Moralizing or conflict management?
Do you want to be right or do you want to save lives?
A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. (Luke 22:24)
As a consultant and as a diocesan staff person I've had a lot of experience with parishes and other organizations in high-level conflict. Situations that were truly intractable. The dictionary says that intractable is “hard to control or deal with.” Speed Leas saw it as a situation that is no longer manageable. It’s at a point where the parties want to destroy one another. There would be attempts to do serious damage to the other’s reputation, position, or well being. This might even continue after the parties have been separated. Note what happens in wars when ceasefires get worked out. Only a few reporters from the New York Times would be so clueless as to think it odd when there are violations and disputes over what was meant by certain wording in the agreement.
Leas thought the appropriate strategy in an intractable parish conflict situation was:
Outside authority will need to make difficult decisions.
The parties need to be separated.
Some people may need to be asked to leave.
Moralizing or conflict management
And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus; And Paul chose Silas, and departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God. (Acts 15: 39-40)
Back to the dictionaries. Moralizing is to express judgments about what is morally right and wrong. Or it is the action of commenting on issues of right and wrong, typically with an unfounded air of superiority.
In either case, does moralizing help in intractable conflicts? Does it bring peace? Does it create harmony? In wars, does it even save lives?
But we, including myself, can’t help ourselves. We want to know what is good and what is bad. It’s an oversimplified view of reality that hangs on long after our childhood.
I recall the first high-level conflict a bishop asked me to work with. The enemies of the rector made sure I knew that he was an autocratic. The rector wanted me to know that his opponents were all racists. Thankfully I had enough training to see that both sides were trying to get me, a known lefty in that diocese, to side with them.
We spent well over one year together, trying to see if we could manage the conflict. We didn't want to believe that it was intractable. What unfolded was an absurd sequence of events in which at one vestry meeting you'd have a 6 to 5 vote asking the bishop to remove the rector and at the next vestry meeting you have a 6 to 5 vote in the other direction. That went on for sometime. A big part of the problem was our moralizing. We were Christians. We wanted to believe that there could always be reconciliation and forgiveness. We forgot that sometimes such reconciliation and forgiveness only takes place in eternity.
I learned two things in that work. First, if it's an intractable situation, it helps to see that sooner rather than later. Overtime, I became more skilled at being able to do that. Second, even in these awful situations, the Holy Spirit is at work. For example, the primary, very angry leader of those trying to remove the rector was a woman who went on to go to college, then seminary, be trained as a parish development consultant, and became one of the best urban priests of that diocese.
In my work on a number of occasions, I've had to facilitate the application of Speed Leas strategy for intractable conflict.
If it’s an intractable situation, and we apply the appropriate strategies early on, we save people a lot of suffering, and the parish the significant level of damage that usually occurs. To do that we have to set aside the kind of moralizing that allows things to drag on endlessly as more and more damage is done.
The learning might also apply in broader issues of social ethics when we look at matters of war and peace. There's a lot of moralizing going on about the Ukrainian - Russian war and the Hamas - Israel war. It certainly grabs my gut. But if we look at how international conflicts like this get resolved, all the moralizing seems to have little to do with saving lives. Sometimes we have to decide to stop worrying about being right and just get on with ending the fighting.
The other moralizing element that can enter into it is our assumption that ending the fighting in a peace agreement is the right pathway. Some kind of compromise. The hard truth is that sometimes the way to end the fighting is by one side winning the war, e.g., the allies against Nazi Germany. The assessment that goes into such a situation is that the suffering and deaths that will occur by continuing the war to a victory are less than the suffering and death that could occur if the Nazis were left in control of Germany.
In my work I’ve used Leas strategy several times. In the case of parishes it usually involved a priest having to leave. I recall a conflict in a nonprofit legal services organization. The executive director was a practicing Roman Catholic. He might have been a third order Franciscan. The situation was a fight between one of the lawyers and a paralegal who worked for her. I met with both women separately several times. It became obvious to me that it was an intractable situation. The executive director, however, insisted that I try to bring them together in a room, along with him to see if something could get worked out in a face-to-face conversation. He just could not accept the idea that the two of them could not find a way to work together. So we had the meeting. And sadly, my read on the situation turned out to be correct. The two of them could not even be in the same room together. That's why in such conflicts you usually work as a mediator moving back and forth between the parties. Bringing them face-to-face, usually will activate all the grievances and resentments. By the time the meeting was over the executive director saw the reality. In the end, we worked out a form of separation that put the two of them in different departments, on different floors, each to arrive at work at a different hour.
This abides,
Brother Robert, OA
The Eve of the Feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle