| Pieces of the Truth, Pieces of the Confusion |
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I learned about the game of “Secret” or “Gossip” as an adolescent at church. You know it, too. You have a crowd gathered together and one person at the beginning of a line of people whispers a “secret” into the ear of the first person in the line. Nothing too elaborate, mind you, just a simple sentence like “I saw you stumble on the Post Office steps yesterday.” Sometimes, the first few people even get it right, mostly, as the “secret” works its way from person to person. But sooner or later, generally sooner, the message begins to get distorted and drifts off track, badly; error compounds error as the now mangled and mangling “secret” snakes toward the last person in the line. Fifteen or twenty people later, the last person announces triumphantly what he or she just heard whispered to them: it might be something like, “I snaggled your tooth at some doctor’s house and we yelled all the way.” Occasionally, the first and last syllable would survive in tact, and everything else became jumbled, though still marginally intelligible, because we humans work hard to forge meaning from what we hear, even when we don’t have much to work with. A variation on this little exercise in the fragility of human communication is to create a “secret” loop, where a second line forms perhaps midway through the first line, creating a figure which resembles the capital letter “P.” A person at the “bottom” of the loop overhears the whispered secret, and can even have the advantage of reading the person’s lips, creating in effect a second “secret” line which also eventually reaches the person at the very top of the “P,” the person who hears the first garbled message. Guess what? The second circuit delivers an equally garbled message from the original, though also marginally intelligible, and different from the message overheard in the middle of the first line. Now, this is a game that church youth groups have played for decades, and it is just that, a game. Young people have fun with this game and with each other, which means that the messages travel down the “gossip” line optimally; that is, when people are untroubled and happy, dealing with a message that is emotionally neutral. Suppose, though, we have a situation where an emotionally charged message is sent down such a line of people who are already upset over an issue related to the message, people who have already formed biases and strong opinions not only about the potential content of the message but about the people who are sending it down the line. “Loops” form in such situations, sub-groups of people who are predisposed to believe either the best or the worst about other people in the line, introducing questionable motives and intent to people who are “sharing” the message. Under such conditions, we can see that the natural garbling of messages will become much worse, and the exhausting quest for meaning, in which we all engage, can tend to produce distortions which are not neutral mistakes at all, but meanings which tend to reinforce either the best or the worst that we are already predisposed to believe about participants who are sharing the message. Our Transition Team members have heard from me, repeatedly, what I consider to be one of our foundational principles from which we must proceed: “Everyone has a piece of the truth.” It is an encouraging and a sobering foundational principle: encouraging in that everyone who is party to a problematic situation in which they participated has a right to be heard, for they do have something essential and un-garbled to say, and yet sobering with the implied recognition that no one individual within the problematic situation has the whole truth about it, though they often think they do, a confusion which is itself a major part of the overall problem. (It is also simply true that some people have more knowledge than confusion and some people have more confusion than knowledge about any given subject.) So it is now my duty, as your Intentional Interim Minister and your Transition Team leader, to express an important companion principle of our foundational principle: “Everyone has a piece of the confusion.” These two foundational principles actually go together, for usually, everyone has what they know (or think they know) and what they are confused about in something of a tangle, often seeking clarification only from like-minded persons who will tend to reinforce their own existing biases, creating apparent clarity and meaning which is then equated with “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” as the courtroom oath states it. You will recall that when we engaged in the balloting process which would produce the names from which the Transition Team would be selected, our publicly stated goal was one of “balance,” meaning here that all significant voices and constituencies, whether reckoned as majority or minority, within the congregation would be represented on the TT. And indeed, judging from our congregational reaction to the list of twenty persons that we produced, very broad and satisfactory agreement was reached that we had accomplished our purposes. While two of those persons have since stepped down for imminently practical reasons, two persons on the original list of ballots have replaced them, people who are competent to represent well both the voices and attitudes of the former TT members, as well as their own perspectives, actually enhancing and refining our overall “balance.” Thus, our stated goal of hearing from every important voice on matters the TT itself selects for examination, not me but the Team, has the chance of being realized. It is clearly not a “game” where only like-minded people simply reinforce each other’s limited notions of the “truth,” nor is it a simply gossip-line where people down the line do not have access to the information that the first people have. To increase the odds for success in our goal of mutually satisfying truth-telling and confusion-dispelling, we as your TT engage in devotional exercises and in intensive Bible study, taking our time to hear from each other about how the Spirit is moving through us to lift up scriptural truths that may have bearing on our subject at hand, and indeed how the Spirit may be attempting to speak through each of us, and to each of us. We have even prayed for one another, openly and publicly, so that eventually, every Team member will have prayed for every other Team member publicly, which is itself a humbling and powerful experience. It is only after we have engaged in spiritually directed dialogue and sharing that we then tackle subjects that have problematic or conflicted aspects to them, as the first developmental study, called “history,” encourages us to do, especially with issues that involve former pastors. We practiceboth speaking and listening with discernment, slowly groping our way through inconsistencies and confusions which inevitably surround any public controversy, asking refining questions, doing homework, trying to hear the best part of what each person has to say. Eventually, a pattern of consensus will emerge, guided by the Spirit, which will point toward a way out of the confusion toward a result or action which is broadly satisfying to everyone at the meeting, acknowledging that, here and there, compromises and concessions need to be made all around. Since we are constrained to deal with sensitive subjects at the present time, though it will not always be so, confidentiality within the Team is essential to our success. We require a safe place where everyone may speak his or her mind and spirit freely and without concern of being quoted out of context and of being judged by someone who is not benefiting from the spiritually guided environment and setting within which all our remarks are made to each other--both by way of truth-telling and by way of expressed confusion, with both ways to be sifted toward broad consensus with the passage of time. I would request that the spouses and families of TT members and the larger congregation respect our need for responsible privacy just now; and in exchange for your cooperation with us on this point, I promise absolute transparency and accountability concerning the Team’s work, when we are ready to share it responsibly and honestly with the congregation through assemblies. During our assemblies, the first of which will be scheduled from mid-to-late August, we will be also asking for input and further clarification from the congregation as we seek to broaden and deepen our understanding of former events and situations which did indeed produce confusion and pain. But instead of allowing ourselves to be polarized and paralyzed by gossip, innuendo, half-truths and personalities, as so often happens with congregations of good will and strong faith, we will harness our conversations to the guiding Spirit of Jesus Christ Himself, drawing near to Him first, in order that we might then draw near to each other in mutual confession, forgiveness and reconciliation. Then, we will be in a vastly better place to move forward, as you can and will see for yourself how that is possible from within your own Transition Team, as we “walk the walk” with our Lord, and with you. Blessings and Shalom, Pastor Walt |
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