Active and Durable Peace With All Our Neighbors Requires Presence, Breathing on the Coals of Conscience, and Bridging

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict.” — Dorothy Thompson, journalist and amazing woman (check her out)

There are moments in history when the air feels electrically charged. We sense fracture lines widening — in politics, in our own communities, sometimes even around our own dinner tables. And in such moments, even people of faith are tempted toward two extremes: retreat (into private piety), or lunge into rage.

There is another way.

At Greater Good Science Center, psychologist John T. Jost and political psychologist John Powell (now known as john a. powell - I am re-reading his books and articles now) have explored the difference between “othering” and “belonging.” Powell reminds us that when people feel they are losing status, voice, or dignity, their brains register threat. Threat narrows us. It hardens identity. It makes caricatures of our neighbors. It makes us fearful or angry - ready to fight or run away.

The answer, he argues, is “bridging” — not erasing difference, but building structures of belonging large enough to hold it.

In her landmark book Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent years listening to Tea Party conservatives in Louisiana. She did not debate them. She did not shame them.

She listened for what she called their “deep story” — the narrative of waiting in line for the American dream while others seem to cut ahead. Whether one agrees with that perception is almost secondary. The act of listening revealed pain, pride, fear, and longing.

Listening does not equal agreement. It equals respect.

And respect is oxygen for conscience. Let me say that slightly differently. Respect allows an inner loosening up of one's tensions (fear, longings, aching wounds, stifled gifts) and liberates our consciences.

Historically, people of faith have understood this. The Religious Society of Friends — the Quakers — practiced what they called “holding someone in the Light.” They would sit in silence, trusting that there is “that of God in everyone.”

Their activism grew not from fury, but from disciplined stillness. They held vigils. They wrote letters. They refused to participate in violence. They sang. They waited. They acted when the Inner Light compelled them.

Most people don’t know it, but there was an active Quaker movement in East Tennessee before the Civil War - a 5-mile drive from where I spent most of my growing up years.  One of the people my family was quite proud of on my father’s side was Captain William Penn Testerman (During the Civil War, he fought first for the Confederacy and then switched to the Union - which mirrored the inner and outer conflict that many in East Tennessee felt.).

I think my family members somewhere back there were admirers of the Quakers though my own family was Methodist. My father, a Methodist minister, had Wesley as his middle name.

The early Methodism movement under John Wesley combined holiness with social action too. They visited prisoners, educated children, opposed slavery, organized societies for mutual aid. Wesley’s “General Rules” were simple: Do no harm. Do good. Stay in love with God. Personal holiness and social holiness were never separate categories. Pray and picket.

Holiness was love embodied in public life.

What does that mean for us now, particularly if we are people of faith? We are still shook up here in our little berg from the previous high school student walk out and evidence of counter-moves of disrespect (anti-ICE protesters versus those standing with ICE).  Worried about holding our community together in love, justice, and active peace.

What can we do?

First, it means we must tend our own nervous systems. Threat hijacks conscience. Before we march, post, argue, or withdraw, we breathe. Quakers begin in silence for a reason. If we want to blow or to “breathe on the coals” of our own or another’s conscience, as restorative justice practitioners and others sometimes say, we cannot arrive with gasoline. We arrive with steady presence.

Second, we practice compassionate listening. Hochschild’s work shows that when people feel heard, their rigidity softens. Bridging work today — whether across racial, political, or economic divides — consistently finds that belonging reduces extremism.

If we caricature, we entrench. If we listen, we humanize. This does not mean we abandon moral clarity. It means we separate the person from the position and speak to the human being beneath the slogan.

Third, we remember that public witness and presence has always included embodied practices: vigils, prayer circles, resistance songs. When enslaved people sang spirituals, when civil rights marchers sang “We Shall Overcome,” when Quakers stood silently against war, they were not performing for cameras.

What were they doing? They were strengthening moral imagination! Singing together regulates fear. Prayer reorients anger toward hope. A candle held in vigil says, “I will not let darkness have the final word.”

Fourth, we act in ways that align with conscience but resist dehumanization.

Restorative justice teaches that accountability without humiliation preserves dignity. Protest without hatred preserves the protester’s soul. As Martin Luther King Jr. often reminded audiences, we must resist systems of injustice without destroying the person caught inside them. We are all caught in our autobiographies and in our human emotional wiring.

So this work can be hard.

We may want punishment. We may want swift correction. Yet history suggests that durable justice grows from movements that combine moral courage with disciplined love. Quaker abolitionists, Methodist reformers, civil rights leaders — their power did not come from dominance but from coherence. Their private prayers matched their public actions.

Bridging does not mean passivity. It means building relationships sturdy enough to hold disagreement. It means asking, “What pain or fear might be underneath this?”

It means advocating policies that protect the vulnerable while refusing to caricature those who oppose them. It means creating circles — in churches, libraries, living rooms — where people can speak and be heard without being shamed.

At this moment in the United States, and here in my little town of Cashmere, people of faith in particular (of all denominations and even different religions) might ask:

Are we amplifying fear or belonging?

Are we modeling conscience or merely reacting?

Are we tending the flame of holiness in ourselves while calling forth justice in the world?

The Good Life is not a life without conflict. It is a life in which conflict becomes an arena for courage, clarity, compassion, and wisdom. Faith communities have always carried tools for such times: silence, song, service, solidarity, steadfastness.

Perhaps the invitation is this:

Begin in stillness.

Listen for the deep story.

Stand publicly for what protects the vulnerable.

Refuse to dehumanize.

Sing when your courage falters.

Pray for those you oppose.

Build bridges sturdy enough to carry truth and fairness and conscience and wisdom and our common humanity across them.

History does not only turn on elections and laws. It turns on the quality of our presence.

How might we journey together to The Good Life building active, durable peace by steady presence, breathing on the coals of conscience, and bridging?

Sidebars:

1) Here's an excerpt from an interview with john powell

But again, in practical terms, it seems so difficult sometimes, when divisions over race, gender and sexual identity are so tense, and seemingly so volatile.

We talk about short bridges and long bridges. We say: Start with the short bridge.

I was talking to Pastor Michael McBride, a local pastor in the Bay Area. When I talked about bridging, he said: “So john, let me be clear — are you suggesting that we bridge with the devil?” I said: “Pastor McBride, I don’t suggest you start there.” 

Don’t start with the longest bridge, and even short bridges can be challenging. But also be careful who you call the devil. We have to learn to bridge with the apparent other, and our fears.  

2. The Buddhists made it!

Buddhists walking over 2 thousand miles arrived in Washington, D.C. yesterday

3. Thank you, Anne-Marie for sharing the following poem with me this morning.

There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Jerusalem”

Sometimes a seed of compassion

slips into my brain and lands in a place

where before only anger could grow.

These seeds appear

when I stop seeing humans

as only our actions and start

seeing all of us as walking wounds.

They appear when I see others

finding ways to be generous, to be kind.

If I offer the seed the barest scrap

of attention, it begins to grow roots.

Then a stem. Then seed leaves.

More leaves. A bud. But what allows

for this growth is far beyond me—

rather some gift that comes through

when me and my story get out of the way.

This is how I sometimes come to find

a whole field of inner daisies thriving

in a place I once torched to the dirt.

At first, they needed my constant care.

Then they reseeded again. And again.

They spread into such unpredictable

places. Sometimes outside my inner world.

The same way the seeds arrived in me.

Through kindness. Through love.

It’s beautiful.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer