Fear, love and leadership

 

Fear, love and leadership

In the wake of this stormy election, and as the waters continue to swirl, what I can’t stop thinking about is how scared we all are. In a bitterly divided country millions of us have been scared that the other side would win. We are so separated, and the more separated we are, the easier it is to demonize. Our deepest fears get projected on the “other”.

I know this is an issue that has caused bitter conflict and divided families. So it was enormously heartening to hear from two people I know with family members who are solidly in the category of “other”. But these two women simply refused to be divided. They decided that love could win over fear. They dug deep to stay grounded in their love, to stay confident that we are all good, to hold to a belief that ultimately we all want the same things. They decided not to try to convince their family members about the rightness or logic of certain beliefs or points of view, but to tend deeply to the relationships.

This is what I want for all of us. It requires a lot. When we’re scared, it’s easy to feel like victims, to feel jerked around by others who have more power, or are led by people who have more power. And when we feel jerked around, it’s not easy to stay grounded in love. It’s certainly not easy to practice new forms of leadership—to lead in places where we’re not used to leading, or to follow leadership that we’re not used to following. Yet our times are calling out for the courage to try.

In this process, we’ll have to give up some assumptions about “the other”. To lead well, we have to like people. We have to hold out a vision that includes them. We have to have some compassionate and respectful understanding of the ground on which their beliefs have grown. We have to cultivate the humility to be open to learning from them, even as we may continue to hold out a different perspective.

To be led may be even harder. What would it take to listen for truth in someone we’ve never considered as an equal, or have learned to despise? Can we face the possibility of being changed? What would it mean to be genuinely curious to learn how someone ticks—either from a position of trying to lead, or trying to follow? Can we imagine finding a heart connection with somebody we had thought was outside the fold and lost to us forever?

I have to believe that whatever we might be required to give up in this process is something that we would be better off without. No matter how closely we have clung to it, no matter how central it has seemed to our definition of who we are, if we approach this project of “de-othering” with integrity. nothing of enduring value will be lost and we will emerge more fully human.

This doesn’t mean everything else has to stop. We get to continue to mobilize around policies we care about. We get  to share our thinking as clearly and compellingly as we know how. We get to strategize about how to win. But ultimately, this deeper work of the heart may be what saves us as a people.