Conflict is not Wrong

"Conflict in itself is neither right nor wrong. Conflict is merely the lived experience of attempting to inter-relate with others whose experiences, assumptions, and usages of language are different from our own. It is what we do with conflict that is right or wrong."

This was a loose quote from Cherith Nordling in this morning's walking lecture; or more precisely a loose quote of her loose quote from a professor of hers some time in the past. It came up in the context of a discussion of theologies from the margins, and the recognition that the existence of the margins is prima facie evidence of a process or experience of marginalization, which means that there has been some profound wrong that has occurred in the lives of the marginalized.

For much of the past five years, I have lived in the context of a church community whose primary means of dealing with conflict was to suppress it, ignore it, or trivialize it. Only when the conflict became so extensive that these approaches could no longer contain it, was the existence of the conflict acknowledged &mdash and then, the most common approach taken was to demonize those with whom one was in conflict. Open and honest dialogue in an attempt to either find common ground or to understand the differing lived experience that gave rise to differences in assumptions, emphasis or expression simply did not occur &mdash perhaps in part because there was so little time available for such activity, time which was needed to be expended in "more important" matters such as the pursuit of vision.

The fruit of this pattern of dealing — or perhaps better stated, not dealing — with conflict was marginalization. And as people came to feel more and more marginalized, they tended to withdraw in various ways from participation in the community life. And the more they withdrew, the greater the tendency for others to discount their differing opinions, expressions, or experience as invalid, thus increasing the marginalization. And people left — not just people who had always been, as it were, on the fringe, but people who had once &mdash and often very recently &mdash been in the very thick of the community life.

The church community we are now part of wants to see itself as accepting of all sorts of people, and in particularly people from the margins — for did not Jesus go out to the margins of his society to proclaim his Good News? Ironically, a too common response of the formerly marginalized is a tendency to attempt to marginalize those they see as belonging to the "privileged" class. A prime example of this occurred last Sunday morning when the speaker, talking about the experience of marginalization felt by many women in our society, particularly around areas of crisis pregnancy — miscarriage, abortion, adoption, and the like — by her manner or speech, acted to marginalize the men in the audience. One man in particular, who spoke with me quite passionately following the service, was feeling overwhelmingly marginalized by a society in which male bashing by women in response to their experience of pain seemed to be constant and unrelenting; and most poignantly, often in the very area where empathy ought most naturally to be have been available. Of course, he spoke in language of retaliation; of "not taking it anymore" — a response that would inevitably marginalize women who had not themselves acted directly to oppress him. And so the cycle continues.

The questions this raises for me are these: If in the process of taking what I think is the Good News to the marginalized of our world, my manner or message results in the marginalization of others — particularly if consciously — is it really Jesus' message I am carrying? How do I deal with my own sense of marginalization, in a marginalizing community or society, in a way that brings the hope of God's salvation to other marginalized people without in turn attempting to marginalize those whose speech, behaviours, actions and inactions have marginalized me?