On Volume and Distance

Conflict abounds. This side rages against that side. Make signs. Post tweets. Getting even morphs into getting ahead. My side wins; your side loses.

It has been a long time since John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band sang, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

We Christians serve the Prince of Peace, he who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9) His culture of peace serves to supplant the culture of conflict that surrounds us.

There are two ways you can work with Jesus to mitigate our culture’s conflicted and conflicting way of life. Decrease the volume. Minimize the distance.

When people experience conflict, they tend to raise the volume. People end up shouting and outshouting one another. This happens on picket lines, in board meetings, in parking lot altercations and at the dinner table. It reflects the old line about preaching, “When in doubt, shout.”

Learn the lesson of your wise third grade teacher. Remember her? Remember how when things got noisy or rambunctious in class, she actually spoke in lower tones? She reduced her volume and did not seek to meet or exceed the noise of the classroom. And counterintuitively, her quietness broke the power of the noise. Things settled down. Order was restored. Reason could reign again.

That’s the first way to minimize conflict. Lower the volume. Try that in your next situation that devolves into conflict. As the others get louder, you get softer, quieter, more measured in word choice and tone. Counterintuitive. Counter cultural.

Second, conflict can be lowered by decreasing the distance, physically and metaphorically, between those who are conflicted. This was a lesson I learned years ago when I first became a pastor. I remember a number of occasions where I was talking with someone on the phone about a problem. The more we talked on the phone, the more conflicted the situation became. It took me a while, but I learned that if there was an issue between another person and me, if I would meet with that person face to face and not over the phone, the situation was much more likely to be solved amicably. By decreasing the distance between us, the likelihood of conflict resolution increased.

When in a conflict, see how you can reduce the distance. A text is closer than a Facebook post. An email is closer than a text. A phone call is closer than an email. A meeting in an office is closer than a phone call. A lunch at a restaurant is closer than a meeting in the office. A visit to a home is closer than a lunch in a restaurant. This is not disconnected from the principle that for people to be together they need to get together.

So much of our culture actually feeds on increasing conflict: media, politics, social media platforms. In fact, an under-reported reality is that Critical Theory (the father of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Social Justice Movement) seeks to exacerbate conflict between groups.* To quote Jesus a bit but not too much out of context, “It shall not be so among you.” Matthew 20:26

You and I are deployed as followers of Jesus into a very conflicted time. We are deployed into our communities, workplaces, play spaces, preferred social media platforms and homes. Let us be peacemakers by practicing the “less is more” principle of conflict resolution. The less the volume and the less the distance the more likely conflict can be resolved.

*Cynical Theories by Pluckrose and Lindsay will get you beyond the surface of what you hear about Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory and the Social Justice Movement and get you closer to what is behind it. It is not by accident that conflict continues to increase.