RelationalProximity – Page 2

rLiving Day 30: Non-Memorial Day (Continuity, Commonality/Identity)

Memorial Day in the US is the last Monday in May. It’s equivalent to UK Remembrance Sunday which is second Sunday in November. And the message from both seems straightforward: don’t take your freedoms for granted since it was secured by the sacrifice of others, so remember them, and be thankful. Even today there are those dying so that others might be free, so remember them too.

Relational Proximity Dimension #2 is Continuity: A relationship is formed and strengthened by the amount, frequency and span of time we are together. It includes a sense of shared history, and an anticipation of the future.

Relational Proximity Dimension #5 is Purpose/Commonality: Our sense of connectedness and relationship is greater to the degree we have things in common or share a common purpose or identity.

“A nation is a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. – Ernest Renan”

The above quote was seen previously in this post, and originally by my friend Dana in the comments on this post . It sums up very well what Memorial Day, and Fourth of July, does functionally for people who call the United States of America their nation. Without conscious remembrance of the sacrifices of the past, a people may well forget who they are or why they are. You can’t build a national identity on a shared history if you don’t continually think about or remember that history. And you can’t build a common identity if you don’t ‘share’ – agree with – the reason for the sacrifices in the first place or if you don’t know or agree on what your ‘common life’ is for which you’d be prepared to sacrifice your life.

The combination of the lack of conscious remembrance and a vehement disagreement over the purpose of recent sacrifices seems to be one reason for a loss of national identity within western nations. I don’t know if you feel it, but I feel it.

But it’s an odd, and slightly uncomfortable, thing to build an identity on a common suffering and death even though that’s the normal context for reference to a nation’s character (i.e. who they are); 9/11 being the most recent example. I say ‘build’ as though it’s a conscious act, but of course identity and commonality is something inexplicable and unique that emerges from that cauldron of suffering. Those who have been through it, like soldiers in war, just know … they just KNOW … what binds them together. And when they forget what it was that bound them, then bound they are no more.

One wonders why then do we want to keep remembering the pain, the suffering, the injustice, the cruelty? Why not forget? Why not instead focus on the future, build something new? Or find something else, something stronger, more positive from the past. Or find something transcendent, something not contingent on circumstance. In fact there’s a paradox in that justice and truth screams at us to keep remembering, to never forget! But the goal of remembering, the goal of all proper attention to evil and injustice, is redemption, restoration, justice and peace. The hopeful future together presupposes the redeemed past together.

This paradox is embedded in the title of the book, “The End of Memory: Remembering rightly in a violent world” (which I haven’t read yet so what follows is pieced together from reviews). In it, the author Miroslav Volf – himself trying to ‘forget’ his experience of interrogation in former Yugoslavia – proposes the need and importance of ‘non-remembering’: “To be fully overcome, evildoing must be consigned to its proper place – nothingness”. But he’s not simply saying, “forgive and forget”. He’s talking about a right kind of remembering, the kind that has an aim to know the truth of what really happened in all its ugliness. The kind that for the sake of justice, Will Not Forget! That’s the “end’, the goal, of memory: to expose and reveal the truth. But ultimately, one wants to really ‘end’ remembering suffering and death. One wants just to not have to remember any more.

Like I say, I haven’t read the book, so I hope I’ve correctly got to the essence of it. But regardless, it does seem there’s a paradox here with memory and memorializing.

It’s likely this weekend is just a long holiday weekend for a lot of people. Time to really gear up for summer. Unless, that is, you happen upon a parade (as we had in Somerville today; that’s my daughter M~ above), or have lost someone in the theatre of war so cannot help remembering. And even if for those watching the parades, and participating. I do wonder how much we’re really remembering as we should, so that we can stop remembering as we should.

Paying proper close attention to – really remembering – the fact and reason for the sacrifice may yet restore a sense of commonality and pride in one’s national identity. The people of the United States have made many, many sacrifices for others. Perhaps with some courageous remembering, the right kind of remembering – even of recent wards – there’s a chance the people of this nation could really feel “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”

As an Englishman, whose father served in Normandy in WWII and died last Remembrance Sunday, Nov 8 2009, I remember and thank you, people of the United States, and your sons & daughters who have given so much for us.

rLiving Day 29: Blogging, Tweeting and Paranoia (Directness, Commonality)

It had to happen, and frankly I’m amazed it took until day 29 to get there. But tonight, and in fact throughout the day, I’ve found myself totally uninspired on what to write about and desperately wishing this 30-day project was over. I’m also unbelievably tired – I’ve had some of the most intense weeks at work just when I’m spending a couple of hours a night trying for the first to work out and write out things I’ve pondered for years. Maybe it takes 30 days to break/form a habit, not 21? It seems to be when you’re near completion of a stretch goal that your metal is tested.

Then as I sat at my laptop this evening I started doubting why I was doing this. And I started getting a little paranoid. I knew people were reading the blog, but who?! And why did the page views go from 80+ yesterday to 15 today?!! Numbers are a pathetic and pointless thing to start worrying about when you’re blogging, or tweeting – unless you’re trying to make money out of ad clicks. Coincidentally this past couple of weeks I also started wondering why other twitter people I’m following tweeted and re-tweeted each other but not me!

This is an embarrassing paranoia. But it does make me think about ‘relationships’ with people in these two social media. I know personally all the people who have commented on this blog series, or commented on my facebook status blog update. And that’s 7 people in total. Two people who I don’t know personally have kindly referred to this blog series; one on twitter (@marciamarcia) and one on his own popular blog (@scotmcnight). But I’ve only had one direct back-and-forth conversation, and that on an administrative matter, with only one of them. The link from Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog generated an all-time peak of page-views (near 180) last weekend. Now I’m delighted and encourage by the interest from Scot and his readers, but I still only know and have interacted with those seven people. So as far as I’m concerned it only feels like I have a ‘relationship’ with those seven.

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully and know each other better.

An awareness of ‘Directness’ makes me think of mutuality in social media. So knowing there are other people reading my blog but that I’m not being able to communicate with them makes me feel … well, paranoid! Literally, it’s like knowing people are watching me, but I don’t know who they are or what they’re thinking. So who wouldn’t be paranoid!!? I’d rather not think about them too much.

Relational Proximity Dimension #5 is Purpose/Commonality: Our sense of connectedness and relationship is greater to the degree we have things in common or share a common purpose or identity. A good relationship has a direction to it, something that is common between the members that holds it together.

And yet, I have a specific shared ‘Commonality’ around the topic of relationships with the daily 50-90+ ‘readers’ (unless the page-views are all from bots) that I don’t have with others. This has been one of the only public means by which I’ve shared my own attempts to work out how Relational Proximity might apply to life. So I have what almost feels like an intimacy with these people, like they might understand me, that I don’t with others. Of course I need to make a number of assumptions about the page-views; for instance, that they are interested, and that if several different posts are clicked on then there’s even more interest. On one post I used the term ‘dear readers’ so clearly I feel like I have a relationship with them/you. I feel like I have an actual ‘community’ of sorts, bound by commonality even if not by directness.

And I’ve spent the whole time on this post talking about ‘them’, when them is ‘you’! So if ‘you’ are ‘them’ then I’m sorry for my rudeness and though I’m paranoid about you I’m glad that you share my interest in relational thinking!

So now I have no idea what to think. But at least I got a blog post from thinking about it!

rLiving Day 28: Forgiveness (Power)

Ill-health and even violence in a relationship between individuals, groups, tribes and nations is likely most often due to an asymmetry in power. More likely it’s due to an abuse, real or perceived, of that asymmetry by the powerful over the powerless. And even more likely it’s due to an acute sense of injustice over past abuses and an unwillingness or inability to forgive.

When you’ve been the victim of what you perceive to be an injustice you feel like someone owes you something. There’s a debt outstanding. And until that debt is paid, until “justice is done”, you cannot rest easy and certainly your relationship with that person or tribe or institution will not be happy or healthy. The deep tragedy of those unwilling to forgive, however, is that non-forgiveness represents a holding on, almost a dependency, almost a sense of powerlessness. It’s as though the offender dominates you, controls and manipulates you, keeps you from sleeping, keeps you from enjoying yourself, keeps you from “moving on” to form new and better relationships. And all this while they, usually, walk around blissfully unaware they’ve done anything wrong!

Relational Proximity Dimension #4 is Parity. The greater the asymmetry of power between me and someone else the greater the potential for difficult and strained relationships. This asymmetry can be real or perceived, and its affect on relationships can be more about the use and misuse of power than the mere existence of power disparity.

That all sounds like a major power asymmetry to me. But in this case the exercise of that power, in what almost feels like even further abuse, is entirely self-inflicted. Yes, of course, if the offender somehow repays something then in a sense justice is done. But their attempts at righting the wrong mean nothing if you don’t forgive them.

From these posts here and here, it seems that one of the major reasons for relational problems caused by power asymmetry is that we equate power with value. The second major reason is that we ascribe or devolve power to another simply by not forgiving them. These two things we can evidently do something about. Can you imagine the mental and relational liberation it would be if we saw people as equally valuable (no matter how powerful they were) and if we forgave them (even if they didn’t seek forgiveness)? These things are within our responsibility and ability to do.

[Update: It occurred to me as I woke up that the Power problem of forgiveness also works the other way, maybe more so. It’s less about you having a sense of powerlessness because you can’t let go of the offense of the other person. Rather, YOU hold the power over the offender because you refuse to forgive. This is where the language of ‘debt’ is helpful. Who holds the power, the lender or the person with the debt? When we say the Lord’s prayer at our church we say, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”. If you know what it feels not to be forgiven when you’re desperately sorry, you know how much power the offended person has.
In any case, whether you’re the offendor or the offended, whether you feel powerless or powerful, an awareness of this dynamic can help explain why the relationship feels as it does. It also points to the need for candid and courageous conversation where confession and forgiveness can happen.]
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Theological/spiritual note:
Being a Christian and all it strikes me that the age-old gospel speaks to this problem in profound and important ways. Value is personal (vs material) and the word means what it says; the value can be ‘high’ or ‘low’. But high or low to whom? “Valuing myself” is pointless because it’s just a number without reference. Heaven forbid (literally) that I rely on other people’s value of me – choosing to accept the valuation of other people who like us (or hate us) is the same as self-assessing. So to me, it seems we long to be (and fear to be) valued by a person who really knows our worth and can demonstrate it. That person would only be God. And since God has first made us in his image, then declared us “very good” (an assessment of our value and worth in his eyes unchanged by our sin) and then demonstrated his value of us and love for us by dying for us in Jesus Christ: we should confidently accept and believe that assessment. Everyone else’s and my own opinion be damned!!

Secondly, we struggle to forgive because our desire for justice is stronger than our desire for peace. In fact, our peace is dependent upon justice. We ‘hold on’ to the offender, perhaps, because we’re still fighting for what’s right. In some sense our unwillingness to forgive, no matter how much mental anguish and misery it causes us, is a wonderful sign of our deep need and longing for justice. And forgiveness feels like injustice, it’s letting someone off the hook. And in so many aspects of life there is nothing, nothing that can be done to right the wrong. Nothing can bring back the lost child, the ruined reputation, the lost innocence. So what is the offender to do? And who of us seriously reckons ourselves innocent anyway? (and isn’t our self-assessment as pointless and inaccurate as our self-evaluation?).

This is why the ancient Christian testimony about Jesus of Nazareth is so breathtakingly amazing: it says that he was the revelation of God himself, that his death was actually a cosmic act of furious judgment on every wrong, every abuse, every deep heart-breaking tragedy that has ever befallen someone, it was a forsakenness that pays in full the penalty of the offense. That is why Jesus is central to being able to forgive; because his nailed hands and feet speak the words “it is finished, justice has been done”, and he teaches us and enables us to say, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. For the offender who doesn’t want forgiveness? God will respect that decision (even while he and his people on earth will/should rage against the injustice to the end of our days). But for those who do seek to be forgiven? And for those who want finally to be freed from the power the offender had over them, who want to forgive and at the same time justice? God in Christ makes that possible. And so, peace.