by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who insult you.” Jesus’ teaching doesn’t get harder than this. It challenges us to hold conflicts in tension, stretch beyond our egos, and hear into speech people long silenced or different from ourselves.
Much in our culture reinforces a win/lose, destroy-your-enemies point of view. We mark our history by its wars. Video games develop skill to blast, bomb, shoot, shatter, and kill rather than negotiate conflicts.
What if we practiced making friends of enemies? What if games challenged players to find the mutual interest opponents did not recognize they had or get out all the facts so the game could move to the negotiation level? What if players scored points for creative and cooperative solutions to problems?
Currently one of my nieces is studying negotiation at a law school. To her this seems a skill for helping mend the world. “What do the parties in a conflict really want?” This is a key question, she says. “What if two parties fighting over an orange decide to cut it in half and never learn that one wants the rind and the other the juice?”
To love our enemies is the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It is the challenge to which Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. also gave their lives in our times.
“Gandhi was inevitable,” Dr. King writes. “If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.”
Ultimately our identity and self-worth are at stake in our conflicts. Who will we be if we negotiate and compromise rather than win? How can we transform either/or into both/and in our personal, public, national, and global lives?
- When and how have you successfully negotiated a conflict or difference or made a friend of a seeming enemy?