Grace for the Unheard, the Misunderstood, and the Rest of Us, Too

I attended the ordination of a friend on Sunday (congratulations to The Reverend Mr. Bob Nolan!). The Senior Pastor of his church, who is also a friend, Rev. Scott Spencer, had a beautiful reflection on the Woman at the Well during the service. Scott said that what the Church Universal has to offer the world today is water for the spiritually thirsty in the form of grace. God’s unconditional love, he said, should be at the heart of everything we as individual Christians do and the motivating force behind everything our churches do. He’s right, and I will come back to what our churches can do in another post; for tonight, the topic is the civil grace for which we thirst in America.

Last night’s debate did very little to change the impressions of the denizens of either Camp Clinton or Tower Trump. Perhaps some undecided voters were swayed to one or the other, although based on the somewhat representative population of my Facebook feed, not many moved fully into one or the other column. Also based on the representative population of my Facebook feed, there were two very different debates that happened last night, and neither one matches the transcripts that I read this morning (we opted for light TV watching at the end of “girls’ night” while waiting for “the guys” to return from an outing; my companion wouldn’t have been able to hear the debates and I can’t stand listening to either candidate anyway, so I planned to read the transcripts from the get-go).

In a lot of ways, the answer to the mystery of Mr. Trump’s success lies in the fact that most of his supporters have been unheard for years. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, talked about the left-behind blue-collar families of white Appalachian culture with Terry Gross on Fresh Air last month; he noted that most of his family and friends are voting for Trump despite the vast difference in their status and upbringing because they believe he is speaking for them—amplifying their complaints to a volume that can now be heard in the national conversation. There is no doubt truth to that. What disturbs me is that along with the reasonable complaints comes the undeniable taint of racism and xenophobia that, while not close to a majority, much less universal, feeling among this segment of the population, means that the merits of their complaints continue to go unheard by those who could most help this group of Americans no matter where they live. It’s hard to understand what you won’t even hear. We have work to do for those who feel left behind.

Many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters have been heard but misunderstood. They are called deluded, slavish, and naive for championing her “of all people!” for president; they have been accused of misandry, hypocrisy, and dogmatic blindness for supporting her centrist policies when such fervor arose on the left for Bernie Sanders. The more her supporters try to explain her qualifications and the unique perspective someone with experience as a de facto ambassador (First Lady), elected official representing an economically and culturally diverse state in the Senate and chief diplomate of the country brings to the position of president* the more they seem to be misunderstood as supporting her only because she is a woman…and I sadly do not find it surprising that the most misunderstood are women and those who misunderstand the most are men. I do find surprising the number of women who misunderstand. We can all do a better job of listening to understand instead of thinking about the objections we will raise as soon as it’s our turn to talk—or instead of interrupting and talking over people.

(Let me be clear that misunderstanding is different than disagreeing. I don’t think it’s possible to disagree honestly unless you understand, quite frankly, and I’m reasonably sure that most of us have our minds so set on what we believe that we don’t even realize we don’t understand what we think we disagree with. I have dealt with the type of people who say that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t understand often enough to know that we should be teaching both epistemology and logic much more in our public schools than we do.)

“Black Lives Matter” is both unheard by some and misunderstood by many others who do hear it. Those who refuse to listen are those who immediately trot out “He/She deserved that treatment because gun/disobedient/resisting arrest/drugs/arrest warrant…” whenever someone of color is hurt or killed by a law enforcement officer and may also be inclined to shout “Blue lives matter!” whenever a LEO is hurt or killed by a suspect of color. Those who misunderstand say, “All lives matter!” as a rebuke to the movement without recognition that “Black Lives Matter” in no way implies that any other life doesn’t. Of course all lives matter. We shouldn’t need a “Too” tacked on to “Black Lives Matter” to get that we need to do a much, much better job at changing the culture that allows our brothers and sisters of African and Caribbean descent to be “othered” at every turn. We shouldn’t need mothers and fathers explaining in their blogs how the beautiful little boys they are raising will all too soon be seen as threats by the same people who now are fawning over their smiles and their energy. We should be hearing and understanding with great clarity that we ALL have work to do.

These are just three areas where the unheard and the misunderstood need grace. I suspect that each of us is all at once unheard, misunderstood, not listening, and misunderstanding (perhaps willfully, perhaps not) in conversation with our neighbors. It makes no difference whether we are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jedis, agnostics, atheists, or members of any other religious group: we can still offer grace when the fault is ours and receive grace humbly when it is offered by others.

Grace begins with the acknowledgement that the side to which you have not been listening or that you have misunderstood has a legitimate point of view shaped by experience and is backed up by facts. Listen to the stories being told by the other side and look for the factual statements being made. If you need to check the, use a reliable fact checking source. If you’re being offered grace, accept it and do your best to speak your truth as you have experienced it and to use verifiable facts. Regardless, if you’re talking politics and if your candidate has said something offensive or stupid, don’t try to explain it away or deny that it was put out for public consumption…especially if what was said is still on that candidate’s Twitter feed or if there’s video of her saying it. And if you’re being offered grace, make sure that you also have heard and understood the other side. There is no doubt truth on both sides of any issue, though mileage may vary depending on the issue.

How is that possible? Because we live in a Technicolor^TM world, not a black and white world or even a world that is 50 or 256 shades of gray. Two things that seem opposite can be true at the same time. We can be much better as a nation than we were 50 years ago about implementing the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., but still have a long, long way to go before the cultural destruction of slavery and Jim Crow has been repaired. We can have a woman running as the nominee for President of the United States of a major party for the first time and still have a long, long way to go before women have equal status and power in America. We can have an unemployment rate of 4.9% in August 2016 with an increase in actual income of 5.2% in 2015 and still have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people feeling like they are still struggling to make ends meet. Both/And is real, confusing, and frustrating, but grace requires that we learn to see the world that way instead of as Either/Or.

The malaise infecting America right now is the result of leadership who insist on Either/Or as the only legitimate world view. We all know in our hearts that it’s not true, but getting ourselves out of it requires hard work that most of us are too tired to start. Grace is that hard work. It doesn’t end with recognizing that others have a legitimate point of view, of course; grace extends through to the point that we have arrived at a common goal that addresses all of our concerns. If we can hear the unheard, understand the misunderstood, be heard, and be understood, I think many of the answers will come to us collectively. We CAN change the trajectory of our country, but we must first offer grace to and receive grace from each other. 

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*Whatever her flaws, and they are legion, there is no other person in the United States today who is eligible to run for president who is more qualified and prepared than she is, though I would argue that Joe Biden and Colin Powell are equally qualified and prepared. I was kind of hoping for a Powell/Biden ticket, actually, in the same way that in 2000 I wanted a Sam Nunn/Colin Powell unity ticket. I liked what Bernie Sanders brought to the table. Though I disagree with most of what he believes, I think Lindsey Graham is an honorable, thoughtful man who would have made a good president if he weren’t saddled with a Palinesque VP, in large part because he’s been known to study issues and—GASP!—publicly state the he has changed his mind! On a gaming matrix of good/neutral/evil and chaotic/neutral (true)/lawful, I suppose I’d set aside my own dislike of Mrs. Clinton’s choice to stay with a man who treated her so very badly to say she’s neutral good. It’s not really “the lesser of two evils”, as so many insist (and I did, until I sat down to read the platforms in detail and the transcript of the debate, not that I was ever going to vote for Mr. Trump, who is chaotic neutral at best and chaotic evil at worst). See here for an easy to understand description of the character types.