Transforming Conflict into Respectful Conversation

Written on: July 7, 2024

By Sister Eileen White, GNSH
Special to Bucks County Courier Times

As a Catholic Sister and an elected leader of my community, I am supported and inspired by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization comprised of the elected leaders of hundreds of Catholic religious communities in the United States. One of their most recent initiatives is a process to help Catholic Sisters and all those with whom we work and pray to address the challenge of polarization in our country. Transforming Grace is the title given to this initiative, which provides materials supporting prayerful reflection, study, conversation, and skills development for all those who want to take steps toward understanding different perspectives rather than remaining paralyzed and polarized by conflicting positions.

Margaret Wheatley suggests, in her book Turning to One Another,

Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. Talk to people you know. Talk to people you don’t know. Talk to people you never talk to…Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world.  Rely on human goodness. Stay together.

I read that advice years ago and loved it and have tried to live by it. But, probably like many of you who are reading this column, I wonder today if it is possible to have a meaningful conversation with “them”!  Yes, that is where I am – playing the “us vs. them” game, which makes it impossible to do anything like converse.

So, here is what I am practicing with Transforming Grace in order to return, at least with a handful of people, to healthy, brave, transformative conversations with people I know and people I never talk to, especially to “them”. When I invite a conversation with someone who I know has a very different perspective from mine, I first pause to remember my belief in human goodness and my desire to be at one with everything and everyone in the universe. I take the time to breathe, conscious of the fact that we are all breathing the same air, taking in the same graced oxygen and then exhaling what is also common to us all. I share a thought, attempting to establish some common ground and invite my conversation partner to share a thought close to the same theme.  I ask a sincere question about her beliefs, seeking to learn something from her responses rather than to prepare my rebuttal.  I listen hard – and invite her to share more about her convictions. “Tell me more” would be the phrase rather than my usual, “Are you kidding?!”

I heard Tim Shriver on a recent blog explain a tool called The Dignity Index to help us recognize how we engage with others. Shriver, president of Special Olympics, believes that polarization in our country derives not from disagreements, but rather from what we do when we disagree with others. The Dignity Index measures whether we treat the other side with dignity or with contempt.  As I write this column, I am reflecting prayerfully on my willingness to treat “them” – that is, all those with whom I so vehemently disagree about recent politically-charged decisions and opinions – with dignity. This does not mean I have to treat their opinion with dignity nor give up my own principles. But does the language I use when I speak or write about the other side’s speech and actions create more division? Do I readily demonize adherents of the other side’s opinions?  And, going back to the Transforming Grace initiative of the LCWR, am I willing to work at having a respectful conversation with someone I stopped talking to over the past few years because his or her opinions contradict my own? Can I disagree with an opinion and still treat the person who has the opinion with dignity?  Can I really listen to learn?

Catholic Sisters have centuries of listening and learning in our history. As Christians, we believe that the Holy Spirit of God has spoken to us especially in the needs of the most vulnerable and poor in our world, leading us to reach out in charity and justice to meet their needs.  We believe that today, the Holy Spirit is speaking to us – and many others – urging us to a transformation of consciousness, to a heightened awareness of the oneness of all creation, to a conversion away from individualism and toward community. Perhaps one by one and group by group, we can be instruments of this conversion, transformed by God’s invitation to learn from and love even those whose viewpoints radically differ from our own, transformed by turning to each other, transformed by grace.

From a Faith Perspective appears in the Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer, and we are grateful for their permission to share it here. Sr. Eileen White, GNSH is a frequent contributor. It was published in the Sunday, July 7, 2024 edition.

This entry was posted in From our Sisters and tagged: contempt, Dignity Index, From a Faith Perspective, Margaret Wheatley, polarization, Sister Eileen White, Tim Shriver, transformative conversations, Transforming Grace