Looking for a safe place to meet?
May is here, beckoning us outside to take in the greens, pinks, yellows and reds of our landscape’s exploding floral palette. Whether we venture outside masked or au naturelle, our spirits should soar with the noisy arrival of migratory birds claiming territories and perpetuating their own kind. The sun’s lengthening rays can’t help but assure us that sweaters and coats can soon be tucked away. Spring is in full array, a time when hope is renewed and hearts turn to recreation, friendship and social gatherings.
But will springtime 2021 really allow us to come out of our COVID-induced hibernation and rejoin the company of souls who, like us, have curtailed their normal associations out of fear of contracting, or spreading, the dreaded viral poison that has been stalking us for over a year. Is there a safe place for us to meet? Will there ever be?
For most of us those first steps we take towards others will likely be cautious ones. But with vaccines in hand—or in arms I should say—and with so many in our herd protected, the time to be in each other’s company, at work and play, seems close at hand. Even the most solitary among us savors those moments when we can be face-to-face with friends and family. Our forced separation this past year has robbed us of so much that is essential to our well being as members of the human race. So, how do we go about rejoining our species, up close and personal? Where is that safe place, or places, where we may meet people, once again? It is a question that is not just for these times, but has actually served as the undertow pulling us into that ocean of humanity from which we came to life and in which we ultimately find our identity.
In days of yore, when Americans lived in smaller communities, most people knew each other by sight and name. Meeting people was easy. We ran into them daily, or weekly in school, in church, at the grocery store, the malt shop or when frequenting the local park. But as America’s landscape changed from one of rural villages and modest-sized towns to sprawling and populous metropolitan centers, meeting people became more complicated. And as technology, transportation, expanding economies, and educational opportunity gave each new generation wings, we became a more transient, mobile species. Whereas people once lived out their lives in or near the places of their birth, now our stories are written in chapters marked by the number of times we have moved, the number of license plates we’ve collected, the several different jobs we have worked or careers we’ve pursued, and even the number of partners who have joined us along the way.
Our opportunities to meet people have changed accordingly. Like ships passing in remote seas, we now signal each other at a distance. Social networks and dating apps—21st Century semaphores of you will—distinguish those worth meeting from those to be avoided. Facebook “friends” enlarge our circle of associations whom we are urged to like, dislike or ignore. Yet they often prove poor substitutes for those we once knew in the flesh. Tweets, waves, thumbs up or down replace discourses over dinner (sans phones), or on the front porch or via letters written by hand in sentences with subjects and predicates rather than coded abbreviations. While we may communicate with each other with more frequency than ever before, are we really meeting them, listening to them, and knowing them for who they are? Or has that just become too inconvenient, too messy, too intrusive and even too dangerous in this era where our private and public existence straddles lines now blurred beyond recognition.
My understanding of where we may safely meet each other was powerfully shaped in the 1980s by Raimundo Panikkar, a 20th Century religion scholar with whom I became familiar in my doctoral research. Growing up with a Hindu father and Roman Catholic mother gave him an unusual knowledge of and sensitivity to the values and outlooks of both faiths. He wondered about where modern people could ever really meet each other, leaving us with this insight:
“The meeting point is neither my house nor the mansion of my neighbor, but the crossroads outside the walls, where we may eventually decide to put up a tent—for the time being.” (The Intrareligious Dialogue, 1978)
As I ponder my life as a social animal, I realize that most any time I have tried to meet another person, I have wanted it to be on my terms, those that suited my tastes and preferences, my likes and priorities. Meeting a friend for coffee and easy conversation may be a spur-of-the-moment decision. But more serious encounters (where we talk about jobs, friends, enemies, life-changing decisions, our kids, politics, money and religious beliefs) typically depend on which of us is more persuasive, or more willful, more inflexible and demanding, or simply more powerful. The closer and more intense the relationship, the more 0ur meetings resemble contests with winners and losers, dominants and submissives. It is either at my house or your house—symbolically speaking—where, at least one of us feels safer. That is why, if given a choice, we would prefer to meet at ours, not theirs. I may be alone in this feeling, but I think not.
When I hear the political rhetoric du jour calling us to “come together” and “become one” in thought and action, I want to believe that I’m being invited to some neutral spot where Panikkar’s vision of honest negotiation may take place. But listening further I too often sense that such offers may be packaged with strings attached, concealing agendas that preclude the open, critical assessment necessary for genuine dialogue. Could it be that the common ground to which I’m being directed is actually someone else’s house or fortress, where they are at home and I am, at best, a misguided soul needing to be corrected or converted. I suspect many Americans, whether liberal, conservative or in-between feel much the same. It is no wonder that we have become so skeptical of each other, no matter who is calling us together.
Herein lies perhaps our greatest challenge. What is safe for me—my places, thoughts, habits, tastes—may not be safe for you. I live comfortably in my house, in my space, in my set of ideas, narratives, even dogmas, but they may or may not resonate with you. In fact, some or even much that I regard as true and real may be so different and so contrary to what you claim to be true and real that we may never gather safely in either of our houses, fortresses, or tribal domains.
What we must be willing to find, and enter, is an intellectual, philosophical, political, even spiritual DMZ (demilitarized zone)—one we can enter without any fear that either of us will be carrying weapons (concealed or open) that can be used by us or against us. In such places dismissive ad hominen attacks can never be okay. In such places virtue can neither be signaled nor discounted. And in such places simplistic either/or dichotomies can never be entertained or accepted, no matter how forcefully they may be blown by the winds of popular sentiment.
From the first time people put their ideas and feelings into script they have longed for safe sanctuaries in which they could meet; where mutuality, shared good will, and trust would prevail. These “places in the heart” were believed to depend on our tacit agreement to meet each other in the spirit of moral reciprocity: what we want for ourselves we must insist upon for others; what we reject for ourselves we must never impose on others. Whether we label such ideals as golden or silver rules, they have been lifted up as the essence of human moral conduct and decency in every place and during every time in which human beings have ever tried to meet each other on this, our planetary home. I doubt we will find better wisdom to guide us as we venture out to meet people, once again, this year.
Meeting people, really meeting them, is more than just seeing them in the course of our day to exchange weather information or offer them a ritualistic “hi” or smile, with or without a wave. Even non-stop cell phone messaging fails to provide us the full sensory engagement that our eyes, ears, smell and touch provide, making these encounters one-dimensional at best. Only if we can be fully present with another person, and only in those places and moments where neither of us is armed or is on his or her native turf—will we ever really meet. For only then and there, in that most rare and liberating place where we feel safe in our own skin and they in theirs, can we ever hope to truly come together.
