The Roots of Civility I:

Faith, Hope and Providence

By Ron Mock

At some point in every class I teach on conflict resolution or community mediation, I give my pep talk about hope. It runs something like this:

“People in the midst of bitter conflict tend to despair. We give up. We see no path to a resolution where everyone’s needs can be met. If the other side gets what they want, our lives will be ruined…or lost.

“Despair disables us. We cannot trust. We cannot risk. We cannot even afford the time and energy to try, since it’s pointless. We need to focus our efforts on figuring out how to destroy or disable our enemies, or finding a way to escape with as few losses as possible.

“The first big thing, maybe the most important thing, you can bring to desperate conflict is hope. The disputants – your allies, your enemies, or the warring factions who have asked you to mediate – need you to be the one person in the room hanging onto hope when all others have given in to despair.”

It’s unreasonable to expect people facing the imminent loss of life’s essentials to forego their desperate defenses. You may as well demand they walk on water. So what can the peacemaker do? Embody hope for those who can't find it on their own.

I ask students to tell me on what basis they could cling to hope when all around them have given up.

Some talk about the power of the conflict transformation processes they’re learning. Others look to prior experiences where things looked bleak but people found a good outcome. A few refer to their belief in the basic goodness of human nature. Many cannot identify a rock they can cling to.

Note what all these responses imply: faith in something is required. Faith in the process. Faith in the replicability of prior experiences. Faith in human nature. None of these are fool-proof. Speaking for myself, I don’t know whether I could gin up enough faith in any of those things to carry me through the toughest situations.

Hope in desperate situations requires active faith – acting as if something is true without knowing for sure it’s true. If the basis of the faith is shaky, it will be hard to act upon it when the winds are howling and the waves are high.

In America as I write this, the winds are howling and the waves are very high. Our corrosive, alienated politics have left us wounded, hurting, and dispirited. Is there some better basis for hope than faulty human nature or our faltering democratic processes?

Here is where a peacemaker's religious faith can be a crucial resource: faith in a loving omnipotent God can sustain hope when others falter.

As evidence of God omnipotence, we have the unnecessary universe. It didn’t have to exist, and its origins are still not explicable by the laws of nature. So why is there a universe?

As evidence of God’s love, we each have our own unique existence. You’ve only existed once. Your parents did the same things that have been done billions of times without making you – but that one time YOU resulted. Had the baby been someone else, as it was every other time in history, no one – not even your parents – would have missed you. So why are you here?

Christian faith offers this answer to these two fundamental questions: God is the omnipotent Creator who made the universe out of love for all of us, and gave each us life out of love for each one of us.

We don’t often enough think through the implications of this faith. Here is one that seems inescapable: an omnipotent God who created and loves each of us would never leave anyone without means to meet their needs.

Which brings us back to hope in the midst of conflict. Believers in a loving, omnipotent God are uniquely equipped to be that doggedly hopeful person, the only one in the room sometimes, when people all around have succumbed to bitter despair. We believe God loves everyone in any conflict, which (at a minimum) means God wants everyone to have access to means to meet their true needs. And we serve an omnipotent God, for whom anything is possible. So somewhere in any mess, there has to be a way for everyone to end up with means to meet their true needs.

Embodying this belief in the midst of conflict is one of the most powerful ways we can love our neighbors (and our enemies).

Well, you might say, that’s interesting, but it isn’t much help if you need God to perform a miracle to give all the disputants means to meet their needs. God doesn’t do miracles on demand.

But we are not counting on miracles. We are counting on providence. The world is replete with resources pre-positioned there by God, as an act of love to humans (and other creatures).

God anticipated we would need vaccines against disease. So the raw ingredients for the vaccines come with the disease: for polio in the polio virus, for COVID-19 in the COVID-19 virus, etc.

The same can be said for paper, or pizza, or penicillin: the ingredients have always been there. God provided at the time of the Creation the means for us to write crucial love letters, feed the mob when the resulting middle schoolers invite their friends, and combat infections when they scratch each other fighting for the biggest piece. Knowing we would need these things, God put the necessary resources where we could find them.

I said I wasn’t counting on miracles, but that’s not really accurate. I am not ruling out new miracles; they can surely happen. But our hope does not generally depend on them, because providence itself is the biggest miracle. God pre-positioned the resources we’d need, provided them even before we needed them, out of love and compassion for each of us, and all of us.

The universe’s improbable, unnecessary existence is a miracle, the original and fundamental bit of divine providence.

The ingredients for warm pumpkin pie and cold vanilla ice cream are improbable, unnecessary, and extravagant providence, another pre-positioned miracle.

And here is maybe the most important example: you are part of God’s providence to your neighbors and your nation. You are God’s specially created improbable gift, far more extravagant than pumpkin pie and ice cream, a crucial link in God’s plan to provide everyone access to means to meet their needs. You are now pre-positioned to be that miraculous providence for people around you.

You really are God’s gift to your family, friends, community, nation, and world.

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You probably should still have questions for me. For example:

We went millennia before we discovered penicillin in mold and polio vaccine in the form of dead polio viri. So many people suffered and died with the undiscovered cures right at hand. What went wrong?

Why did God hide the cures in plain sight like that? Why couldn’t God put all the cures we ever needed in a slice of pumpkin pie and ice cream?

These are excellent questions, which I will begin to address in my next exploration of the Roots of Civility.

© Ron Mock, December 2020