Aside from wondering "How long, O Lord?" a lament taught to me by a wise professor, I've formed no significant opinion on the Ferguson issue…OK, not true.
But where this is rubbing against faith practice for me is a larger issue. Judging by people's behavior and language, it seems what is most important is to be right. As soon as someone says racism, someone else has to prove them wrong and it is law enforcement that is under attack. As soon as someone supports law enforcement, they must be proved wrong and insist the cops are the perpetrators.
Conversations around Ferguson are intense and pressing. But I wonder if, instead of having to prove ourselves right, or prove others wrong…what if we listened to the truth of another's experience. The truth of black parents being frightened for the lives of their sons is a reality I didn't live with on a daily basis when I raised my son. But it is their reality. Statistics back them up. They are right.
It's also the case with an increasingly armed population, and a myth that violence protects us from harm, our police forces work in increasingly dangerous situations. They are also right.
If you haven't stopped reading already, here's my question. If we didn't assume that only one side of an issue could be right, if we didn't have to determine the "winner" in the "right" column, could we listen to the "rightness" on all sides and come up with some better ways of being in this world together?
The Genesis story describes sin as eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
God says having to know Good and Evil (I read "right" and "wrong" in our language and understanding) leads to death.
In many of these cases it is literal death on both sides. But certainly it is a metaphorical death to be so entrapped by our need for only one side to be right that we forget the humanity involved on all sides.
Maybe the lesson we should spend our time learning is how to listen to the experiences of others as their truth. That might just give us what we need to restore trust and reconcile communities.
