Update [2005-6-12 14:49:0 by pastordan]: Sorry not to respond to comments as they came in; my wife and I were away this afternoon.

Some folks in the thread have pointed out that reconciliation requires atonement and that justice be done, which is quite correct. However, my belief (and the argument here) is that the precursor of those things is a willingness to stay connected with the other party. No engagement, no reconciliation.

I think Kansas pretty neatly summed up my position in this comment:

Well, there’s reconciliation and there’s reconciliation.

I’ve felt re-connected and reconciled to myself this week. “Oh, right! Duh! I’m a person who doesn’t want to give tacit approval to denigrations of women by remaining part of a group where that happens a lot.” “And, sheesh, I’m a person who doesn’t thrive in a loud, agressive, insulting environment. What was I thinking to stay there?”

There’s also the matter of sacrifice that Paul talks about in your Bible verse. Sometimes we make sacrifices for the greater good. I think that’s a privilege. I think a lot of people who left dK felt like they were losing something they loved, but they had to give it up for the sake of all sorts of other good things. And now the water is roiled, but then Christ’s friends and enemies were pretty upset for a while after he left, too. That’s not to paint anybody in this whole situation as saints! god knows, just to say that peace doesn’t necessarily follow right on the heels of sacrifice, and that’s apparently okay.

Yep.

Romans 5:1-8

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks over at Daily Kos. For what it’s worth at this late date, I have no real position on the pie fights. I thought everybody had good points, and I think those points got overplayed on all sides.

It’s the nature of an open-source community: our strength is that we’re open to many perspectives, many contributions from many different sources. Our downfall is that that same openness means that it’s hard to put the brakes on  a destructive cycle of argument. It just grows and grows until it burns itself out. Call it the “wildfire principle” if you will.
As many people have pointed out, we’ve been through these meshugas before. I wasn’t around but for the very tail-end of the Kerry vs. Dean vs. Nader vs. everybody fights, but I understand they got pretty bad. There were the Shut Your Fucking Piehole diaries, the rolling recriminations after the November elections, Schiavo, NARAL, the Pope, the Pastor Dan diaries. Let me know which ones I’ve missed, and I’ll add them to the list. We need to keep track of them for the sake of site history.

I’m not very interested in rehashing any of these debates. Most of them were silly, and needless.

Needless, that is, in the sense that they got misdirected into personal territory. Once the insults–real or perceived–start flying, the useful discussion comes to an end. The underlying perspectives were often valid, and I for one learned much from them.

It’s also true that conflict is a normal part of life together. People build up friction whenever they rub elbows; it happens in virtual communities just like in meatspace. When the friction goes away, you’ve got real problems, because it means that people have stopped taking one another seriously, stopped talking to one another.

In this sense, then, the opposite of conflict is not so much peace (the absence of conflict), as it is reconciliation, a productive balance that allows the creative sparks to fly all over again.

As Paul notes in his letter to the Romans, reconciliation is something hard-won:

…We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…

For Paul, of course, the process of reconciliation begins and ends in Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross. It’s that sacrifice that reconciles us with God the Father, and that allows us to be reconciled one to another.

But you need not be a Christian to find the insight here. Follow the chain in slightly different terms: we can be proud of the conflicts we’ve been through, because conflict makes us stronger, and that strength forges a common identity, and the common identity enables us to believe that we are doing will make a difference in the long run. And that will indeed not disappoint us, because we are making a difference, if only in how we are changing ourselves.

It works for the grizzled veterans who stick with the community: Well, I was here when we went after one another tooth-and-nail over Ginger and Maryann, and here’s what we learned… But interestingly enough, it also works for the folks who have left. Many of them have ended up together in new communities (this time, here at Booman or Women Kossacks), and their departure is suffering enough to create a common identity.

Can the various parties be reconciled to one another? I don’t know. It might take some kind of divine intervention. The online communities I’ve taken part in have a tendency to attract strong personalities with stronger opinions.

We’ll see.

But here’s something that I hope all sides can take away from this. It’s the end of Paul’s chain of logic: “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that was given to us.”

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s necessary to have the Holy Spirit to receive God’s love. My point is simply this: that hope doesn’t arrive from hurt and anger and conflict. Not by themselves.

Instead, it comes about by the way in which those things remind us of the attachments that motivate us, and lead us to new ones. If the Pie Fights lead us to understand better who and what we love, and why we fight for them, if the conflicts and the crazy-making we go through widen the circle of our compassion, then as idiotic as they may seem, they will have been worthwhile.

Amen, and pass the lemon meringue.