Visiting a small and unfamiliar city at the terminus of a rail trail became an engendering occasion as I ate outside at a fine restaurant and walked up and down reading historical markers and plaques, examining statues, gazing at buildings, thinking many thoughts. There were general themes but localized as singular events and particular circumstances occurring in that particular place over its nearly 400 year history. How much of encountering is just looking, listening and being open to learning?
One plaque in particular caught my attention. It depicted an incident from early on in the history of the settlement: a line of native Americans, who’d lived peacefully side by side with Anglo colonists, tied together with ropes around their necks, being marched to Boston under the supervision of white soldiers, to stand trial for a crime for which they were acquitted. The details are here: under The Praying Indians: The Infamous ‘Incident’.
I am disturbed by this picture and this story. It speaks of all the attitudes which characterize the worst ways we treat each other. I personally, viscerally hate them, and they are also counter-productive, to say the least.
Supremacist attitudes and the domination they seek are fundamentally at odds in perspective and practice with freshness and values of encountering. Making common cause with the livingness of an other or otherness is an activity founded on a basic premise: the other has a claim on existence as good as our own. Even more fundamentally, supremacism sees the world primarily as conflict whereas freshness sees it as communion. The drive of supremacism to always prevail is the diametric opposite of that of freshness to always participate.
Encountering is not hierarchical, not combative, not exclusionary, not acquisitive. Freshness works by wooing rather than whipping. The transcendent world does not assert control over the mundane. The various hegemonies that mundane agendas aspire to institute are in stark contrast to the ever more numerous independent, individual encounters, past, present and future, sponsored by freshness which is actively engaged in integrating them, even now, into something concrete and cosmic.
The posturings and provocations of these days may cause us to conceive of the world as a contest of right and wrong, good and evil, us and them, so justifying our own dreams of domination, out of entitlement or tit-for-tat terror. Freshness has no part in this dynamic, but rather renders unto the mundane world the things of that world, and unto the transcendent, what belongs to it.
Individuals and communities can be infected by these destructive attitudes, particularly when under stress, as long as they share allegiance to a worldview that conceives of conflict as the basis premise of interaction.
If we want to build communities less vulnerable to supremacism, we need to start from alternate principles; we should consider encountering.
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