I spent the past week co-leading a retreat on transformative storytelling, with Brian Ammons and our friends Kaitlin Curtice and Micky ScottBey Jones. Twenty-five of us wandering the natural and built landscape of the north of Ireland; attending to music, cinema, literature; hearing the stories of people who take life seriously enough to want the best for others. (You can learn more about these retreats at www.irelandretreats.com - we just opened applications for next year.)
This retreat has me thinking about the fact that I emerged in Belfast fifty years ago this coming January - that number seems astonishing to me. When I look in the mirror I see the same face I’ve lived with for half a century; a few more lines, but the eyes still sparkle. I’ve grown, been wounded, made mistakes, learned, loved and been loved. I’ve changed, but I’m the same. The little boy lost and the teenage dreamer, the student out in the world and the traveler being welcomed all over the world just to find himself there. The one who feared he would be lonely, most of the time, who ended up gratefully co-convening community gatherings. The open heart that ached for peace somehow getting to witness peace being made. The wide-eyed lover of other people’s projected dreams not only finding that the best movies got better, but that he could find some of his purpose in helping yet other people awaken their own dreams by watching. The eyes are the same, but the smile broader, because I realize that I am, actually, being healed of the belief that there is something fundamentally broken about me - or that I am more broken than we all are. I also matter as much as you do - and you as much as me.
I think I started to learn this partly because of the tumult in my homeland. The peace process that has transformed the conflict in and about northern Ireland is a lot of things: a dialogue between people(s) who had advocated each other’s deaths leading to the assertion of exclusively non-violent means to achieve social change; a system that aims to share political power collaboratively; an acknowledgement that the past isn’t past until it’s tended to. Of course it has specific resonance for the people who have been most directly affected; who live in the north-east corner of Ireland; who call the north of Ireland or Northern Ireland home. But it also has something to say to everyone, everywhere - whether or not tribalist conflict manifests conspicuously where you are.
The peace process that I have witnessed, and in a small way participated in clarified to me that all people should be considered of equal worth, and treated with the most refined dignity. The stock we put in your assertions may vary depending on the outcomes; but no matter what you say or think or have done with your life, no one reading this is any less valuable than anyone else.
That should be the starting point for all interactions among humans; it is to be lamented that it took us northern Irish a long time to accept it. But even more so it should be celebrated that we’ve codified parity of esteem in our politics. That doesn’t mean we have to like each other (or even pretend to) - electoral politics still suffers from the habit of trying to outdo each other, and it’ll take a while to turn political campaigns into large-scale competitive games for the sake of the common good. But some people believe that eventually that’s what war will become: in the future, what used to be Canada, and what used to be Iran may well engage in creative conflict over who can cure cancer first. The place I’m from, despite its two-steps-forward, one-step-back tendencies, gives me hope that such a prediction could be entirely realistic.
The starting point of accepting that no life matters less than any other should be a fundamental tenet of our decision-making - from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the floors of parliaments to factories, from pulpits to recording studios and soundstages, not to mention broken cities, beleaguered flood plains, and fault-lines of global conflict.
It should certainly affect how we engage with media, and the way we vote in elections. If we want a world in which every human life is held as sacred, and no one’s fundamental worth is considered to be less than anyone else’s, we may be able to learn a lot from places like northern Ireland, or anywhere that dehumanizing conflict has been transformed into creative possibility.
I know many people reading this are feeling genuine fear these days. The Porch community is full of people who are trying to contribute to a better world for everyone. I’ll write more about this soon, but for now I want to say this: There are no perfect political candidates or party platforms; and while politics isn’t everything, what matters most to me in deciding who to vote for is what outcome will move us more toward a safer and more compassionate world, in which all lives are considered of equal worth, conflict is transformed nonviolently, the ecosystem is held as being as much alive and in need of care as we are, the creative callings of every human being are honored and facilitated, misdeeds are held accountable and amends offered, people who have been persecuted, excluded, or silenced are resourced to find an equitable place at the table - a table to which everyone is invited, with only one rule: don’t harm anyone else. The path to that world begins with all of us experimenting with the belief that no one is worth less than anyone else.
