It often distresses and bothers me to hear or find out that I am thought to be a ferocious or combative person who seeks after arguments and fights. I suspect, from long and painful personal experience, that this very common misinterpretation of my character springs from a wide gulf between the way in which I think and feel and the very direct and outspoken way in which I present myself to others, especially in writing where there is no ability for others to see the tone and facial expressions that often moderate the pointed and direct words I say. I try to give others the benefit of the doubt in their own communications (which often read rather fiercely to me), given that I recognize how easily and commonly my own communications are tragically misread by others.

When I listen to other people, which is often, I tend to find that most people have strong sensitivities and generally good reasons for those sensitivities. Now, often those sensitivities lead to behavior that may be extreme or counterproductive, but at the same time I cannot find fault in others for problems I share rather pointedly within myself. Even among those I strongly disagree with and may even intensely dislike, I generally see where they are coming from if I take the effort to do so, and even if I cannot often convey my respect and consideration for others in ways that they recognize, being an extremely emotionally reserved person by nature, that concern is generally felt if not always expressed very openly.

I have also found often that personal matters are often at the base of our political and intellectual commitments. Being a person whose passion for justice on a large scale springs from intensely personal ground, I do not pretend to be without bias. Generally, I assume that any cause that motivates others motivates them for personal reasons–either something that has happened to them or someone they care about. Often our efforts to help improve the world in whatever modest way that we can spring from personal experiences. The same is true for the commitments we are opposed to–those too often spring from intensely personal ground also. We ought to be willing to admit the sort of personal experiences that have led us to our commitments, even if we are afraid that such an admission might undercut our intellectual rationalizations and arguments, because it makes us more human and therefore worthy of more compassion.

Even if I have not been able to convey this understanding of where people come from, this sympathy for their struggles, it helps me see others as less cardboard black & white villains from a spaghetti Western and more as flesh and blood human beings who are often just as prickly and sensitive in their areas as I am in mine. I just wish it was easier to convey this understanding. After all, most of my insight and recognition in this area comes from being an intuitive person who sees the external behavior of people as resulting from internal causes, and then doing what is possible to figure out what internal causes would lead to those external actions and behaviors and results. Obviously, this intuition is not perfect, but at the same time it is immensely useful, even if it is difficult to convey these insights to those who are enemies and who would be unwilling to appear anything like human in the eyes of one they assume (generally wrongly) hates them.

But it is so easy for misunderstandings and miscommunications among very sensitive people dealing with very sensitive areas to blow up into massive arguments over and over and over again. It is an immensely difficult task to avoid the hurt feelings and misunderstandings in the first place, to stop the problem before it blows up into a massive fight. After all, we are supposed to be peacemakers, with fervent love for our brethren, rather than combative and angry souls cutting down the wounded with ferocious swords of verbal and physical abuse. God only knows we all have enough wounds as it is already without adding more and more to that list through our carelessness and our lack of compassion and outgoing concern. We ought to be binding up the many wounded and broken souls of this world and helping them to become whole in God’s ways, rather than adding more wounded souls to this world’s overflowing amounts.

I say this not to condemn anyone else (for certainly I could not condemn others without condemning myself–I know I have a sharp tongue and a skill with wounding others with words, a tendency I struggle against daily). Rather, I wonder how we can convey the love that we genuinely feel, and how we can make it safe for we ourselves and others to be honest about ourselves without fearing that others will use that knowledge against us at every opportunity. It is as if to resolve the personal issues and personal insecurities that we have to build an social infrastructure of safety and concern that is recognized and felt before one can talk about difficult matters. And we are pretty woefully poor when it comes to building infrastructure of any kind in this present age, be it social or material.

It is clear that in order to deal with disagreement and unpleasant truth that we need to construct a social space that gives safety to all, and allows all to feel comfortable, honored, respected, with their needs for privacy met as well. This requires hard work, and time, and the building of trust (which is rather easily squandered by careless and thoughtless mistakes). I see this as a necessary task, and an urgent one, but it is one that I do not feel very skilled at at this point in time. Perhaps practice and effort will allow me to get better at it, but I am far from comfortable with my own ability in providing safety and recognized outgoing concern to others. As in so many areas of life, I know where I want to be but I do not know how to get there. There is a wide gap between who I am and who I could be, but hopefully there is time to get there and some way to find a path from here to there.