Tag Archives: grievance

The Fallacies of Friction: A Holy Week Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

13 Apr

Where there is power, there is resistance. Michel Foucault

The friction between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’ burns you, stirs you up, propels you. Marcus Buckingham

Occasionally when people in the grip of obsessive resentment were pouring out their ire and grievances, something in them, some small trace of self-awareness, heard themselves as others might, and was surprised to find they didn’t sound quite as blameless, or even as rational, as they’d imagined themselves to be. Robert Galbraith

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left. Merida Johns

Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all – that is where the energy is. — Doug Aitken

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky

I have been quiet in this space but not quiet. In other formats I have been doing my small part at national level to counter the grievance which has become a form of embedded cruelty and at international level commenting on the peculiar brand of diplomatic indifference which refuses even to uphold the core principles which gave rise to the institutions which we have entrusted with peace and security in the first instance.

In these strange times, in some ways a throwback to manifestations of the human condition we foolishly thought we had consigned to history, I and many others have taken up the task of creating friction for those who believe they are above the impacts of their own bad work, those who believe that their lofty positions and distorted policies exempt them (or should) from resistance to the point where such is deemed an evil impediment to the fulfillment of their desires – a grievance and even vengeance-driven remaking of political culture in their own image.

As some of you know, I have long worried that my own country has become essentially ungovernable, full of people fleeing to the safety of bubbles where we can nurture our self-serving ideas and petty grievances without friction, without interference. We have become a nation of trolls with little taste for subtlety or even self-reflection. We “root” for people and ideas rather than examine their legitimacy and intent. Our collective arrogance blots out almost all of the inclinations we might otherwise have to humility, reflection or self-awareness, let alone to service.

What I just alluded to has been true of my country for some time. The current crisis is a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem which cuts across political and even religious affiliations. Our hearts are largely consumed by violence and greed, much more than is helpful for a society which seems to have misplaced its creeds, a society which is increasingly turning its backs on veterans, on the elderly and disabled, or on those seeking refuge from governments deemed even more cruel than our own. We have “drunk the kool aid” even when we aren’t thirsty and by so doing contributed to a society which seems comfortable with mass firings of government employees, mass dismantling of our health systems and mass deportations of non-criminal legal residents. A society where its leaders huddle to embrace a God of violence, riches and vengeance as though there had not been a subsequent message focused on forgiveness, humility and reconciliation attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. A society where what is true is reduced to what someone can convince us is true.

This society has needed and now needs even more the friction which communicates categorically “this is not OK.” This is not good enough. We will not return to a time long past when enfranchisement was for the few not the many, when a cruel but not so unusual hierarchy kept too many people in the places that they were “assigned” ostensibly by a God who ordained our lofty patterns of discrimination.

You’ve heard all this from me before, this indication that what we are now living through is a culmination of sorts, a culmination of increasingly inadequate leadership and a distracted, self-interested populace which has lost sight of all that must happen in this world – the good, the bad and the sometimes ugly – in order for us to enjoy the blessings that we too often forget we have.

In this current climate, I and others continue to resist, continue to provide a bit of friction to a government and a system that has convinced itself that its cruel judgments have some sort of divine sanction. But in this season of Ramadan (now concluded) of Passover and of the Christian Holy Week, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of resisting a false religious narrative with one of our own making.

Indeed, we must remind ourselves that resistance is not righteousness, that to overquote Reinhold Niebuhr, “the evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own.” Resistance is an obligation for many as it is for me, but it is not a “counter-crusade.” It is not about swapping out one perverse view of God’s favor for another.

In this Holy season, we must also remind ourselves of the costs associated with being that source of friction which not all of us provide but which all of us need. This is the friction which helps us to be better versions of ourselves, refusing to divert our gaze from cruelty and poverty to which none should be subjected, refusing to allow the chores of the present to divert our attention from the needs and aspirations of those who follow.

But the friction which people like me attempt to apply in our now-adrift society cuts in many directions. We who attempt this work, including the work of inspiring resistance in others, are not immune from the responsibilities and impacts of that resistance – to challenge what we see while trying to be better than what we see. But also to acknowledge that friction wears us down too. Friction takes a toll on us too.

And this toll is in part a function of the culture of resistance itself – seeing the glass as forever half-empty, slipping into patterns of language that ascribe things to people – including evil –that apply in full measure to only a handful of humans, failing to appreciate the spring flowers, or poetry and music, or a thrilling sports match, so that we can get in one more “cut” of friction, one more pithy response to a systemic “monster” which remains much more formidable than people like me will ever be.

Indeed the consequences of resistance, of creating friction day after day, can produce their own grievances which serve neither our own work in the world nor the interests of those to whom we seek to connect.  More than anything else, we must never lose touch with the people whose lives have been upended through policies which are anything but “people-centered.” Indeed, such loss of touch helps explain the predicament we now find ourselves in.

I’m a bit beaten up now but will spend this Holy Week recalibrating my own resistance and the effects it is having (or not having) on matters internal and external to myself, including on those whose response to the gravity of these times remains to be inspired.  For those of you already in the friction business, even part time, we need to ensure that our voices and actions have all the impact that is possible.  It’s going to be a slog for now as what “is” continues to lag well behind what could be.  Let’s commit to locating the formula that can bring more hope to the world and ensure timely and healthy responses from ourselves.

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Attitude Adjustment: Our Unquenched Thirst for Grievance, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Apr

The recitation of grievances was strange balm.   Regina O’Melveny

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

When we make grievance our traveling companion, it blocks out light, it distorts our perspective, it consumes our hearts until there is nothing left.  Merida Johns

People haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. Eric Hoffer

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. Robert Frost

As you might have noticed, and for which you are perhaps grateful after all, I haven’t been posting much recently.   This hasn’t been a Lenten (or Ramadan) lull so much as a time of diverse and largely connected activity where ideas for writing routinely pop into my head but don’t stay there long enough to find their reflection in print.

There have been some noteworthy things happening around us in addition to the war and pestilence that forever remind us of our essential impotence, the limitation of our collective ability to define the path forward let alone to walk that path with resolve and integrity. 

Indeed, this holy season has not been a fallow time for us.  We have been able to return to the General Assembly Hall for in-person meetings, a strange feeling after 2+ years of endless (and at times pointless) online monitoring.  On our return, it is even clearer that the current President, Abdulla Shahid of Maldives, appears to be the right person for this moment, insisting on a functional, attentive, promise-oriented “presidency of hope” in which the Assembly is better able to assume responsibilities for issues from vaccine equity and the digital divide to international justice and peace (the latter of which is urgently relevant given the relative dysfunctionalities of the Security Council). 

Beyond meetings, we have given consultative advice on issues from the “peaceful uses” of nuclear energy to the care of persons with disabilities in Ukraine, many of which have been caused by war.  We have welcomed new young people into the UN orbit, including Jamshid Mohammadi from Afghanistan now practicing his first Ramadan devotions in the US.  And we have invested in projects designed to strengthen the presence of women — especially women of color — in the tech sector.

In addition to the specific engagements of ourselves and others, we remain mindful of the psychological toll that pandemic effects have taken on many millions – the uncertain futures, the food and fiscal insecurity, the children who have lost connections to schooling and peer relationships, the “social distancing” which has morphed for many into the loss of confidence that human relations can still be successfully navigated, that the isolation crafted by a virus in association with our own personal “ issues” may well have created human divides that could well be impossible to fully overcome.

One of the issues that has come to the fore in recent years, and which the pandemic only seems to have made worse, is that of grievance.  This “strange balm” is one which I have indulged at times in my life, most always in an unseemly manner, unseemly because I allowed it to figuratively blot out the sun, making what was happening to me into some sort of grotesque barometer of the moral character of the universe.  Those times when I made grievance my “traveling companion” virtually ensured that I was on a long road to nowhere, ignoring that the “meaning” I was seeking was less about what I had taken or what had been denied from me and more about what I had to contribute, to whom and with whom those contributions might more liberally flow.

I grew up with many people angry or frustrated, and not without cause, given the economic crumbs which were routinely tossed in their direction, the marginally attentive government services, the policing and courts which reinforced cultural biases, the schools which offered little beyond local replication.  These were often people who had also made personal sacrifices to protect a country which they now see ruled by persons who either ridicule their life choices or exploit their passions with a bevy of half-truths and unfounded assumptions.

But this phase of grievance feels different, something akin to a black hole which absorbs all matter around it and then transforms that matter into some fact-free realm full of anger, yes, but also of conspiracy and a generalized hatred of those who, it is assumed, hated them first.  What is missing from this aggrieved moment in our collective history is some sense of perspective, even some measure of gratitude, an acknowledgement that the world is filled with unanticipated challenges that we who indulge the grievance of the moment are unlikely to help others meet, or even meet ourselves.  

To be fair, the pandemic has generally speaking not drawn us closer in any web of mutual responsibility.  The wealthy have gotten wealthier, largely on the watches of those who found themselves lacking either sustainable employment or trustworthy child-care.  A story this week emerged about Russian Oligarchs apparently moved to tears at the thought that their private planes would be denied landing rights in select global capitals.  This is the essence of grievance, or so it seems – the absence of any perspective, let alone gratitude for the privileges we do enjoy, including the privilege of making it with dignity through this challenging world which advertises much but continues to deliver in a grossly uneven manner. 

I had a dream the other night that seemed to capture, albeit through my own twisted subconscious, the essence of a world to which we should all be inclined to contribute.  In this dream, I was trapped in a hole filled with water and largely sealed in concrete.  My lifeline was a single straw protruding above the surface, through which I was able to sustain some semblance of breath.   Above me, people were working to remove the concrete such that my rescue might commence. Despite experiencing some unusually dire circumstances, I was neither alone nor abandoned.

Aside from the claustrophobia which would normally have consumed me in conscious life, and without delving too deeply into the symbolic meaning which the dream communicated, three related things occurred to me upon waking.  First and most obvious is the fragility of life as we know it, the vast number of people (and other life forms) whose very existence is hanging, as it were, at the end of a breathing straw.  But there were others present in the dream as well, others who were helping to free me from the most perilous of my circumstances, who were clearly devoted to rescue and restoration for other than themselves.

The last thing occurring to me about this dream is that despite how easy it would have been to simply pull the straw, how tempting it could be to take advantage of this opportunity to sever me once and for all from my singular lifeline, even as options for rescue began to take realistic shape.  

That temptation was not taken and thus it struck me upon waking as a counter-narrative to our current obsession with our garden-variety grievance, the unsubstantiated beliefs we harbor regarding the actions and motives of others trying to “do us in,” our dystopian sensibilities projecting a belief that, aside from an occasional superhero, the world is nothing but turmoil and deceit, nothing but lies and the illegitimate power built on their edifice, nothing but the death wishes that some of us have for others and, more often than we might admit , for ourselves as well.

During his aforementioned “presidency of hope,” the president of the General Assembly has called attention to our deficits of fairness, generosity and in promise-keeping, let alone our timidity in establishing conditions for a sustainable peace.  He knows that getting to this finish line is in part about our poetry and in part about our politics, in part about our ability to grieve our world of pain and uncertainty while keeping our grievances in perspective, in part about moving past both grief and grievance while placing more of our gifts and treasure in the service of others.

There are millions of people in this world whose very lives are dependent on some thin, metaphorical breathing straw. We are running out of time to help free them, once and for all, from such a perilous and traumatic condition.

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Lonely Exile: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

29 Nov
Feeling lonely? You've got company. | The World from PRX

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Donna Goddard

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. Sylvia Plath

Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting. Khaled Hossein

They’d elevate small grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue. Amy Bloom

As we have said about many things in this strange and uncomfortable year, this Advent season feels like few we have experienced in our collective lifetime.

One of the reasons, I suspect, why Advent is not more resonant within communities and even across faith traditions is that we don’t routinely engage in the reflections and reactions that the season demands. The word “Advent” is perhaps best translated as “expectation.” The signature image is, as we have noted over many years, the lone person peering into the night sky, knowing that something is out there that can reverse the trend of lonely exile, that can provide a lift to relationships in disarray and the loosening of the iron grip of occupation both of our nations and our souls.

This peering into the Milky Way was never merely wishful thinking, for Isiah and other prophets had long-anticipated “a light to those who sit in darkness” indeed even to those who find themselves sitting “in the shadow of death.” And yet this expectation was accompanied neither by a timeline nor a script. Something out there would surely come, a visitation would commence that could “guide our feet into the way of peace,” peace in our families, our communities, our world, but the timing and the program elements were as yet unclear, as yet uncertain. And the wait for clarity was genuinely painful as “the simple act of waiting” so often is.

But longing and waiting for a visitation are insufficient. This “way of peace” demands more of us as well. The visitation that can “guide our feet” requires us to use those feet to walk that path, to trust the direction but do so willfully and mindfully, to push ourselves forward and not wait for some unseen hand to keep pushing from behind. And as we walk, to engage in the two demands that, for me at least, signify the essence of the Advent season, the essence of our longing and response.

For me, the core of Advent takes the forms of Anticipation and Preparation: anticipation of the world made possible in part through the promise of a visitation; preparation to seize that opportunity, to be as ready as we can be as that world of promise takes its welcome shape.

On the surface, these two attributes seem like obvious conduits for the best of our modern age; indeed in healthy families, institutions or even governments, both play a key role. Such health requires an attentive and active investment in the world and its peoples, a willingness to see past our often-petty, soul-clogging grievances and our sometimes discouraging logistics to a time when, as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it, we have “cast away the works of darkness” and now bathe in a light which is accessible to all and not just to some, a light which never dims in part because we ourselves have accepted the responsibility for illumination.

But all this sounds now like a bit fantasy, doesn’t it? Those in our time who dare to anticipate at all often see a future filled with obstacles for which we are no more prepared than we were for prior sets of challenges. We “expect” the next major storms to devastate coastlines, the next geo-political tensions to spill over into brutal conflict, the next species to be made extinct through our own greed and negligence, the next pandemics lying in wait to inflict their damage once the current virus has had its fill of us.

On and on, anticipating an epoch of impediments for which we do not know how to adequately prepare, indeed that our elected representatives and policymakers don’t seem properly equipped to address either. Rather than anticipating that time when our feet finally reach that place of light and peace, that time when anticipated visitation becomes trusted presence, we expect to see only the faintest glimmers of a world that seems perpetually beyond our reach. Indeed, especially in this pandemic year, it seems to many as though our sun is always setting, regardless of the hour.

But Advent calls out circumstances not in perpetual dusk — calls us to anticipate and prepare for the world that can and must exist beyond the loneliness that has disabled so many of our current connections, beyond the (non-virtuous) grievances that rob the world of light and disfigure our very souls, beyond the masks and social distancing which are necessary for physical health but challenging to emotional stability. We fear the dusk and the darkness which soon envelops it, but we fail to properly discern what such fear reveals about the status of our own resilience, our own courage to stay the course of peace, our own capacity to illuminate a path different from the one we are on now, a path inconsistent with Advent’s calling.

In writing this, my thoughts turned to a deceased Aunt who helped raise me but whose later years were a veritable cauldron of suspicion and grievance, immersed in conspiracy theories and half-truths she never bothered to interrogate. She was one of those people who when the phone or doorbell rang, would erupt in expletive-saturated discourse as though the voice on the other end had no goal other than to take her money or make her life more confusing and threatening than it already seemed.

With all due regard for the prevalence of elder abuse, I used to think that my Aunt was a relatively extreme, isolated case. But in this era of pandemic, climate and economic threats, when even a jaunt to the market has potentially grave health and budgetary implications, the numbers of socially isolated persons are vast approaching epidemic proportions. Indeed, one explanation for the failure of political polling to make accurate forecasts in the US election just concluded is the large number of people who now simply refuse to answer the phone or whose grievance-laden and conspiratorial responses made pollsters wish they hadn’t bothered.

Most of us are not as angry and self-protective as this, of course, but many of us seem unable to see past the current circumstances to that time when it is no longer necessary or appropriate to see others primarily as viral conduits or threats to our increasingly privatized spaces, but rather as fellow beings who need our touch, our encouragement, our tangible expressions of interest. It is thus cause for concern, especially apparent during this season of anticipation, that our heart-habits are still tracking in dubious directions, that the visitation of Advent finds so many of us in hardened, isolated, impatient, even desolate places.

As circumstances better enable, it will be instructive to see if and how we are able to pivot to a world where solidarity makes more sense than competition; where vulnerability makes more sense than isolation; where sharing makes more sense than hoarding; where showing interest in others makes more sense than demanding attention; where gratitude makes more sense than grievance; where our aching feet carry on the path towards that revelatory state wherein the world remains illuminated and lasting peace remains within our grasp.

This Advent more than others, such instruction still indicates a risk of of slipping deeper into “lonely exile,” a place of disconnect from ourselves but also from those who can bring richness to our lives, including those who can inspire visions of a better world and help enable the multiple preparations we must now be about in order to to get there. Thankfully this Advent can also serve as a reminder of what months of isolation, social distancing and face coverings have tended to obscure, that the keys to our recovery from this pandemic are also keys to our recovery as a species.

The blank stares which define so much our battered present must not be allowed any longer to blur anticipation of a healthier, fairer, saner planet. Something is coming to help push us down a path towards a world that is no longer falling apart, that is no longer shedding species and hope, that is no longer enveloped in a fog of virus, mistrust and indifference. Advent is our time time to prepare for that visit, for that push, and for that world.

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