Conflict is our great paradox.

We love peace and yet more easily create war.
We long to be loved and thrive on defiling others.

We can see the problems of conflict in our lives. We know that conflict is not our way. We also know that the roots of conflict arise from our fear of difference: of the people that are different from us and what their difference does to us. We know all of this.

And yet, we still don’t examine what connects the root (difference) from the head (conflict). We throw our hands up and say “as it ever was, it will ever be”. We accept that racism comes to us because some people are just racist and we must accept it. Some are homophobes and we must accept it. Some hate the disabled / women / children / immigrants / homeless / foreign / poor / uneducated / chemically-imbalanced / other and we must accept it. It is just too confusing for us to do anything about it. So let’s ignore the conflict as we ignore its causes.

The cause of conflict is not too difficult to understand. Conflict arises from an unhealthy view of competition, which is born from the fear of what is different. These are the three parts. But we can’t examine them because we have trouble differentiating them, deconstructing them, and reforming them in such a way as to promote a healthy response to the other.

The crux for us is the stalk: competition. Difference is not something we necessarily fear on its own: it is feared in concert with an unhealthy and unsubstantiated view of competition. Notice, for instance that many conservatives don’t argue about immigration from racial or national concerns (difference) but from the impact on employment (competition). Where competition becomes unhealthy and leads to conflict is when we operate from the scarcity model and see competition as one-on-one combat for survival when that is not the only solution. They believe that there are only a few jobs and immigrants take them. Then others add fuel to the fire by saying that these aren’t jobs we (the non-others) want.

There are many other solutions embedded in the example. We could make more jobs. We could increase the value of free time and decrease the value of financial profit. We could intentionally devalue our real estate to 1950s levels and make housing take up far less of our income. We could normalize our work so that bankers and athletes don’t make thousands of times more than our orange pickers. Competition isn’t a zero-sum game.

The other way that competition becomes unhealthy and leads to conflict is when we impose dualism onto our competition. Just as fear leads us to see competition as zero-sum, we see competition as the natural duel between two opposing forces. This is almost never true, but it is almost always taken for true. The prime example is that our two biggest political parties are treated as natural opposites, when they in fact share much in common (for good and for bad) and primarily have differing governing priorities.  I will explore a church example of this in a future post.

What this means, then, is that the primary argument that Jesus makes when he talks about the Kingdom of GOD as he does in Sunday’s reading from Mark and when describing our work in the world (such as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Love Commandment) is based on 1) our ability to see the humanity and divinity of every person, particularly those with whom we feel we are competing / hating / fearing / rejecting and 2) that we right our relationship with them.

How we do that is personal, through a healthy understanding of difference and competition, and corporate, through the communal gathering around a common table. No conflict is truly irreconcilable.

[NOTE: One of the historic moves is to deny a seat at the table to the one we name as heretic. Another move, and the one favored by many Anglicans over the last decade, is to avoid going to the table–so as not to get cooties, I suppose–but to make their own table somewhere else at the same time. Both of these is a violent attempt to avoid reconciliation and intimacy–true attacks on the Body. I do not see either situation as truly irreconcilable, though it is possible, and has often happened, that the small schismatic groups find themselves dwindling and disappearing to the sands of time, making their attempts to avoid reconciliation the seeds of their fate.]

What are your thoughts about both the root and stalk of conflict? 

What risks are at stake for you when you love the person who tries to harm you? What do you risk if you choose not to love them?