leadership in the office. Sigrid started a process where staff rotate leading the bimonthly meetings. “Staff each have different needs and different definitions of leadership. The ones who want more emotional connection might choose to open with an icebreaker to ask everyone how they are feeling. Others choose to open with a warm-up exercise on big-picture visioning. In one meeting, a staff member led us through an exercise to articulate our personal values.

“Those changes have been really helpful, because (a) it creates space for others to step into their own leadership however they define that, and (b) it’s one place staff can start to be more self-aware about what they need to be healthy, happy, and productive in their jobs and make it happen for themselves, rather than reflect it back to me about what’s missing from the staff meeting. I say, ‘Bring it in yourself!’”

Another significant change Sigrid made was to clear one afternoon each week for anyone who wants to book time with her. It has helped her personally and is good for her team. “The daily disruption factor is a challenge of managers across the universe. I was finding that I was responding to problems or issues as if they were tennis balls: whack, whack. This wasn’t giving anyone a chance to really learn or grow. My door is still open all week, but if the discussion can wait till Tuesday afternoon, then it gives me a chance to put away other work and move into a place of deeper listening.” All this invokes the second touchstone: Be present as fully as possible. Sigrid also said, “I try to ask open, honest questions to help them figure out what to do, rather than me simply giving them quick solutions.”

Peter Block writes that transformation occurs when leaders focus on the structure of how people gather. Leadership is “convening,” he says, and happens when leaders can shift the context within which people gather, when they can name the debate through powerful questions, and when they listen rather than advocate, defend, or provide answers. The physical design of the spaces in which we work makes a big difference. “The design process itself needs to be an example of the future we are intending to create,” Block says.¹

Sigrid did just that when she designed her meeting room with interaction in mind. Most meeting rooms are designed for control, negotiation, and persuasion. But we can choose to rearrange the furniture to facilitate how we interact in those spaces. Living into those values day after day is the real test of integrity. You can see a glimpse of that in Sigrid’s intention and presence when she meets with her staff in groups and individually.

Physical space must be met with open minds and open hearts, and a willingness to be changed. How often have you been welcomed into a new job but not felt really welcome to bring something new? The phrase “That’s not how things are done here” doesn’t make room for learning and growth. True welcome also means welcoming different routines and traditions, as well as welcoming how people express themselves through their work. It takes courage and good questions—at the very least—to explore what new things might be possible to cocreate going forward.

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength. We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of that tapestry are equal in value no matter their color.

—Maya Angelou

Welcoming All Sorts of Diversity

At work and at home, what are the ways you have experienced hospitality and welcome—or the absence of welcome? When have you been in a space where people felt seen, heard, valued, and safe?

Kate Sheppard described what welcome feels like, especially for an introvert like herself who often feels intimidated in a crowd of people she doesn’t know. At her first retreat sitting in a large circle of strangers, she reached down into her bag to get out a pen. At that moment, the lead facilitator, Marcy Jackson, tried to squeeze by her chair, and Kate blurted out, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry,” apologizing for blocking Marcy’s passage. A typical interaction in that moment would have been for Marcy to reply, “No problem.” Instead Marcy saw it as an opportunity to recognize Kate; she put her hand on Kate’s shoulder, saying, “Oh Kate, I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for coming.”

How Marcy responded affected Kate deeply. “To me that embodied the spirit of welcoming others into a safe space and put me at ease for the rest of the retreat.”

Welcome and inclusion can be as simple as making sure there are enough chairs at the table for all meeting participants. Welcome is making eye contact and saying hello to your coworkers or anyone who walks into your space. Or ensuring that people can talk while sitting side by side rather than separated by a large, power-laden desk during a difficult conversation. If you work in a global organization, inclusion can mean being aware of the time zones, not always scheduling meetings in the wee hours for those farthest away. Food allergies, differences in religious holidays, or differences in lifestyle (for example, being parents or being single)—all are opportunities to examine equity and inclusion. When you start to think about all the ways people are different and about which policies tend to favor one over another, you can become overwhelmed—or you can see a rich source of topics for curiosity-filled conversation.

Describing this variety of efforts to offer welcome and inclusion is not meant to dismiss or deny the more painful and complex realities of today’s world—realities such as structural racism and oppression of marginalized people that are deeply rooted in society.

Professor and Courage & Renewal facilitator Sherry K. Watt told me, “We must acknowledge the ugly and the darkness as much as the light and not move too quickly past it. If more people could find a way to focus on the system and not on the people they think they’re fighting, I think we could find ways to dismantle the system that is binding us all.”

In her book Designing Transformative Multicultural Initiatives, Watt introduces the metaphor of “moving the furniture” as a way to name the structural barriers that must be dismantled. “Making this shift requires a focus on developing the skills to engage in difficult dialogue in productive and principled ways,” she writes. Such difficult dialogue must occur within authentic relationships that honor one another’s individual identities, values, and beliefs.²

“We have to recognize how heavy the furniture is [of structural racism in the United States, for example]. It has nails that go deep into the foundation,” Watt told me. “You need a lot of people to rock and rock to move it just a little bit. We recognize there is furniture and it needs moving—and we need to sit with how heavy the furniture is before we talk about strategies for moving it.”

She writes, “The aim is to actively and critically interrogate the historical and contemporary roots of traditions and practices (head), to explore self in relation to context of the point of conflict in authentic and self-awakening ways (heart), and then balance reflection of the former with taking collectively thoughtful and socially just action (hands) to change the environment.”³

Like the poets, scientists tell us that biodiversity is the planet’s saving grace, and that it is in the places where there is the most diversity—they call it the “growing edge”—that living things flourish. Yet flourishing has to do with sustaining the struggle, staying in the discomfort, long enough for growth to occur. There isn’t a quick fix for overcoming generations of cultural conditioning and systemic oppression. It is a process without certain outcomes. And because it’s a process that must engage people—their heads, hands, and hearts—it takes courage and trust.

Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.

—Frederick Buechner

Welcoming the Soul Without an Agenda

Touchstones are one example of guidelines for creating trustworthy and disciplined space in which to hold meaningful conversations. Over the years, our touchstones have been used with skilled facilitation to hold conversations around race, class, sexual orientation, and other potentially divisive matters. But there is a paradox here, because “to invite the soul to show up in order to solve a social problem is to scare it away as surely as when we set out to fix another person.” The soul can be approached for no other reason than to honor it without trying to direct or demand certain outcomes.⁴

In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer describes being approached by the leaders of a community whose schools were being torn by racial and ethnic tensions. They wanted his help in creating Circles of Trust to alleviate this crisis. As much as he cared about their plight, Parker had to tell them he could not help—at least, not under those circumstances—because their request reflected a misconception of what makes a circle trustworthy to the soul.

You cannot gather people and say, in effect, “In this circle, we invite your soul to speak so we can resolve our racial tensions.” The moment you do so, an impossible distortion sets in: I am in the circle because I have a “white soul,” he is here because he has an “African American soul,” and she is here because she has a “Hispanic soul.” But the soul has no race or ethnicity: it is the core of our shared humanity as well as our individual uniqueness. The moment we try to trap it in sociological categories, hoping to get leverage on some problem, it will run away as fast as it can because we have distorted its nature.⁵

This raises the question of whether it’s possible to create truly safe space when talking about emotionally charged issues. It’s not meant to dismiss that social categories do exist (race, class, ethnicity, and so on), which makes holding the many tensions at any one time exceedingly complex. Meaningful conversations about things that matter require trust.

Inclusion asks, “Has everyone’s ideas been heard?” Justice responds, “Whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the majority?”

—Dafina-Lazarus Stewart, PhD

Safe Space or Brave Space?

It takes courage to let oneself be exposed to differences that are threatening for whatever reason. It takes courage to sit in a room with people you don’t know, when you can’t anticipate how others will react to your words. But dialogue ground rules such as the touchstones define the agreed parameters in which people can take the risk to speak about how they think and feel. In such a circle, people respond to the invitation to be empathetic to others: “Oh, is that what you’re experiencing? I had no idea.”

Lallene acknowledges that there is no such thing as entirely safe space: “We can’t be protected from our anxiety. But we can create a place of respect where nobody is coerced to speak. Having a well-facilitated experience around speaking up can encourage people to continue to try to do that or engage further conversations elsewhere in their lives.”

The term safe space has itself become a hot-button phrase in recent years, especially on college campuses and social justice settings where it is sometimes invoked as a way to avoid conflict rather than to engage differences with respect. Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens investigated this phenomenon and discovered that their students were conflating safety with comfort.⁶ When dialogue moved from polite to provocative, students were invoking “safe space” for protection—but not so much as protection of free speech as protection against anxiety. Feeling defensive, students slipped into a default mode where they discounted, deflected, or retreated from a challenge. The authors wonder whether this kind of response occurred because students were not adequately and honestly prepared to be challenged in this way. “Were we in fact hindering our own efforts by relying on the traditional language of safe space?” they ask. Rather than claiming to remove risk from the equation, Arao and Clemens opt for different language, emphasizing the importance of bravery to help students understand and rise to meet the challenges of genuine dialogue.⁷

It takes courage to step into unconventional conversations that ask us to examine our hearts, our actions, our assumptions, and the implicit biases that occupy our blind spots. Such conversations can bring up a variety of negative emotions, ranging from fear and sorrow to guilt and anger. They can trigger memories of feeling violated, or realizations of being the one perpetrating violence. They become uncomfortable very quickly, and it’s hard to stay in discomfort and to stay open to the conversation.

But when we actually articulate something—either writing it on paper in a journal or, more powerfully, sharing with another person, talking to another person—that’s when our experience becomes more real for us. That’s why it’s important to create conditions that are more hospitable than the environments we usually find ourselves in.

The courage to connect depends on welcoming and valuing “otherness.” Authentic leadership is showing people that you value their unique contributions and welcome diversity—in visible and invisible forms we may not always be able to measure by externals. And if you expect people to show up, to be self-aware and authentic, you as the leader have to model the behavior you are demanding.

In the company of strangers, we can learn that we are all in this together despite our many differences; that some of our differences are enriching and those that are vexing are negotiable; that it is possible to do business amicably with one another even in the face of conflicting interests.

—Parker J. Palmer

Setting the Table for Genuine Welcome

Our touchstones have made their way into a variety of other applications beyond our programs, sometimes customized to suit the needs of specific audiences and aims. The Welcome Table is one such process originally developed by Susan Glisson and her team at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi⁸ and is a central part of her work with Sustainable Equity, the consulting firm she developed with her life partner, Charles Tucker. They work with major corporations, police departments, and public institutions to foster dialogues in racial reconciliation. Charles says their goal is to “work ourselves out of a job.”

When communities and organizations invite Susan and her colleagues to bring the Welcome Table process, the invitation comes with a readiness to talk about racial issues but also pessimism. Sometimes it’s possible to jump into the topic head first, often with the facilitator asking as the first question, When did you first notice race as an elephant in the room? At other times, it’s better to encourage people to talk about their own lives, and one way to do that is with creative exercises that get people out of their heads and into their hearts.

To help people develop more ability to check in with their own feelings, the Welcome Table facilitators use an exercise called Where I’m From, inspired by the poet George Ella Lyons.⁹ (Many other dialogue-based programs employ this beautiful poetry exercise, too.) Participants are invited to answer the question “Where are you from?” by recalling specific memories of their origins: items found around the home, yard, or the neighborhood where they grew up (for example, bobby pins, Grandma’s front stoop, broken rakes, the corner store); names of people from the past, or family sayings; or other things, such as the names of foods or dishes or music.

Susan’s own poem includes this stanza:

I’m from Mama’s dressing and

sweet potato casserole, from

her never taking a sick day and never getting to go to college

so making sure I did.

Charles starts his poem this way:

I am from flat brown earth

From fields that stretched into the horizon with no end in sight.

I am from crepe myrtle and black walnut trees, pecan groves, and old

King Cotton—no longer king anymore.

“Every time we tell people ‘You’re going to write a poem,’ they freak out,” Susan told me. “They’re scared, like, oh my God I’m not a poet, what are you talking about, please don’t, and please don’t make me read it out loud.

“The prompts help people tap into long-lost thought about their families and how they grew up. They start to jostle with each other about who’s going to read their poem first. I’ve never heard a poem that wasn’t beautiful.”

People have told Susan that they’ve framed their poem and given it to their families, or that they’ve kept writing the poem in a different way every day. This clearly is more than a poetry exercise. Fundamentally, the reflecting and the writing and reading of the poem—and working through it together with others—help people see that it’s okay to be who they are and okay to be intimidated or uncomfortable but to go ahead anyway. After that, facilitators can introduce topics that might make participants uncomfortable, and “they’ve gotten a little bit of practice in about how to keep staying at the table even when [they’re] uncomfortable.”

A surprising aspect of creating trust among people, Susan explained, is to introduce the idea of self-care during the Welcome Table process. It’s important for people to be able to trust that others are psychologically and emotionally able to be present. Stress increases our tendency to default to our implicit biases. When stress turns toxic, it’s hard to predict how people will react, and that suspends trust.

Susan observed, “On some level it feels like we’re sharing things that are commonsensical. But we’re so distracted in a media-driven, twenty-four-hour news cycle culture, we do not stop and think. We move on to the next urgent thing. I think we’re all overwhelmed and exhausted. We have got to take the time to pause and reflect and connect and breathe together. Listen to our inner teacher.”

People usually resist Susan’s call for self-care, saying that it sounds like a luxury and there’s no time for luxuries. But when they do come into the process, those same people have come out and said, “This is not a luxury; this is a necessity.” Susan named a specific urgency as an example: “Police officers go from one horrific crime scene to a traffic stop with no decompression in between. They’re all walking around traumatized. We’re expecting them to then have the self-discipline not to react out of old patterns. It’s ridiculous.”

It’s also important to note that speaking about your experience and living in alignment with who you are are forms of self-care. That is care of true self.

Susan has facilitated remarkable changes over the years in places hurting from deep divides. I asked her, “What’s one thing people could do to start building a bridge across lines of difference? What would be the first step?”

She replied, “I really wish that people would realize they can just start right where they are. They can start in their family. They can start with their friends. It doesn’t require you to go to Washington, DC, or do anything complicated. Just start reaching out to people and inviting the conversation. Do it in a way that’s respectful and not blaming and shaming. That might take some practice, but I think people will respond to that.”

Where do you stand on complex issues like race? What would it take for you to initiate a conversation about differences—or some form of “elephant in the room” in your own workplace?