Last
week I was a guest on the island of Nantucket, in Massachusetts. I was
participating in a program called The Nantucket Project (TNP) which brings
together people of differing backgrounds and points of view and creates a
“container” of sorts—physical, emotional and spiritual—in which people can talk
about their commonalities rather than differences.
Many
of us are trying to attempt this kind of communication now—all of us who are
fed up with the anger and blame and harsh judgments that we witness and
experience on social media.
The Nantucket Project (TNP) is like a high-end version
of Quaker meeting, or maybe, more familiar, it is like what those of us in
recovery understand from conversations in our fellowship.
Several
times during my four days on Nantucket I sensed that TNP was replicating the
deep conversations that people in recovery have the luxury of experiencing
regularly, because our traditions and guidelines help us to care about each
other through our differences. And it is a gift.
One
of the speakers I heard on Nantucket last week was Ndabe Mandela, the grandson
of Nelson Mandela. Ndabe was a boy when he came to live with his grandfather
and he began to learn the ways—both fierce and compassionate—of being in the world
and being a man.
Ndabe Mandela told the audience the story of Nelson Mandela’s time as a prisoner on Robben
Island. Mandela was there for 27 years in isolation--cold, hungry, aching and
aging. He knew that he would be there a long time—expecting to end his life
imprisoned—and had every reason and expectation to be hateful and hated.
But what Nelson Mandela did was to become
fluent in the Afrikaans language, the language that his guards and captors
spoke. He taught himself to speak and read and write Afrikaans, and it happened
that, over time, the guards—many of them less literate than Mandela—would come
to him to have him read them their letters from home and have his help in
writing back to their families.
As you can imagine, when you are reading
another person’s correspondence and helping them sort out their family
situations, it is a very intimate experience. You quickly find your shared
humanity as you discuss another person’s children or in-laws or marriage or
money. Mandela quickly cared for his captors and they in turn, for him.
This was an enormous frustration for the
prison managers who wanted Mandela to suffer and to feel isolation. The detail
of guards surrounding Mandela had to be changed every three months because they
would—each time—begin to care for the old man, and when they cared they would
start to bring a little extra food, or extra blanket etc.
And so, his
conditions, which were intended to be quite harsh, kept improving much to the
consternation of the wardens.
What
was so striking to me about this story was that change came about because
Nelson Mandela learned the language of his captors.
Relationships were forever
changed because he made the effort to change toward them without an expectation of them changing toward him.
The
take away is this:
Wherever
we have conflict in our lives, wherever we are insisting on our rightness, that
is when we have to learn the other person’s language and they (any “they”) do
not have to learn ours.
