This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Michael McRay has traveled to some of the Globe's most contentious sociopolitical locales.
Episode Transcript
Lee
Michael
So you'll have Rami Al-Anon, who's an Israeli, whose grandfather survived Auschwitz, but his daughter didn't survive her 14th birthday. She was blown up in Jerusalem by a suicide bomber. And so he's an Israeli whose daughter was killed by Palestinian terrorism. And then you've got Basaam, who's a Palestinian who spent seven years in Israeli prison, and whose daughter was 10 years old coming home from school and was murdered. So they would be in a room together with other parents with similar stories.
Lee
He tells such stories in his new book, I Am Not Your Enemy, because...
Michael
I had a strong belief that the stories that we tell directly affect our ability to imagine the world. So if we only tell one type of story, we will only see the world in one type of way.
Lee
Instead, he says, you story them into new ways of thinking. The stories Michael tells us have not only sociopolitical implications; they have personal implications for us as well.
Michael
Desmond Tutu says that the strings that we attach to the harm done to us are the chains that bind us to the past. And that when I continue to say, “I have to have something from you in order to move on,” I'm actually imprisoning myself to this person, and I'm continuing to give them power over me. If we hope to see a peaceful world around us, we have to start by creating a peaceful world within ourselves. You know, Gandhi said, “You have little hope to be nonviolent in situations of violence if you haven't cultivated the nonviolent self.”
Lee
Our interview in just a moment.
Michael McRay is a writer, facilitator, and story practitioner, has a master's degree in conflict resolution and reconciliation, and is the father of a brand new baby boy named Rowan. He and his wife, Brittany, live in Nashville, Tennessee, and I'm proud to say he's one of my former students. Welcome Michael.
Michael
Thanks Lee. Great to be here.
Lee
It's really good to have you with us here today.
Michael
Yeah, you've got a beautiful office. I love this space.
Lee
Yeah. This is my a COVID space that I got set up. Everything went online at school. I got my office all set up there to do online stuff, and then they said, “Well, evacuate your offices.”
[Laughter]
Michael
Yeah, well, this is great. It's beautiful.
Lee
Yeah, I love my space, and love my backyard here in Green Hills. It's a great space, but glad you're here. How's fatherhood treating you?
Michael
It's great. He's a really happy baby, and that's been such a joy. He smiles constantly. He absolutely loves it when I sing to him, so that's been great. I play guitar and sing to him every day. He's developed a very strong love of the Irish song, “Leaving of Liverpool.” Like, I can just sing the opening notes, and he starts smiling and cracking up. And he'll be really happy with some of the other songs, but that song, he just... it's so fascinating to me. So I sing some Dolly Parton to him and a bunch of other stuff. So I'm trying to teach him all the good Celtic songs and some good mountain songs from Tennessee.
Lee
As a good McRay should.
Michael
Yes, indeed. So he's very happy. He's a little bit fussy right now; he's teething at the moment, so you know, we're going through that, but he's great. I love him to death.
Lee
That's pretty sweet. Those are sweet times. And challenging times, if you get sleep deprived.
Michael
Yeah. Those first couple of weeks were... there were moments where I was like, “Exactly why did we do this?”
Lee
I can assure you, you're gonna ask yourself that many times over the next couple of decades.
[Laughter]
Michael
I'm sure. But thankfully right now we're in a nice smooth stage.
Lee
Well, Michael's latest book is entitled I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World, released by Herald Press. It's a fascinating premise for the book, in which you traveled to some of the most widely known geopolitical conflicts. So how did this... tell us a little bit more about how the book came to be.
Michael
Yeah. I think I first got the idea for the book in 2014. So Michael Brown had just been killed in Ferguson. ISIS was in the news all the time. Israel was bombing Gaza. And I had this sense of: the stories that we're hearing told publicly through the news seem to be beginning and ending with violence with no real imagination for “How is it that we can live in the midst of this, but find a way out?” And I had a strong belief that the stories that we tell directly affect our ability to imagine the world. So if we only tell one type of story, we will only see the world in one type of way. And so I wanted to be really intentional with the kinds of stories that I was going to tell. And so I thought, you know, what I think could be helpful is to go to places that have been living with deep division for a long time and say, “What are the stories about how you have found a way to kind of live beyond this violence, to live beyond these cycles of revenge and animosity?” And I grew up going to Israel, Palestine, so I had a lot of connections there. I did grad school in Northern Ireland, I lived in Belfast, and then I'd always studied South Africa when studying reconciliations. So I chose those three as the places that I wanted to go and try and have conversations with people who were figuring out how to live together beyond this idea of enemies.
Lee
So one of the questions I had written down that you just began to get at there was, Why storytelling as a primary art form here? But you just said you think that the stories we tell shape the imagination we have about what's possible, or something like that? Talk to us a little bit more about that.
Michael
Yeah. I mean, I think stories are one of the primary ways that we communicate. It's one of the oldest forms, I think, of human communication, for as... you know, you can see some of these thousand-year-old drawings on cave walls of people kind of writing out these stories, essentially, of hunting the sabre-toothed tiger or whatever. But, I mean, stories, at a very practical level, are the way that we tell each other about what it is to be human. You know, a story is, at a basic level, “Here's what is happening to me. Here's what's happened to me.” Stories have things happening to them. We can see ourselves in stories. They function a lot like mirrors. They activate mirror neurons in our brain. All of these... there's all this neuroscience around stories, but there's this sense of: this is what we do when we get together. You go out with friends for a beer, you know, whatever, and what you end up doing is just telling stories. “Oh my gosh, you won't believe what happened to me.” Right? So there's this really familiar thing, kind of, storytelling. Like, this is how we talk to one another. And I think that it's... there's a saying that the shortest distance between two people is a story, that it's what, you know, draws us in to one another. Shane Claiborne, mutual friend of ours, says that you can't argue people into new ways of thinking; you story them into new ways of thinking.
Lee
That's so, so true. Yeah.
Michael
Yeah, so I thought, you know, it won't be enough for me to just say, “Let me list for you wise ways of dealing with enemies.” It's like, “I need to show you this.” You know, there's another saying in writing: “Show, don't tell.” So I don't want to just tell you what I've learned. I want to show you in the stories, to kind of make this clear, so that you, as someone who also experiences human relationships and emotions and difficulty, can see yourself in the stories, and that we can use those as sort of beacons to guide ourselves through.
Lee
Yeah. And this has led into another sort of venture of yours called Tenx9 storytelling. Want to tell folks a little bit about that?
Michael
Yeah. So Tenx9 actually started before this book came about, but this love of storytelling has root there. So when I decided to move to Belfast to do grad school, there's a friend of ours named David Dark who had lived in Belfast. I reached out to David and I said, “I'm moving to Belfast. Who should I know when I go there?” So he gave me three names of people. I reached out to all three people. The first one was like, “Oh, I'll be happy to see you sometime when you're in town. Let me know when you're here.” Second person said, “Tell me the week that you're arriving. We'll set up coffee.” The third person was a guy named Pádraig Ó Tuama who said, “Who's picking you up from the airport?” And I said, “Nobody, I don't know a soul in Ireland.” And he said, “I'll be there to get you.” So he was literally the first person I met when I arrived in Ireland for grad school. And on our drive from the airport back into Belfast, I asked if I could pay him back for the gas for driving out to get me. He said, “Oh, don't worry about it. Just come to this storytelling event that my partner, Paul, and I run called Tenx9.” And I was like, “Oh, that sounds fantastic.” I love storytelling, but I'd never really seen live storytelling done. So anyway, I went to it in Belfast and was absolutely hooked, went every month that I was there. And when I left to come back home in 2013, I said, “Can I start this in Nashville?” And they're like, “I guess. No one's ever done that.” But I've now run it for... next month will be seven years of monthly events. And it's a time for true people to tell true stories. You know, we say it's nine people with up to 10 minutes each to tell a true story from their life. So, you know, I think of it... there's an Irish proverb that Pádraig taught me. In Irish, it goes, “Is i bhfoscadh a chéile a mhaireann na daoine,” which translates, “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” And I think that's what we're trying to do with this Tenx9 storytelling, with all the storytelling work that I do, is: how is it that we can use stories to create a shelter for one another so that it feels safer and more secure to live together? And so Tenx9 is just that. It's just a place for true... for real stories to have a place on stage. And it's been a joy.
Lee
I don't know that I ever told you this, but not long after you had started Tenx9, Laura and I went with six other friends, three other couples, and we were away for a weekend together. And because of Tenx9, I suggested to my friends: I said, “What if we take three rounds, where each of us has like eight minutes or six minutes or whatever it was, for each of us to tell a story.” And I think we did two or three rounds of that. And it was one of the sweetest times I've ever had with friends, because we really got to know each other, you know, in a way that we wouldn't know each other, other than sitting and listening to each other tell stories in a very intentional way like that. So, yeah. That's lovely. So in your book, I see you challenging some of the conventional wisdom around conflict or conflict resolution. Like for example, one of your chapters early in the book is entitled: “Dialogue is Not the Goal.” So, what do you mean by something like that?
Michael
Yeah. So this came from a conversation that I had with a Palestinian peace builder named Ali Abu Awwad. And it came on the heels of... where I start the book was that I was sitting in the garden of this hotel, essentially in the old city of Jerusalem, and I just sent an email to a Palestinian professor wanting to talk to her about, you know, this: what do you think about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians? And she wrote me back a very short email that just said, “This is an inappropriate conversation. We're being occupied. So we should talk about justice, not reconciliation.” And this was the start of the trip. So this woman is a Palestinian professor teaching in the West Bank. And my question around: what is your thought on reconciliation between Israel and Palestine... her response was to say, “Israel is occupying my country. I am being controlled by the Israeli army, by the Israeli government. So if we're going to have a conversation, it's going to be about justice in Israel Palestine, not reconciliation.” Then, so, she was communicating this deep tension. And even though her email was only, I think it was like 17 words, it contained, like, a lifetime of stories of abusive peace talks, of what it is to be a traumatized people, of how language of reconciliation and those processes have been used against people to perpetuate harm. And so I really wanted to say, like, “Well, that's what I want to talk about. Let's talk about that, this tension that there is between justice and reconciliation,” but I decided to respect her boundary. And so I went on to meet this guy named Ali Abu Awwad who grew up in the West Bank. His mother was very active in the political party, kind of friends with Yasser Arafat. For people that know that name, it's a big Palestinian political leader. And he spent time in prison for his resistance to the Israeli army, and his brother was murdered by an Israeli soldier. And yet he has devoted himself to building a nonviolent movement among the Palestinian people. And the time that I met him was trying to have these conversations with settlers. And so shorthand settlers would be... for many, would be considered the most extreme of the Israeli public. They are people who are actively moving in and building communities on Palestinian land. And so Palestinians would call them colonizers. So Ali was trying to have...
Lee
We should just clarify, for some, perhaps, they're moving in against internationally recognized boundaries, and building communities in the midst of that land, but has, then, profound ripple effects for access to resources or access to roads or...
Michael
Absolutely. Yeah, that's it. And so, for many Palestinians to even have conversations with Israelis at all would be... the language used is normalization. You're trying to normalize this unjust dynamic. We're being controlled by another group of people, so to be friends with them is to act like this is all normal. It's not normal. So for Ali to go and try to talk to the settlers, the people that would be seen as the most extreme, is just, like, unheard of. You do not do that. And I was really curious to know: what is this about? And one of the things he said to me in the course of the conversation was he said, “For many Israelis, dialogue has become the goal. This is what we're working toward.” He said, “But for me, dialogue can never be the goal. Dialogue for me is a carrier to freedom, that is, a means of my liberation. And when it is not used as a means toward liberation, it can become a tool of oppression.” And because he said, you know, “Look, dialogue is really helpful,” and he'd seen the humanity of each other's identities - a really useful tool, and that's very important - but he would say, “The identity of the Israelis is not what's occupying me, it's their behavior. I need a change in behavior. So to the extent that dialogue leads to a change in behavior and a change in harm, it's a benefit. When it doesn't, I don't have much use for it.” And I found that really convicting as a white man in America. The amount of times that I've heard white people say, “If we could just sit down and have conversations, like, if we could just dialogue together around race, like, this would be fine.” And Ali gave me the language to at least ask: dialogue to what end? What are we envisioning beyond the dialogue, or is dialogue the end of our imagination? If we could just sit down, we would work it out. And it's like, well, what would it look like to work it out? You know, what do we imagine is changing? Because if we don't see anything changing, then perhaps we're using the dialogue actually as a way to keep the status quo. The dialogue becomes a means of upholding the system that's not working. And so I wanted that to... it wasn't actually the first person that I encountered on the trip. I just put the chapter first ‘cause I thought, I want this to be the very first story that we encounter, to say, “What do we do with this thing of dialogue? What are the limits of this?”
Lee
It seems like, in the United States, so often when we get into conversations particularly around race, I hear friends of mine who are white, who are good folks, who will say things like, “You know, I'm not a racist.” And it's good that they're not aware that they're consciously racist, right? But it seems like that so often misses the point, right? The point is that there are systems and structures or policies, especially in Palestine, you've got policies in place, and behavior of groups of people that need to be changed, not simply talking about those things.
Michael
Racism is not just a cognitive belief that a certain group is inferior. It's also practices that are put in place that we often aren't aware of, you know. And for me, I've gotten to a place of saying, “Well, of course I'm racist. Like, how on earth did I think I was going to grow up in this country and not be?” You know, you can look at the history of it. Or Mohammad Ali did a great bit that I saw on Facebook recently. Obviously it's from a long time ago. But one of the things he was pointing out was just how conditioned we are to see white as good and black as bad. Even down to, he said, “Angel food cake is the white cake, and devil's food cake is the black one.” And I know, it's just like... it's down to that kind of level. The black sheep, you know? All that kind of... it's just like, why is anyone surprised?
Lee
Yeah. So, in Palestine, Israel, Ireland, South Africa, you speak in the book about how some of the folks you've gotten to know speak not of PTSD, but of trauma coping.
Michael
So I was sitting with a man named Dr. Zoughbi, who runs the Wi'am Center for Conflict Transformation in the West Bank. And he was talking about the work that he does in Bethlehem with children and with adults. And he said, “Here we don't do trauma healing.” And I remember thinking, that's so bizarre, like, trauma healing is such a central part of conflict transformation, especially in a place like this. And I said, “Why don't you do that?” And he said, “Well, because we have no PTSD.” And again, I thought, the whole country's traumatized. What are you talking about? But he said, “There is no post-trauma.” He said, “The trauma is ongoing. It is always here. So, you know, you could be traumatized by a soldier, an Israeli soldier, at a checkpoint on your way to school. And then that could happen again tomorrow, and it could happen again a year from now. So there is no sense to which this was a one-time thing that you can now work to heal from. We don't have the PTSD, because there is no post. It is just layer after layer of ongoing trauma.” So he said, “We have to just teach our people: how do we cope with trauma, rather than how do we heal from it?” And then it's interesting... like I was just listening to Krista Tippett - her podcast On Being - and she was interviewing Resmaa Menakem, who wrote an amazing book that I'm reading right now called My Grandmother's Hands on the racialization of America. But one of the things he said in there, also was that he said, “For most black people in America, we don't have PTSD in the typical sense. We have persistent trauma.” You know, “Instead of the post-traumatic, we have the persistent traumatic stress disorder.” And so it was just fascinating, again, to see like, oh, this same dynamic that I was seeing in Israel and Palestine is right here on my doorstep.
Lee
Yeah. You tell this bizarre, even, I would say, story about a taxi ride in Ireland.
Michael
Oh my goodness. I was on my way for a final drink with a classmate that was leaving, and I started talking to this... I always tried to have conversations with taxi drivers. I wanted to do a whole blog series called Taxi Talks about... I think that'd be a fun book or documentary about what you learn about the world from the back of taxis in conflict zones. But this one particular guy I was asking about... I would often ask people like, you know, “Were you here during the troubles?” Which for those listening, who don't know, it's a violent conflict in Northern Ireland from essentially the 1960s to the 90s, depending on who you ask.
Lee
There were, what, 3,400-3,800 people murdered.
Michael
Yeah. It's going to be rare to find someone in Northern Ireland who doesn't know someone who was bereaved by that conflict, or at least traumatized by it. So anyway, this guy said, “Oh yeah, I was here.” And he said, “Yeah, the 70s, the 80s, like, those were good years.” And I was thinking, I know enough about the troubles to know those weren't good years. And I said, “I thought that was a really violent time.” And he said, “Oh no, it wasn't that violent. I mean, except for the bombs and the murders and stuff.” And it was the way that he said it, where it's almost a side thought. Like, no, that was really normal. There were the killings. And then he went on to say, “You know, like, there was the time that I was driving down the falls road and I saw a black taxi pull up, roll down the window, and blow my brother's head off.” And he said, “I can still remember the way…” and this is the way that he was saying it: “I still remember the way that my mother bent down to scoop his brains back in.”
Lee
Oh...
Michael
And it was... that was the reaction I had. It was just like, I hit the back of the seat. Like he was saying it was such normality, like this is just the way that it was. And one of the opening chapters on Northern Ireland, I start the chapter by saying that I talked to this woman who was telling me about, when she was a kid, that she got really frightened of a loud noise outside, and she called for her mother, and her mother came in and said, “Oh, don't worry, honey, that wasn't thunder. It was just a bomb.” And it just spoke to me of the trauma that exists when violence becomes normalized. Like what is it for a whole generation to grow up where what is comforting is to know that it was a bomb that went off, not thunder? ‘Cause bombs happen all the time. And this guy in the taxi was able to say, “There's nothing unique about those years. I mean, except that everyone was getting killed, but other than that, like, it was perfectly fine.” And those are the things that we have to deal with as we build peace after conflict.
Lee
I think one of the reasons I found myself drawn into your storytelling in this book is because you insist throughout, in your storytelling, to hear, say, from a soldier in the Israeli defense forces on the one hand, as well as a Palestinian on the other hand; that you clearly have a kind of sense of your own understanding of what justice might entail in any given of these situations, but you're wanting to hear a multiplicity of stories, and a multiplicity of takes. So why is that important to you?
Michael
I mean, I guess in one way, it's pretty central to building peace: the ability to empathize. And peace is never made by one side; reconciliation always requires a two-way street. Forgiveness may be able to be a one-way street, where I can forgive and not need anything from you, but I can't reconcile with you unless you're going to reconcile with me. And so, it felt really important to say, “I'm not going to be able to write a book about how stories can transform a divided world, and about what we can learn about how to live together well, if I'm not hearing from the people on both sides who are trying to live together well.” That would be really disingenuous, to just tell Palestinian stories, or to just tell Israeli stories. And because often what I feel like I'm interested in is challenging the assumptions of whoever's listening to me. So if I'm talking to people for whom they have a strong bias against Palestinians, then I typically want to say, “Well, let me tell you a couple of stories about Palestinians that I know,” but if I'm talking to people for whom they're antisemitic, or they're just over-the-top against Israel, then I'm like, “Let me challenge that a little bit with... let me tell you about Robi Damelin. Let me tell you about Rami Elhanan, you know, these folks that are just like... they don't fit your stereotype about who these people are.” So I have found it helpful just to say... you know, my friend Pádraig, who I just mentioned... one of the things that he often asks people, when they're in conversations around conflict or are doing mediation, is to say, “Who could you bring into the room that could counter what you've just said?” You know, to have this awareness that there are multiple truths, and everything that I might say, someone else could have a different way of saying it. And have I cultivated an ability to be mindful of the fact that my truth isn't the only truth in the world? So I wanted to bring that in as well.
Lee
Yeah. You mentioned the significance of empathy, and you mention, in your last chapter of this book, the art of empathy, which I've not read.
Michael
Karla McLaren, yeah.
Lee
Yeah. But I was fascinated in that you talk about how she mentions honoring the great range of emotions. And I think oftentimes in a sort of... I don't know if it's Southern gentility, or if it's an unhelpful construct of what love means or looks like from a Christian perspective, but that oftentimes we see things like anger as inherently problematic, or strong displays of emotion as inherently problematic. But how have you seen that kind of play out in things that you've learned?
Michael
Yeah. I mean, Karla McLaren's book was so helpful to me. She has a previous book before that called The Language of Emotions, and she's essentially saying, “Emotions exist because we need them. There is no bad emotion.” People would talk about, well, this was a good emotion or bad emotion. There is no bad emotion. Doesn't exist. So emotions are emotions, and they are always giving us information. And it's learning how to listen to what they're trying to tell us that's really important. And so, that's been so liberating for me. I grew up with exactly what you're saying, especially this sense of, you know, that the primary emotion for men is anger, but you're not supposed to be angry. And It's very stifling. But what Karla says is... anger: she calls it the honorable sentry. Sentry, so the border guard. Anger is the emotion that guards your borders, and then when anger shows up, it's usually because you have experienced something as a trespass of a boundary that you didn't consent to. And so your anger comes up to guard against that. And, and I love that she calls it the honorable one, ‘cause she's like, “That's a really good thing.” And that's been so useful now, that when I get angry, my first question now is: what has been violated for me, or what am I perceiving as being violent, whether or not they've done it?
Lee
Yeah. I don't know where I came across it; somebody taught me the language that anger is simply telling you someone has violated a boundary, and then to simply start interrogating my anger in that way.
Michael
It's liberating.
Lee
Yeah. Rather than having to repress my anger.
Michael
No, it's like, it's needed. How do I then feel this and channel it, that doesn't perpetuate harm on the other person, right? That's the big question. But sadness is the emotion that tells you, there's something that you need to let go of, or... you know, so those things were so useful to me, and it reminds me of... there's a book called The Virtue of Resentment or something around those lines. But one of the things that he argues is that - he's writing about forgiveness - and so he says that, so often, we kind of... we prioritize forgiveness over resentment, and we kind of pathologize resentment, or demonize it in a sense, but he said “Resentment is actually a really useful starting place,” that will sometimes - in his case, I think he is a counselor - that what can happen for people is that they are just so quick to just forgive and just let things go and they become this sort of doormat. And what he argues is that you actually have to learn how to cultivate resentment, because resentment is one of the things that says, “I actually deserve better than what you're treating me,” and that sometimes this quick forgiveness can stem from a lack of self value and a lack of self worth, and that actually, then, what I need to do is learn how to get angry about the fact that you keep doing this, learn how to resent you, so that I can then forgive you. But I have to start there. So those things have been really influential to me, to just say, “I don't ever need to think about an emotion I'm feeling as a bad emotion or a wrong emotion.” There is no wrong emotion. There are wrong responses to take from my emotions. But it's just to say, “Oh, I'm feeling this for a reason.” So I need to now ask myself, “What's coming up for me? Why is this the emotion that I'm feeling?”
Lee
Yeah. I think that that's immensely helpful. And I think it relates to the ways in which, throughout your book, you are pushing back at paltry or superficial or even potentially dangerous constructs of forgiveness, that you're wanting a more rigorous, multifaceted practice.
Michael
Well, if any are interested, I actually wrote a whole book on forgiveness, so I'll plug that. It's called Where the River Bends. Where the River Bends looks at forgiveness, but then also considers 14 stories of Tennessee prisoners and what their stories say about forgiveness. So I think forgiveness is naturally oriented toward reconciliation, that it's pointing that direction, but it does not necessitate that we get there. And I think we often get into problems when we always talk about forgiveness and reconciliation; these terms go together. But for instance, it could be very appropriate for an abused spouse to just say, “You know what? I forgive you for what you're doing. I'm not going to hold this against you, but get the hell out of my house. I don't need a relationship with you, but I don't also have to hate you forever.” You know? And so forgiveness can lead toward reconciliation, but it also doesn't need to. And I think that forgiveness, at the very least in my mind, is this way of saying, “I'm not going to be defined by the harm that's been done to me. I'm going to write a different kind of story.” You know, sometimes people talk about us moving from victim to survivor. I'm not going to be consumed by this resentment and this hatred that there is... you know, I think Desmond Tutu says that the strings that we attach to the harm done to us are the chains that bind us to the past. And that when I continue to say, “I have to have something from you in order to move on,” I'm actually imprisoning myself to this person, and I'm continuing to give them power over me. And so it's learning how do I say, “I'm doing this for myself, because forgiveness can lead toward healing and self-love, and that's something that I need, whether or not you ever give me what I need. I can't wait for it.” Now, I will need that if I want to reconcile with you, right? That's where the reconciliation comes in, ‘cause we're going to need something. I'm going to need apology. I'm going to need remorse. I'm going to need amends if we're going to reconcile. But I don't necessarily have to have those if I'm going to forgive you. And I think I see those in some of the stories of, you know... even in the last story in the book, there's a man named Bassam Aramin whose daughter Abir was killed when she was 10 years old by an Israeli soldier. He shot her in the back of the head on her way home from school with a rubber bullet that ended up killing her. So she died in the hospital, and Bassam had the opportunity to meet the soldier that killed her - met him in court - and he basically went up to him and just said, “At any point in your life, when you decide you want my forgiveness, come and ask for it and it's yours.” And that wasn't because he loved the guy. That wasn't because he liked him at all. I mean, you know, but he also knew - and for him it was very practical - he just said, “I can't be consumed by hatred for him. I have five other kids. I have five other kids that need me. You know, I can't let myself go that direction.” So it's a very pragmatic...
Lee
It's fascinating, too, that he also did not walk up to them and say, “I forgive you,” but he said, “If you want my forgiveness come and ask.”
Michael
Something's going to be required from you. You're going to have to make an effort.
Lee
Yeah. You talk a bit in the book about a number of folks who are in groups in which their children have been killed, and they try to meet with people from the other side. What are some of the things that you saw there, or stories that you've carried with you from those encounters?
Michael
So one of those is Bassam, and then in that same chapter, I talk about another guy named Rami Elhanan. So they're both members of the Parents Circle Families Forem, which are Israeli and Palestinian parents and family members who have been bereaved: lost siblings, lost parents, lost children. And so they are actively trying to work for a reconciled future, to end the occupation and have a reconciled future.
Lee
So they're coming together with family members or parents who've been bereaved from both sides of the conflict?
Michael
That's right. So you'll have Rami Elhanan, who's an Israeli whose grandparents survived Auschwitz; and that's one of the lines I had in the book, that Rami's grandfather survived Auschwitz, but his daughter didn't survive her 14th birthday. So Smadar was just about to turn 14 when she was blown up in Jerusalem by a suicide bomber. And so he's an Israeli who has this story of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, and whose daughter was killed by Palestinian terrorism, and then you've got Basaam who's a Palestinian who spent seven years in Israeli prison, and whose daughter was 10 years old coming home from school and was murdered. And so they would be in a room together with other parents with similar stories, and on one level just to offer support to one another. They say, “We find common ground through our shared sense of suffering.” And then on the other hand, they also will go around to high schools and speak to young people in Israel and in Palestine about how is it that we're going to find a way to live together. And so incredible stories of folks like that, like Robi Damelin, who is an Israeli mother whose son David was a soldier and was shot and killed by a Palestinian sniper. And when the army came to tell her that her son was killed, the first thing out of her mouth was, “You may not kill anyone in my son's name.” Which, what does it take to have... like, that's something that you've cultivated, it would seem to me. Like, how is that...
Lee
Especially for it to be your first response.
Michael
First thing out of her mouth. Yeah. So, and then there's another organization called Combatants for Peace. I tell a couple of stories from folks there, but that's an organization of former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian political prisoners, the combatants on both sides, who are trying to come together as one to work for nonviolence, and to bring about the end of the occupation of Palestine. And so those places are amazing to me, to see these people who - as Rami said at the end of the book - he said, you know, “We have every reason to hate each other.” But one of my favorite lines is - I ended up calling the last chapter “Cracks of Hope” after this - Rami said to me, “We continue to come up against this tall wall of hatred and animosity that divides these two people, and we bang our heads against it until we will put cracks of hope in it.” To me, it was such a beautiful expression of what so much of peace building is like and feels like. It's these huge walls - in Israel Palestine, a literal wall - that you just keep coming up against over and over. And you just... you're just going to keep ramming your head into it until you can begin to see these cracks of hope to pursue.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. You're listening to the penultimate episode in season one. In the final episode of the season, I'll give you a bit of color commentary on season one, pointing back to some highlights and things I learned in the process. Scintillating academic commentary at its best, I know you will think. If you have been joining us all this season and have not yet done so, please do go over and give us a nice review on Apple podcasts, and subscribe there or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Remember too, we'd love to hear from you. Send us feedback at podcast@tokensshow.com. This is our interview with Michael McKray on his new book I Am Not Your Enemy. Part two in just a moment.
You are listening to Tokens and our interview with Michael McRay on his new book, I Am Not Your Enemy.
So here you are living in Nashville, still relatively new in your marriage, married what, two, three years?
Michael
Four years? October, 2016.
Lee
Father of a new baby boy, but in the midst of a pandemic - world pandemic - great deal of societal and sociopolitical strain and stress. And yet you and I live in a context in which we do not have to deal with the sorts of ongoing trauma that people in these places that you're visiting and learning stories from have to deal with.
Michael
Yeah.
Lee
So one of the things that I wonder is: how do you translate some of the things that you've learned from people dealing with a great deal of more immediate violence and trauma? How have you tried to translate that into your own daily life? You're dealing with stresses and strains that, you know, are not as great. I'm not aware of the fact that you're dealing with strains and stresses that are as great as some of these friends that you've developed, but nonetheless, it's still strains and stresses, very human realities, right? So what are some of the kind of practices or virtues or skills that you've learned from folks in those contexts that you try to regularly practice in your own life?
Michael
Yeah. I mean, one of them is - I remember this from from Robi Damelin, who I mentioned her son, David, was killed; from Ali Abu Awwad, who I mentioned at the beginning with dialogue is not the goal; and it also kind of comes from Gandhi - but this idea of: if we hope to see a peaceful world around us, we have to start by creating a peaceful world within ourselves. That, you know, Gandhi said, “You have little hope to be nonviolent in situations of violence if you haven't cultivated the nonviolent self,” which isn't just sort of meditation or other things, but it's also like, how do I not speak to myself in violent ways? How do I look in the mirror and express gratitude for what I see, you know? So those to me - and I don't say that, like someone who's figured that out; I have a great deal of self image issues and all this kind of baggage from different parts of my life - but that's one very practical way to say, “One of the greatest services I think I can do for other people is to learn how to be a nonviolent person who does no harm.” And that starts with the way that I treat myself, and then toward my wife, and toward my son. And so... still so weird to say my son. He's only 13 weeks old.
[Laughter]
So I think that's a big part. And then, I mean, when I've been with Palestinians, one of the things they say the most when I come home is, “Tell people what you've seen. Tell people what you've seen.” And that's where I've come in some ways to understand my vocation as a storyteller or story practitioner, I say, ‘cause that looks... it's not always about me telling the stories, but about facilitating those stories to be told. And so that's been a big part for me: it's not just telling about what I've seen and trying to do education, but continuing to educate myself. You know, I see a lot of people who just say, “Oh, I just can't look at the news anymore. It's just too overwhelming.” And I'm like, that is one of the clearest examples of privilege, you know, to just say, “I have the opportunity to just turn it off and not have to deal with it.” And I'm just like... the people who are in the streets are there because they don't get to do that. They don't get to turn this off. And so being mindful of when I'm exercising my privilege in a way that is shielding me from dealing with the problems of the world... and where is that actually helpful for my sanity, and where is it actually a cop out?
Lee
Because it does seem to be that there's... I remember this was probably 20 years ago, a book by a Quaker entitled A Testament of Devotion. I love that little book. And I mean, he's writing this in the 1930s, I think it is, but I just remember, you know, double marking, double underlining and marking in the margin, where he says something like, “The human psyche was not created with the capacity to deal with the onslaught of mass media.” And that's in the 1930s!
Michael
Yeah. [Laughs]
Lee
And so I do think that there's a space in which I have to figure out: in what way is my media ingestion a form of obsessing or wasting of emotional energy that's really not going to accomplish anything? But then there's also that space where you talk about it, where you're just cutting it off, and refusing to pay attention to what's going on in the world definitely is a form of privilege. And so there seems to be a sweet spot in there where we figure out...
Michael
Absolutely. I think almost all of this is about... it's a balancing act, and it's recognizing... I feel like I have a responsibility to be informed and for that information, then, to motivate something in my life. Like what good does it do? What good does it do people of color, black people in this country, for me to be informed about racism and do nothing about it, right? I'm a hundred percent part of the problem. So that information, that education, needs to move me to do something. You know, I say in the book that empathy, in my mind, for the sake of empathy is only so useful. Like, empathy should lead us toward compassionate action for trying to improve something. And if it's not, it's not of much use to most people. And so I do try to stay really active in reading and following what's going on in the world when I can, to join people in solidarity. If there weren't a pandemic - and really not even just the pandemic, but if we didn't have Rowan - I would try to go out and march as well. But that's one of those decisions where I was like, “I can't. I can't do that. I've got to look out for my son now. I can't do those marches.” But then Brittany and I, you know, we evaluated our finances and gave as much money as we could to support the people that were doing that. So it's just looking for ways to say, “What are my priorities?”
Lee
Yeah. It helps me to think also in terms of the fact that any given life has different seasons of life...
Michael
Totally.
Lee
... in which we are capable of, or have the space to do, particular things. And I think one of the things that drove that home for me as a sort of thing to accept and embrace: years ago, I had taken a group of students to the Civil Rights museum in Birmingham. And as I was waiting on the students to finish up the tour, I was talking to an older African American woman. She had been in the children's march that happened there in Birmingham, you know, the marches where Bull Connor rolled kids down the streets with the fire hoses and had the police dogs out and so forth. And she had been in those marches. And so I was asking her questions about that and what it was like and so forth, and she said, “You know, our parents couldn't do it.” She said, “It wasn't parents that could get out,” she said, “because our parents had jobs, and they had to go to their jobs to make money to pay the bills, and they just couldn't come do this.” And she said, “That's why the kids got involved, because we could skip school and come do this, you know?” And that was just fascinating to me, to think in terms of taking seriously the season in life. And, you know, we all are in different places. But that brings me back to another kind of thing. I want to go back to something you said a moment ago.
I remember - this was a long time ago now; it's 2005 - we were back visiting friends of ours in Nairobi, and Laura and I, when we were young marrieds in 1994, we had spent some time in Nairobi: half a year or so. And we still had friendships with people that we had gotten to know and had lived with and been with there. And so we were back visiting some of those friends, and we had been out seeing some of the spaces of some of the deepest, roughest poverty in Nairobi, still to this day some of the roughest spaces I've ever seen in the world. Next morning at breakfast, I was talking with our friend Darlene. And I said, “I find myself overwhelmed with this just kind of American self hatred, you know, of, you know, knowing this is in the world and hating myself because of the sense of guilt of my privilege.” But then very quickly she said, “But you know, that never accomplishes anything.” And it was just... it was this really sharp - and she was very gentle - but I've never forgotten that. It's like sometimes I can mistake my sort of sense of guilt or self hatred, which itself can be an indulgence, right? I can think, well, because I feel badly about this, then I'm okay. But me feeling badly about something doesn't really change anything.
Michael
No. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, maybe you're referring to what I was talking about earlier, about kind of white guilt around, you know, racism, and, yeah, I'm with you. I think Karla McLaren, if I'm remembering right, in her book on emotions talks about... if I remember, she says, “You know, guilt is a condition. Guilt isn't a feeling,” in her estimation. When we say we're feeling guilty, what we're feeling is ashamed. And, you know, there's the one camp where there's sort of like... people are saying, “Shame is a toxic emotion and we need to get rid of it.” Karla McLaren is saying, “Shame is a really useful emotion. Being overwhelmed by shame or anything else is not helpful and can be toxic. But shame is the emotion that says there's something about our behavior that isn't okay.” Which is really useful to know, you know?
Lee
Yeah, we never... to call someone shameless is not a compliment.
[Laughter]
Michael
Exactly. Yeah. So it's like, how do we...
Lee
There's toxic shame, and then there's some sort of sense of healthy shame.
Michael
Healthy shame, you know, that if I say something inappropriate in a gathering, my immediate feeling of shame is part of what will tell me I shouldn't have said that. And that's worthwhile to know. It may lead me then to be able to say, “I'm sorry,” to make amends. You know, so it's, again with all these emotions, like, how do we use these in ways that help us? So, I mean, in my waking up around - which is an ongoing journey - I get kind of annoyed with the language of “woke,” ‘cause I'm just like, that sounds like a static place that we're supposed to get to. And I just think really, especially for folks like me, like, it's just... we're waking. We're waking. That's what it is. As opposed to being woke, I am waking. And it's... 8I have found in that journey that there was a time where it's just like, “Oh my gosh, I'm so ashamed to be white.” And I just thought, you know, that's only so useful, you know? I didn't have any control of the fact that I was born, that I look like this. What I have to recognize, though, is that looking like this, being who I am, means certain things in this country. It meant that I was going to be programmed in certain ways, that I was going to be conditioned to think in certain ways, that I was probably going to believe certain things, and that my task now is to come face-to-face with that, to look it right in the eyes and say, “I see what this is. I see how this is.” And my job now is: how do I move forward that undoes as much of this as I can, and keeps in check the stuff that I can't undo, so that I'm not harming other people? It does me little good to be paralyzed by my own guilt and shame over looking like I look or being white. I can't help that. What I can help is what I do with the new knowledge. And that has felt much more helpful to me.
Lee
Yeah. There is, though, that kind of habitual self hatred that some of us struggle with, that I certainly struggled with for many, many years. I do think that I became a much more enjoyable human being to be with for my family and my friends when I stopped hating myself.
Michael
Yeah. That tends to happen.
[Laughter]
Lee
Because you know, a lot of times what happens is that we just simply project our own stuff out onto other people. And in the absence of true love of ourselves, we can't be much of a contributor to the peace of the world, I think. What have you learned or what have you seen about the sources of self hatred, and then what have you learned about coming to a new space of moving beyond that?
Michael
Mercy, that's a great question. That is a journey I'm very much still walking, you know, so I don't know that I have a lot of wisdom on it. You know, one of the phrases that comes to my mind: trauma that is not transformed is transferred. I think of it like energy: energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's only transferred. And that when we don't actually try to take the energy of trauma and turn it into something that can help us, we will just keep passing it on to the next person. You know, it's why people are far more likely to abuse their children if they were abused, if they haven't dealt with that, you know? So I think a lot of this stuff for me, you know, came from... a lot of it was kind of cultural in terms of: how do we think about what it is to be a man, what it is to be beautiful - like there's body images as well; what does the perfect person look like - so there's some of that that's in there. There was a lot of theological stuff as well about expectations around right living, what it is to be in favor with God, what it is to earn your salvation. And I think I found a lot of that left seeds in me that grew poorly about feeling like I could never quite get in line with what was expected of me, and that it left me feeling very different from the people around me: feeling very other than. And I think what has been helpful - I mean, what's been helpful for me - is just lots of therapy, which I know is a form of privilege as well. Not everyone can access that, but that has been helpful. You know, group supports. You know, there's lots of processes to be done around things like trauma eggs, and other kinds of ways of looking back at the wounds of our own lives so that we can come face-to-face with it and kind of work through it. But I don't know that I have a lot of wisdom, ‘cause I still feel like I'm very much in the midst of: how do I... and on one hand, I'm a three on the Enneagram, for people who know anything about the Enneagram, so I'm wired to achieve things. So there's this false belief that if I keep achieving, everything's going to be fine. You know, maybe if I put out another book and people like it, everyone will be okay with me. So far it hasn't worked.
[Laughter]
So, it's... how do I find a way...
Lee
The ever shifting elusive expectation of when I'll be okay with myself. It never arrives.
Michael
Absolutely. You know, and the Dalai Lama and others have been telling us this for a very long time: that, you know, happiness is something you cultivate within yourself. It can't be achieved with just external goods and relationships. And I've always had a hard time being very happy with myself by myself. Being alone has been a great impossibility for me. And yet, for some reason, I keep doing trips like this, where I go travel for three months around the world on my own.
[Laughter]
And I'm miserable for a lot of the time. And I come back and I'm like, “I'm never going to that again.” And then I go and spend six months in Ireland for, you know, grad school or something. But this to me is - especially now that I have Rowan - it's one of those things that I've been thinking about a lot. Like, how do I - as you said, like, I become a much more pleasant person when I stop hating myself, you know - like, how do I cultivate this love of self within me? And part of it's been helpful now: I want to speak to myself the way that I speak to Rowan, you know? Like, I don't want to say anything to myself that I wouldn't say to him, or that I wouldn't want him to say to himself. And it speaks also to the power that we give other people. Like, I mean, I was bullied severely in high school, and all kinds of things - was assaulted in high school in locker rooms, and, you know, had people key my cars and urinate on my cars, put glass under the tires to puncture the tire - I mean, all kinds of stuff that happened. And I can trace so many of the harmful voices in my head now to the things that I heard those bullies say in high school. And it's been, what, was that 20 years it's gone by? And I haven't been able to shake it. And it's so fascinating to think, why have I given them so much power over me, you know? Now, like why do those kids - they were kids - like, why does that 16-year-old guy from Williamsburg, Kentucky, have so much power still in my head? And that's where I think therapy and those things have been really helpful, to try to unlearn: how do I hear those voices for what they were, which was kids with their own wounds, with trauma that wasn't transformed, transferring it on to other people, and how do I develop even empathy for them?
Lee
For me, too, the therapy allows a space where I can voice the voices in my head and get another party's perspective on those voices. And they can begin to say, “Do you think that's really true,” or to challenge those voices. And then for me, in turn, to begin to learn the habit of challenging those voices myself, so that rather than jumping on the train of self condemnation, I can realize that's going on, and I can look at that as one process going on in my brain, and use another part of my brain or myself to question and interrogate that, and to interrogate that narrative and say, “Well, I can tell a different story.” Which goes back to narrative, right?
Michael
It does. And what's so fascinating is, you know, it just speaks to... I think sometimes when people read stuff like whatever, and I Am Not Your Enemy, there's this... you develop a perception of who this author is, right? Like, “Oh, you're all about stories. You are full of grace and…” It's all this kind of stuff, and it's just like, the hardest place for me to live that out is with myself. It's always been that way: that I can go to things, I can do the therapy, I can go to these retreats, I can learn all these tools, and it is so hard to then use them for myself, you know? When I hear the voices in my head, if I'm looking in the mirror or something, like, I know what I have to do, and yet the pattern, the wiring, is so strong. Like, those rivers have been carved, you know, and that water is just flowing. And even when I can be really effective in facilitating these processes of healing for other people, it can be so difficult to do it for yourself.
Lee
Yeah. I think that the practice of meditation... one of the reasons that's been so important to me is that it gives me the mental habit of observing my thoughts rather than jumping on the train of [indiscernible].
Michael
Yeah. “Oh, isn't that interesting,” as that thought floats by. [Laughs]
Lee
That's exactly right. So regardless of how outrageous the thought is, that rather than immediately having emotions about the thought or more thoughts about the thought, I simply observe it, and let it, you know, simply observe, right? And that has a capacity to facilitate a peace within myself that I couldn't have otherwise when I can simply observe that.
Michael
And then I think, you know, part of it for me, then, is also learning how to just observe the emotions as well, you know, to not have to hold those back and to be like, “Oh, when I have this thought, I have this emotion. Isn't that interesting?” What is that emotion telling me about my relationship to that thought, you know? And I think those... it's been such a liberating thing to get out of this sense of: oh, I need to try not to feel this, I need to not have this reaction, and be like, “Why do I need to judge that? I'm having this emotion for a reason. Why? What's at work here?”
Lee
And it may be the fact that I want to learn to not have a particular emotion so much, but I'm probably not going to get there by beating myself up about having the emotion, right?
Michael
Probably not, yeah.
Lee
It's only by a long process of honoring the emotion and asking, interrogating the emotion, and asking about the narrative that's going with it.
Michael
You know, I do a lot of facilitation of storytelling, story exchanges, with the organization I work with called Narrative 4, and I teach people, then, how to facilitate these. And one of the things that I tell people is that if you... we do this session on challenging behaviors. So what happens if someone, you know, takes over a conversation? What happens if they start crying in the middle of an exchange? All these things that might be challenging to facilitate. And one of the things I tell people is: when people exhibit challenging behaviors, they're usually trying to get a need met, but they're not doing it very skillfully. And your job as the facilitator is: how do I help them meet their need more skillfully? Which is a lesson that's come in very handy with parenting a newborn [Laughs]. And one of the things we talk about is, like, the person that keeps talking, that keeps taking over the conversation... and I tell people: sometimes, if not oftentimes the person who it feels like they're on repeat is on repeat because they're feeling like they're not actually getting heard, that what they're saying isn't landing, and they're going to just keep hammering it in until they get some sense that it's landing. But it made me think of that, just when you were saying maybe the way to... if I'm wanting to feel an emotion less, maybe it's honoring it. And I think it ties in there to be like, “Yeah, very few things go away simply because we ignore them. Usually what helps them is turning and looking at them and saying, “I see you. I appreciate you. I hear you. How do we move forward with this?” You know?
Lee
Well, going back to the very beginning of your book... it's either the introduction or the first chapter, you talk about being part of the journey, that we don't need to be saviors. I really liked that because I feel like, you know, I've often said - and I think I've written several times, you know, that for those of us who are Christians, we have this Messiah who did not have a messianic complex, which I just think is fascinating, you know? - and you're giving us in this book this invitation to not think we have to be Messiahs, you know? We're not going to save the world, no matter how good we are at understanding a given particular difficult sociopolitical conflict. We're not going to fix it, right? But we can be a part of the journey and make contributions to that.
Michael
That's right.
Lee
And I love the way that you've honored people throughout your book who are simply seeking to make very serious contributions to that. And you've done that same sort of work of contribution yourself by pointing to those people who are making contributions.
Michael
Well, I hope so. I mean, I appreciate that. And the first time I remember hearing that kind of idea of “we don't have to be ministers” was in your class at Lipscomb. But it was the one where we looked at Oscar Romero, and of the things he says is, “We are ministers and not messiahs.” He says, “We are prophets of a future not our own, and we cannot do everything.” And there's a sense of liberation in that, because it allows us to do something and to do that something very well.
Lee
I'm glad you remember that [Laughs].
Michael
It stuck with me. And that there is this sense for me of asking, kind of, pretty frequently, like, what is my something right now? You talked about the different seasons of life. So in this season, what is my something that I want to do very well? And in a very obvious way, it's parenting Rowan. Like, I want to do that one very well. And what are my other somethings? ‘Cause I can't do everything. I cannot be everywhere. And it's been helpful for me to say, “I actually am not going to be the hero of the story.” Not only do I not need to be, but no matter what I do, I won't be the hero of the story. And so I don't actually have to be. I don't need to be on the cover. I'm just... I might be a character, and hopefully my contribution helps, but that's what it's going to be: a contribution. But being able to say that, but then not letting that mean, “Oh, there's not a lot that's required of me…” you know, like, “Oh, I don't have a lot of responsibility,” ‘cause I'm just gonna make a contribution and it can be really small to say, “How do we balance knowing that we're not the saviors or the heroes of the story,” with saying, “But I have a responsibility to do everything I can to try to help move this along.” And, you know, I talk about it in the context of this theory of peace building, that says that it takes as long to get out of a conflict as it took to get into it. You know, in recovery circles, they often say, “If you go 20 miles into the woods, it takes 20 miles to get back out,” you know, that you can't learn a pattern of behavior for 20 years and expect to change it in one. And part of what that tells me is that when I look at... if you even talk about racism in America as a conflict, and if you'd only say that it started from the arrival of the first kidnapped Africans in 1619 on the shores of what would become America, to say the signing of the civil rights agreement - what was it, 64, 65 - you know, that's... I don't remember what the number is, like 340 years or something, you know? And that's just to say, what if the conflict ended there, right? To say, we would be, you know, 60 years into a 300 year journey, you know? And that can be overwhelming. But for me, it's also helpful to say, “You know, maybe we are where we are. We're always going to be in this story,” and that we - and it's mostly said to kind of white folks - to say this kind of exasperation of, “Why are we still talking about this?” You know, Obama was president. Racism is done. How is it still a conversation to say, “There's still a very long way to go?” You know, conflicts don't just wrap up that quickly. You know, we've got a lot of kind of healing work to be done.
Lee
We've been talking with Michael McRay: writer, facilitator, story practitioner, author most recently of I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World, available from Herald Press. Great book. Thank you, Michael. And thanks for being with us.
Michael
Thanks Lee. It was a real pleasure.
Lee
Yeah. Thanks for your work. Blessings.
Michael
Thank you.
Lee
You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. Thanks so much for joining us. Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please remember to refer us to a fellow podcast listener or pick out one of your favorite episodes from the season and share it on social media. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email text or attach a voice memo and send it to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
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Thanks for listening and peace. Be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios, both in Nashville, Tennessee.