I participated in the Bridge
Builders Course Transforming
Conflict 1: Leadership, Discipleship & Community on 3 -8 February 2019.
It was brilliant and I am grateful for the facilitators who led the course. I want to jot down a few things to embed my learning.
One of the objectives of the
course is to transform our attitude towards conflict and engaging with conflict,
another to increase our self-awareness as leaders facing conflict. The poem Conflict
– what art thou? suggests that conflict has always been with us. The
difference between A and B is not a problem but a difference with tension
leads A and B to C for Conflict, out of which flows predictably D and E.
There is diversity within unity
in the Trinity; there is no grasping within the Trinity (cf. Philippians 2).
Difference becomes a problem where the unity of love is lost. It is lost by the fear
of not having enough, the desire with which we seek to grasp rather than
receive.
Wants Needs
Needs must
Grasp
“Conflicts are power struggles
over differences.” (Hugh Halverstadt)
Some people fear conflict,
others relish it. Fearing conflict can lead to avoiding it but avoiding
conflict can feed it, make it bigger and more difficult to handle. Conflict can
come across as a force but there is nothing automatic and inevitable about it.
In the poem Conflict
– what art thou? D and E lead to F, G and H but these are denied (“not
to be Feared...no Giant...”) and the sequence is broken. Power lies with
people (within relationships), not with the conflict as such, and we must take responsibility
for the power given to us (as well as the power grasped by us). It helps to realise
how much power we have and how powerful adopting a certain stance can be, e.g.
the offer of a non-anxious presence.
It is right that conflict
questions and rattles us but with the right skills and motivation we can engage
with it and having been transformed ourselves, released from the need to justify
and defend ourselves, we can help to transform conflict.
Conflict brings danger and
opportunity. The danger is represented in the
poem as the stinger of a scorpion. Poetically the chiastic D-E-E-D sequence
of lines 3-5 is echoed in the (less obvious) R-S-S-R sequence, interrupted by revisiting B and C, but part of
the new ‘narrative’ (Q-R-S in the middle stanza followed by T-U-V-W-X-Y in the
final stanza). The new sequence (‘narrative’) is the result of a decision to frame
conflict from a new perspective and the use of new skills. These allow C to
emerge as a positive word (“Comfortable”), once the danger has been removed. In
fact, the middle stanza does not mention “Conflict” but this does not mean it
is ignored (it is after all the implied subject of “Questioning” and “Rattling”).
Rather, it is not allowed to dominate. Space is made, embodied in the beginning
of the stanza, not least by the refusal to engage in tit-for-tat.
The opportunity conflict offers is
the lifting of veils, allowing two unknown entities (“X and Y”) to see each other
“face to face / For the first time.” (I was thinking of the wonderful novel by C.S.
Lewis, Til We Have Faces).* The absence of Z suggests that the story is
not over; the absence of the letters between H and P maybe signals that not
everything can and needs to be said.
*In the poem,
counter-intuitively, it is the seeing that removes the veil not vice versa,
emphasising our decision to see as the action that enables conflict to be a
lifter of veils. The novel suggests that only honesty gives us faces, making it possible for
“the gods” to engage with us.
