Dear Old South Church,
Imagine your extended family is gathered together for Thanksgiving Day: cousins and in-laws, parents and children, siblings and significant others. The elephant in the living room is this election season and you have reason to worry that impassioned and incompatible opinions could fray the family, strain the gathering or worse: explode into hurtful words that cannot be taken back.
May I suggest the use of a Talking Stick? The Talking Stick is a listening technique from American Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Properly employed, a Talking Stick foils argumentation and thwarts the urge to persuade, convince or strive for ideological or partisan victory. It engenders something quite different, something gentle and lovely, a dynamic all too rare: respectful listening. It could begin to heal us, repair broken relationships and reunite us in the wake and wreckage of this election season.
Here is how it might work. Before the meal ask your family to gather in a circle, perhaps snuggled into living room chairs, or sitting around the kitchen table, or lounging in the den. Everyone should be there: old and young. Children’s voices are as valued as those of our elders. The voices of the shy, inarticulate or uncertain are honored as equal with the loud, brash and confident. Turn the television off. For American Indians the stick itself might be a beautifully carved staff. For our purposes, it can be any object: maybe a family heirloom, or a Bible, Torah or Koran, a copy of the US Constitution, a souvenir of the Statue of Liberty, the picture of a beloved ancestor, or a piece of great-grandmother’s china. It should be an item everyone recognizes and respects.
Name the elephant in the room: the election season that has wounded and divided our nation and our families. We are so mystified by each other’s strongly held views that we have lost the means to communicate meaningfully. Loathing each other’s candidates, our interpersonal, familial communication has devolved to frosty silence or outright war. We can do better.
Tell your family that you love them dearly and hope they will want to listen deeply to each other without arguing. The rules are simple but essential. Only the person holding the Talking Stick can speak. The speaker shares his or her own truth, speaking from the heart, using the personal pronoun, “I”. The use of “they” is out of bounds. The speaker shares only their own feelings and opinions and is not to be interrupted.
As a listener, I am not inwardly mounting my argument against the speaker. Instead, my singular task and discipline is to listen, deeply, patiently and with an attitude of respect for the person talking (if not for their views). Whether I agree or profoundly disagree with the speaker’s perspective is immaterial and, to the purpose of this exercise, off beam. My task is to listen. When the Talking Stick comes to me, I am then free to speak my own truth, yet without arguing against another’s truth.
Slowly, deliberately the Talking Stick is passed from one person to another. No one speaks twice until all have spoken at least once. There will be no winners and no losers. This is not a contest to decide who is right and who is wrong. We will come to no resolution. We have a simple but precious goal: respectful listening.
Depending on the size of your family, you may go round the circle in this way two, three or four times. Then, thanking everyone for listening respectfully to each other, gently call the Talking Stick to an end. As you retire to the Thanksgiving table invite your loved ones to move on to new topics: to engage in conversation about school, work, leisure pursuits or hobbies, about travel, sport, books read, new music, or movies watched. Ask about each other’s lives. Be gentle with each other.
Finally, on Thanksgiving Day, even in the wake of a bruising and discouraging election season, do pause to give thanks: for a strong nation that can withstand impassioned disagreements, for democracy and the peaceful transfer of power, for a land that is beautiful and broad, for tables laden with the harvests’ fruits, for the gift of our families and friends, for the possibility of loving each other despite strongly held disagreements. Give God thanks that for nine magical years, we were highly blessed by the person and musical brilliance of Harry Lyn Huff. Not least, give thanks for the American Indian tribes with whom all Americans share this holiday and who bequeathed to us the ancient wisdom of the Talking Stick, a practice of listening with respect.