A parish pastor is occasionally asked to help married couples work through conflict. The same counseling principles apply to conflicted culture. Here’s some free relationship advice that can also help to build community.
Frustrated couples typically come to counselling with a list of grievances. One spouse starts off complaining of ongoing bad behavior. The other may or may not admit to the sins. Either way, he is quick to respond with his own list of grievances. Sometimes, it is a bid to dilute guilt by comparison. Other times it is an attempt to justify his sins as necessary.
Then the fur flies. If the counselor has let the conversation go this far without intervention, it is very difficult to keep it from devolving into a shouting match right on the spot. Tempers flare. Voices rise. Unkind words are spoken. And still more damage is done.
The situation remains hopeless so long as husband and wife are looking to the counselor to be the judge. The peace of a home will never exist if both are depending on someone outside the home to come barging in to settle internal disputes. Unless the couple learns to create harmony themselves, harmony will not exist.
A married couple needs, first, to recognize that they are forever bound together—for better or for worse. Harm inflicted on one is harmful to both. Fighting is like your right arm stabbing your left arm.
The same is true in every community. Our commitment to the well-being of one another is foundational. The intrusion of power from outside exposes a fundamental failure of community. The chains of law can never replace the bonds of love. Voluntary obligation, not coercive litigation, is the foundation of harmony in homes, towns, states and nations.
Power seeks to control others. Love seeks to control self. Married couples eventually learn that every attempt to force their spouses to act will be ultimately unsatisfying. Laws, power-plays and manipulation can force behavior and words, but they can never produce love. Love comes from the heart, not from the law.
Love can only be given. It cannot be taken. The only control we have over love is the control of our own giving. Happy couples have learned this lesson. They focus infinitely more on their own behavior and attitudes than they do on the behavior and attitudes of their spouses.
To focus on changing one’s own attitude and behavior avoids the trap of magnifying the shortcomings of others. Instead, we can just appreciate what is given freely. As an added benefit, a clear-eyed admission of our own sins helps us become more understanding and forgiving of others.
Here again, what helps marriages also helps communities. One reason that our culture struggles is the incessant desire to control one another and the habitual neglect of self-control. Many are the experts who point out the errors of others, few are those capable of seeing their own.
The healthiest communities have no policemen because everyone is policing himself. Conversely, no police force in the world can make a community safe when its citizens are not community minded. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
All this means that the most important activity that anyone can do to build a better home, town or state is courageous self-discipline. We are not advancing the ball when we have shouting matches on social media. We do not help matters by denying our own faults. We cannot build the bonds of love by ever more restrictive policies, statutes and laws.
In fact, it is just the opposite. The more freedom you have in your actions, the greater capacity you possess to love. The more restrictions and laws burdening you, the more love is stifled and resentment builds. Communities should be in the business of building the capacity to love, not tearing it down.
We are, after all, one body—the body politic. What is bad for one member of the body is bad the whole body. Imagine for a moment that some part of your body is hurting you. Your toe does not hurt you out of spite, but because you have stubbed it. The remedy is not to smash it with a hammer, but to do everything possible to heal it.
That’s also how we should approach community. Our communities are hurting yet we irrationally respond with more laws that hammer people down. That is not the way forward. It only causes more pain. The way forward is the way of freedom. The obligations of love are both stronger and softer than the chains of law.
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