Dwelling in the Grey

We were talking at our staff meeting last night about part of Dan Butin's "Service-Learning in Theory and Practice," particularly about what it means to dwell in the grey. In the chapter we read, Butin is writing about various ways to theorize service-learning, one of them being an approach he calls "antifoundationalism." This obnoxiously-long phrase means something just as vague as the word itself: it's about challenging our biases and assumptions, avoiding an end goal which is too-easily achieved, and forcing us to remain open to different ideas and continue hard discussions. In short, antifoundationalism is about seeing the world in shades of grey.

Which is hard, eh? (I don't know why my Canadian side is coming out so much right now... hmm, maybe it's an unconscious attempt to challenge your assumptions! Just for clarification since I will continue to refer to the US as "our country," etc., in this post: I'm American, but my mom is not. And sorry to any non-American readers--it's a convenient shorthand, though an ironic assumption for this post...) Anyway. We were sitting at our meeting wondering how well our office does at the job of encouraging dialogue on the 'greyness' of life and service, which is an important question to ask, when I realized how inadequate I am to help lead that discussion. I struggle with allowing grey in my own life.

Personally, I am far too prone to trying to figure things out in my head, reducing them to black and white so that I can form an opinion about them and proclaim it boldly. It's tiring to dwell in the grey! It can be exhausting to never settle, to continuously probe for the other side of the story, to sweat long and hard in the dirty dig for truth. So, sometimes I long for easy answers that simply work, no matter what. But I don't think they exist. We're often guilty of thinking they do, but the reality is that things in life are never--yes, I think that's an appropriately-strong word--black and white.

This interim I took a class on war. I had been to Vietnam and Cambodia last interim to study the Vietnam War (or, in their words, the American War... interesting switch of perspective, eh?). I also was able to spend time in Bosnia this summer studying the war there and reconciliation efforts in the wake of the violence. My worldview was literally exploded this year, expanding so fast that I'm still not even sure what's happened--sometimes, all I know is that the world is much bigger and more complicated than I once thought. It hit home again over interim: war--in fact, all of life!--is not black and white. My war class frustrated me because of its over-simplicity, because of the way we often focused exclusively on the American military, neglecting to engage really deeply with 'other' (non-mainstream-American) traditions, voices, points of view, beliefs about what is just and right. Maybe we would still end up in disagreement. But the 'other' still deserves legitimacy. To assume that the story of our own country's interests is the only proper metanarrative to use in explaining war--and the rightness and wrongness of what happens there--is a scary, scary problem.

I think there's a connection here to the work of the Service-Learning Center. Part of our work is to take Calvin students, a majority of whom still come from the same socioeconomic, racial, and educational background, and expose them to the 'other.' It doesn't stop there, of course--from that exposure we hopefully move to relationship, challenge, questions, acceptance; hopefully we move from focusing on our own ability to serve to humbly being served ourselves, and from giving charity to learning how to really love. It can be a transformative process, a really beautiful and challenging thing. But a large part of that process is the difficult and terrifying piece in which we let go of our assumptions. In studying war, that means acknowledging that the 'other' was fighting for a cause he or she believed in just as legitimately as your own country's soldier, and that the lives of 'other' soldiers and their families are just as valuable as the lives of your own people. It's a difficult (and often unpopular) thing. It challenges the way we act, if we really believe it. In service-learning, a similar thing happens, but in our context, it means asking difficult and terrifying questions that challenge our assumptions about our own motives, privilege, efficacy, pride, and wisdom--asking whether or not, at the end of the day, we actually have offered anything to to our neighbors after all. That's not always popular either, but it's the greyness we must dwell in if we're going to be engaging our community as authentically as we ought.

It's not simple. There are too many people with heart-wrenching stories and valid perspectives for life to ever be simple. War is not simple, once we start to hear the stories of refugees and Iraqi soldiers and Afghani store owners and American Marines. Loving and serving and learning with our community is not simple either, once we start to hear the stories of partner agencies, homeless alcoholics who have been abandoned by their churches, pastors who sacrifice every evening to work with refugees, parole officers, store owners involved in urban renewal, and refugees from wars... no, none of it is easy. The truth is not black and white. It's complicated and grey, and this is the reality of the world we live in. Thank God we're in a place where we can embrace it. Let's keep doing so.

Posted by Kelly