Beyond Convincing

A couple years ago, a man I’ll call Jim passed away well into his nineties. Jim was a white man, U.S.-born, with plenty of resources. He had his prejudices, but was by all accounts kind and eagerly personable. He was devoted to his family, his church, and friends. He was a confident, lifelong, conservative voter.

Jim’s neighbor, Gloria, is among the many friends who miss Jim to this day. She’s a teacher, decades younger than Jim, who immigrated from Central America years ago and moved in across the street. Gloria is a passionate, lifelong liberal.

Long before the illness that ended Jim’s life, Jim and Gloria had forged a devoted and loving friendship. In the months before he died, Gloria visited almost daily. Until he could no longer speak, they continued a years-long conversation about how the world works in which they quite often disagreed.

I know this story from Jim’s daughters, who witnessed many of their conversations, and heard from each of them how much they cared for each other. I’ve asked them how they think their father and Gloria tended their friendship, even though for each their political perspective was a deeply important lens through which to view the world.

The answers are always the same: trust and respect.

What I’m curious about is this:  How did they come by that trust and respect?  How did they even get started?

Over their years of friendship they discovered values and traits they had in common: being good neighbors was one, as were compassion and kindness. In the end, they loved each other. But when they first met, all they knew they shared was the street they lived on. And even after their years of friendship, they’d found little common political ground.

Especially in times of drastic differences between perspectives about what’s wrong and right, and how political leaders ought to act and behave, common ground is often invoked as the antidote to social discord, sometimes even to social injustice. 

But what if there’s scarcely any, or no common ground, at all? What’s the antidote then?

Jim’s daughters can’t tell me what exactly happened between the two to generate their trust and respect despite their differences in experience and political perspectives.  They can tell me, though, that their dad was deeply and genuinely curious, that he listened well. He believed in compassion – not causing or celebrating others’ suffering. He was full of grace; he knew that being human meant making mistakes, and gave people plenty of chances to grow beyond them.

My friends say curiosity, compassion, and grace describe Gloria too. So maybe that was the ground in which the seeds of trust and respect between them were nourished and grew. But does that trust and respect matter, if they don’t succeed in convincing each other of their political perspective?

I think it has to matter, because when passions run high, when it’s hard to tell facts from fictions, when experience and belief say that survival is at stake, then convincing is very hard at best, and at worst feels like a threat.

But I’m not willing to give up on change when convincing isn’t an option; there has to be another way to overcome cruelty, to mitigate hate, to help fear stand down, to make way for all people to thrive as who they understand themselves to be.

Jim and Gloria’s friendship points toward another way: practice.

What they shared was compassion, curiosity, and grace. For them, perhaps, that came naturally, though it doesn’t come easy to everyone; it certainly hasn’t for me. But practice isn’t for what comes easily; it’s for getting better and better at hard things, on purpose, by trying over and over again.

A friend of mine said recently that when people meet her with compassion and curiosity, when they offer her grace, “It rubs off on me.” She finds herself feeling more compassion and meeting more people with grace. She thinks differently about people with whom she disagrees. It’s less easy to put people in boxes – to forget that they’re fully human, with complex lives, loves, and potentials.

That makes her less comfortable with cruelty, more inclined to do something about it. She’s not alone in that – research and systems-change wisdom bear this out. People can change in humanizing ways, without any active convincing at all.  

Gloria and Jim, it seems, spent little time on convincing. They recognized each other’s compassion, they offered each other grace, they earnestly asked questions and listened to the answers. In that way they earned each other’s respect and trust.

In my view there will always be need for organizing, for advocacy, for standing ground in anger, for clear-eyed non-violent resistance to inhumanity. Those options aren’t always available, though, and in relationships, very often they do more damage than good.

Relationships are not everything, but they’re often where change begins. Respect and trust are powerful antidotes to cruelty and inhumanity; love even more so. That’s not an empty platitude. I’m not suggesting doe-eyed kindness. I’m suggesting strategy: when convincing may not work, practice offers another path to change.

Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Founding Executive Director