#18 Our cognitive capture is real.
Science is figuring us out: Now we know why we can't get along. Helping people consider perspectives other than their own is a major human deficiency. Our brains are wired to be bad at this. We live in cognitive capture of our own making. That's how we used to survive for million years. But times they are a-changin'. Now we need "the other" to help us know ourselves, and "the other" needs us for the same reason. That's how we can all survive.
There's hope: Openings at the edges of our identities where new ideas can loop in and out of our thinking system can free us from this cognitive capture. Every person, marriage, family, company, country, and political party needs outsiders to help us see what's obvious to them but not to us. They help us see bad, good, and ugly and to speak the unspeakable, whether scary or beautiful. Once we experience some liberation from our cognitive biases and survive the experience, we have found the door to freedom.
#19 Break the boundary rules.
Act before explaining: I used to be younger and sturdier. I was a church pastor at the time (long story). When I sensed something was wrong, very wrong, with religion around me at the time, I could not explain what exactly was so very wrong. So I turned towards what that religion has been teaching me (without telling me) to be afraid of: The Other.
Here's how it went down.
Back in 1990, I arrived on the Upper East Side of New York City to help lost souls of the big, dirty city find the right path. But I fell in love with the city, and the city loved me back and changed me. So, I invited eighty Christian leaders to come for a "city plunge."
I put together an immersion event I called Loving Babylon (for those of you who are not religious, Babylon is bad, very bad). We divided everyone into groups of six and sent them on twenty-four-hour carefully designed journeys into the belly of the city, exposing them to forty spaces, interactions, and other experiences, led by trained guides.
One group, for example, went to a Kundalini Yoga class, a dinner in a leather bar, and a visit to a Harlem food pantry, topped off with a night of '60s dancing in a museum. Another group went to an AIDS hospitality house, followed by a conversation with black Muslims in Harlem and a poetry slam in Soho, finishing with a dinner with transgender folks. And so on.
I wanted to expose them to the grit and delight of people they had never met and always judged. I wanted them to experience beautiful dissonance until it became unbearable. I wanted them to encounter sheer grace embodied in the form of a drag queen serving them dinner. It was a smashing success.
Eventually, it got me fired. But, oh, my, God, angels, and all the elves, it was so worth it.
Question: What boundary rules do you think would be worth breaking in your context?
#20 Stranger is a problem.
Throughout the history of human interaction, we have been faced with the problem of the stranger. For every "us," there has to be "them." To describe ourselves, we must differentiate ourselves—me and you, kin and non-kin, friends and enemies, neighbors and foreigners. Without dividing the world, we would have no identity. Night implies there's the day. The other implies there's you. But that's not the problem.
We are engaged with strangers in inverse proportion to the distance that separates us. With globalization, the distance between "us" and "them" has been rapidly vanishing. The stranger has come close. The other is not "out there" in our physical, intellectual, and emotional neighborhoods. The distance that used to separate us is being abolished. That's not the problem either.
Here's the problem: In this new relationship, we are confronted not only with a new view of those we used to consider "outsiders" but with a new view of ourselves. They see in us what we could not recognize in ourselves, and when we let them, they tell us what we cannot tell ourselves. They have arrived into our daily lives with their beauty, wisdom, vulnerabilities, as well as their suffering, grievances, and aspirations. The stranger reveals. In other words, to survive, we need to protect ourselves from the stranger; to survive, we need the stranger to help us. That's difficult, albeit beautiful, problem to have.
God-level stuff: Jewish tradition nails this. While the Hebrew Bible commands, "you shall love your neighbor" only once, it commands no less than 36 times to "love the stranger." Other religions have an equivalent obsession with strangers. The entire histories of peoples have been held together by the visits, wisdom, and care of strangers, people who were not "us" but "them."
Why is God obsessing with strangers? Because the otherness of a stranger is akin to the otherness of the divine. The human other, the one we don't understand, is (gasp!) made in the image of the divine. Whether you believe in God or not is not the point here. The point is that spiritual traditions invite us to see the image of ultimate kindness, justice, and beauty in "those people." And none of us have brains that can handle it. Yet.
Learning to love well: Love visits us from the outside. The outsiders are often the only ones who can see and tell us what we cannot see or tell ourselves. If we could know these truths on our own, they would not be strangers. These visitors from the unknown are strangers precisely because they are bringing to us what don’t know. Which is a gift. Our fear signals revelation.
#21 Do you have a Strangers' Gate?
I have a story for you: In the 1860s, the nearly completed Central Park was recognized as a masterpiece of landscape architecture. Some influential people thought that the exemplars of high society who frequented the old park needed an entrance to accommodate their open carriages and reflect their place in the world. So they lobbied for a tall, European-style gate with a huge plaza, a decorative fountain, curving stairways, and 50-foot-high Classical-style columns. It could not get more predictable than that.
Fortunately, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Central Park, saw this initiative as an attack on everything their design was meant to accomplish. So, instead of building one colossal gate resembling the style of a European monarchy, Olmsted and Vaux turned the tide of public opinion and designed 20 gates into Central Park, whose low walls and simplicity of the wilderness inside the park represented democracy and the American republic.
In the 19th century, most of the gates were named after people groups who made New York City what it is. They had names such as Merchants' Gate, Mothers' Gate, Engineers' Gate, Mariners' Gate, Scholars' Gate, and Farmers' Gate.
Radical hospitality: Strangers' Gate (at West 106th St) is the closest gate to my home. Today, not only New York but every city, organization, community, and company is re-learning how to survive and thrive in our newly small world. In this new world, the role of those who differ from us is becoming critical. Those who can harness the energy, leadership, insight, support, and innovation through an authentic and life-giving relationship with "the other" will learn to love well, live well, and break free.
#22 Sometimes, go where you don't want to go.
I believe Joseph Campbell had saddled us with a problematic myth of the Hero's Journey (More about this in the future HummingWord issues). Being a genius, nevertheless, Campbell gifted us with incredible wisdom. Here's his quote that has been saving my life…