The Way of Openness :: Conventions for Productive Dialogue

Melissa Inouye - Mormon Women for Ethical Government MWEG

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye was the plenary speaker at the 2020 Mormon Women for Ethical Government spring conference. These are her remarks. To view the video of her presentation, click here.

Thank you very much for the privilege of speaking to you today. I am very humbled to have this opportunity to share useful tools for difficult conversations. First, I will explain where I’m coming from, the experiences that shape my worldview. Then I’ll explain the Way of Openness, which is a set of conventions for productive dialogue, and give examples of how these conventions work in practice. Finally, I’ll leave you with some thoughts from where I am right now, into my third bout of chemotherapy and in the middle of a global pandemic.

Where I come from

We all have different experiences that shape who we are and how we think about the world. These formative experiences do not begin when we are born, but stretch further back into the past.

My mother’s name was Susan Lew Inouye. Here she is on her wedding day at the Los Angeles temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was a third-generation Chinese American.

Her mother Margie (my grandmother) was born on a farm in Salt Lake City, Utah. Margie’s grandparents had come to the United States from the Pearl River Delta area in Guangdong, China. In Salt Lake City, they grew vegetables on a large farm. They got along well with their closest neighbors, the Sorensens, and became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Sorensen boys worked for my great-grandfather to pay for their church missions. But not everyone saw my family as sisters and brothers. Other kids in the neighborhood threw rocks at my grandmother and her siblings as they walked to school. They shouted, “Chink!” and “Go back to China!” After World War II my grandmother’s family eventually moved to Orange County, California. It was still mostly orange groves then. They farmed land in what is now Buena Park.

My grandmother Margie married Hall Lew, a Navy veteran and UCLA engineering student. Margie and Hall ran a Chinese restaurant in Westwood, where actors in Hollywood Westerns came in for lunch still wearing their cowboy costumes. My mother was born in Fountain Valley.

My father is Warren Sanji Inouye, also third generation, a Japanese American. He was born in Richfield, Sanpete County, Utah. His parents were Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans from California, and Washington State. Their parents, my great-grandfather Sashichi and great-grandmother Mikano, met and married in Hawaii in the early twentieth century. The family later moved to Mountain View, California. My grandfather, Charles Inouye, was one of the early Japanese American graduates of Stanford University.

World War II unleashed a wave of racism and nativism in the United States. White Americans looked at their fellow Japanese American citizens and saw the enemy. In the West Coast, many had long resented Japanese Americans’ participation in the economy and coveted their farms and businesses.

On February 19, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to evacuate all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast and imprison them deep in the interior. Over 110,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them born-and-raised U.S. citizens, were loaded into trucks and buses with a suitcase in each hand. They had been forced to abandon their homes, farms, and businesses, at an estimated loss of $1-3 billion. Their properties were looted, their places of worship vandalized. First they were sent to “assembly centers” like the Santa Anita Racetrack, where they were housed in horse stalls. Then, they boarded trains away from the coast.

At the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, my grandparents and great-grandparents lived under the gaze of armed sentries on watchtowers. The tar-paper-covered barracks were made of green wood that shrank to leave large gaps. Each barracks block had a room with showers and a long row of toilets with no partitions between them. My family made the best of the conditions. My Auntie Jeanette was in Girl Scouts. My Uncle Frank played in the band. My grandpa Charles Inouye and Grandma Bessie Murakami met because they were both teachers in the Buddhist Sunday School. Their first baby, my uncle Dillon, was born in camp.

At this time the government mandate was that anyone with one-sixteenth “Japanese blood” had to be locked up. I’m half-Japanese, and my children are a quarter. What would it have been like, as military trucks packed me and my husband and four children off to live for months in a single horse stall? In this age of self-quarantine, we are better able to imagine how it felt to be confined. But we at least are in homes with bathrooms, kitchens, and the internet, not horse stalls that had been whitewashed in such haste, clumps of manure had been encased in the walls, breaking open like sores when you touched them.

What would I have done, if I had not been targeted myself, and I had learned my neighbors were being forced to abandon their thriving crops and businesses to live behind barbed wire? Would I have raised my voice and stood outside the halls of power? Would I have been my brother’s and sister’s keeper?

People living in a historic moment do not “feel historic.” The score of small choices constantly at hand just feels like everyday life, like common sense: what to do on the coming weekend, where to look for a place to live, whom to invite in, whose problems to make one’s own.

Historian Robert Shaffer studied the few individuals in the state of Washington who did stand up on behalf of their Japanese neighbors. Often these individuals had prolonged contact with Japanese or Japanese Americans as educators, missionaries, or members of Christian churches. Emma Azalia Peet, a Methodist who had been a missionary in Japan for 25 years, spoke out forcefully against removal at government hearings held before the evacuation decision was made, “demanding that evidence of wrongdoing by Japanese Americans be presented before the government moved to deprive U.S. citizens of their civil liberties.”

Rev. Emery Andrews, the pastor of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, declared “future historians will record this evacuation — this violation of citizenship rights — as one of the blackest blots on American history; as the time that democracy came the nearest of being wrecked.”

Rev. Andrews and his family sought unsuccessfully for permission to live inside the prison camp at Minidoka, alongside the members of the Japanese Baptist Church. When this failed, they moved to Idaho to be closer to the Minidoka camp. Rev. Andrews “made over 50 trips back and forth to Seattle, about 700 miles each way, to deliver goods out of storage to the internees.” He also brought out the automobiles of those who had arranged to move east. In 1944 he wrote to a WRA official:

“By evacuation of this minority group, we have said to every other minority group and to the whole world, two things: that our Constitution and its principles are null and void, and that the military has precedence over civil rights.”

When these efforts to prevent removal failed, people like Floyd Schmoe, a Quaker, worked to — as he put it — “[ease] the blow upon our neighbors by helping to arrange the safe storage of their possessions, leasing of their lands, businesses, hotels, etc.” L.P. Sieg, president of the University of Washington, allowed Japanese American students who had been compelled to evacuate before finishing their final quarter of university studies to receive their degrees. He traveled to the camps to bestow each one of these degrees in person.

Catholic priest L.H. Tibesar published a full-page feature article in the Seattle Times in 1943, protesting the poor living conditions in the camps. Referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime rallying call of establishing the “Four Freedoms” abroad through an Allied victory, he said, “We cannot export what we do not have at home.”

Despite the heightened fear and anger and racial divisions of the age that led the majority of Americans to set aside their ideals of liberty and justice for all, these few good neighbors worked to lay the foundations for a better day, seeking to improve public attitudes toward Japanese Americans so that when the camps closed, people would be more accepting. Over and over again these few good neighbors waded into difficult conversations, sharing their personal experiences of trust and friendship with Japanese Americans. They persistently stood up to offer people around them other ways of thinking, doing, and being.

I grew up in Orange County, California, a beneficiary of the trust-building efforts of these kind neighbors and the hard work and determination of my parents and grandparents. I had the privilege of education, music lessons, sports teams, summer camps. My mom was in the PTA. My dad was our local scoutmaster. And then there was church.

As far back as I can reach into my childhood, the Latter-day Saints are there — at birthday parties, on Sunday mornings, on Sunday nights, on Wednesday nights for youth activities, all day on Saturday to help someone move, at innumerable performances and practices and graduations. They are stoking the campfire beneath the tall pines of the Sierras and scrambling up the coarse rock formations of Joshua Tree. They are performing at piano recitals (my teacher was the ward organist) and lip-syncing “Under the Sea” on the stage at the ward talent show.

All of these activities involve organization: people working side-by-side, taking direction but also taking initiative to plan and coordinate. It was at church that I first learned how to be an activist, as I observed my mother, father, and other volunteer leaders. To massively mix metaphors, I saw how they herded cats, tamed beasts, got back in the saddle, cut the Gordian knot, and marshalled the troops.

All these people working together with their hands were incredibly powerful. In a few hours of a day, a pack of us could clean and paint an entire school building or plant an entire neighborhood with trees. We could swarm through a patch of woodland like eco-locusts, snapping the necks of weeds and tearing up invasive plants by their roots. There should be a specialized plural noun to describe them: A mob of Mormons? A sanction of Saints? A heap of Helping Hands? This phenomenon probably exists in other religious groups, so we should think of plural nouns for them too: A bevy of Buddhists. A union of Unitarians.

Religious communities of all stripes have tremendous power beyond literal helping hands; because in addition to physical gathering they have a strong ideological and moral orientation. Members of such communities believe in things that are not seen, but real and true and important. They believe in righteousness. They value honesty and integrity. Together, communities built around morality dare to define standards of right and wrong (though they often disagree about the details). Working with our minds and hearts as well as hands, communities held together by strong beliefs in right and wrong have tremendous influence. As a Latter-day Saint, in my religious community I have seen the power of people acting together to aid their neighbors — often with elbow grease or tater tot casseroles, but also with shared experiences and a listening heart.

Precisely because right and wrong are universally important but also deeply personal, often it’s difficult to have conversations about ethics. We may agree that honesty and integrity are important, but what does that look like in practice and policy? We all espouse values such as fairness, loyalty, and kindness, but what do we do when someone claiming those same values proposes a course of action that is the opposite of the course we would take?

The Way of Openness

The Way of Openness is a set of dialogue conventions developed by Randall Paul at the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy. Randall’s worldview, which stems from his Latter-day Saint theology and his generous heart, is that deep disagreements between people do not indicate that one person is very righteous and the other very wicked, or that one person is very smart and the other very stupid. Rather, deep disagreements between people are symptomatic of their mutual goodness, their desire to enact what is right in the world, and their unwillingness to compromise their values and beliefs about what people need to flourish. The goal for productive dialogue is not compromise, but trust.

The first and most critical element of a deep dialogue actually happens before the dialogue itself. Randall has taught me that prior to any dialogue on a controversial topic or question you must first build a relationship between the interlocutors, preferably over food, lasting over an hour and a half. In this first meeting, the dialogue topic is off the table. The only question the two have to answer, taking equal time, is, “How did you come to your deepest beliefs?” This begins to build a relationship and to establish trust.

Here are the 10 conventions for dialogue, which the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy calls “The Way of Openness.” You can check these out in greater detail at the Foundation’s website.

Be Honest
Be Kind
Listen Well
Share the Floor
Presume Good Will
Acknowledge the Differences
Answer the Tough Questions
Give Credit Where Credit Is Due
Speak Only for Yourself
Keep Private Things Private

In 2008, the Prop 8 battle was fought in California. Proposition 8 would ban same-sex marriage. Religious groups and individuals engaged on both sides of this ballot measure. In the critical final weeks leading up to the election, I happened to attend a Los Angeles interfaith event. It was held at a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in West LA because a Latter-day Saint public affairs official was receiving an award for building bridges in the community. The church cultural hall was filled with banners about how “the golden rule” existed in every religion and culture. Look at what we have in common! they proclaimed. Treat others the way you would like others to treat you! What you do not wish for yourself, do not inflict on others! Etc., etc.

And yet! The lesbian Anglican priest, the progressive Jewish rabbi, the United Methodist pastor, and many others working to oppose Prop 8 sat in their seats, clapping politely as the Latter-day Saint leader, working to pass Prop 8, accepted his award. But their eyes and lips were grim. They sat stiffly in their metal folding chairs. A feeling of heaviness was in the air. At this moment, I had an epiphany: It’s not enough to be able to talk about what we have in common. We also have to learn how to talk about how we disagree.

In the aftermath of Prop 8, anger erupted across California. People lost friends and alienated family members as they denounced each other’s positions. The following year, I arranged a collaboration between the City of Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy, using the dialogue conventions of the Way of Openness. The dialogue took place between eight Los Angeles religious leaders in 2009. Later, in 2011, we reconvened for a second round of dialogue with mostly the same people, and the City of Los Angeles made a documentary about it. I will play the first four minutes here.

WAY OF OPENNESS FILM

0:00-4:00 — Introduction of film laying out context for the dialogue and to the Way of Openness

In these dialogues, people did not pull punches. People were kind, but they told each other what they really believed, even if it was hard to hear. I will play a short clip of a conversation between Judy Gilliland, a Latter-day Saint and a prominent interfaith leader in Los Angeles, and Rev. Dr. Neil Thomas, then the pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles that ministers primarily to the LGBTQ community.

12:30-13:04 — Dialogue between Judy Gilliland and Neil Thomas

Judy and Neil had two conversations that day. The clip you just saw was from the first conversation. Later on, in another room, as the day was drawing to a close, they talked with each other again. I was watching them from the corner of the room as they concluded their dialogue: leaning towards each other, listening intently. At the end of their conversation, they suddenly embraced, tears running down their cheeks.

The relationship between Judy and Neil has borne fruit of trust and goodwill. Judy attended Neil’s church three times. Two out of those three times she was asked to speak, and each time she received a standing ovation from the congregation. Eventually, Neil accepted a new position at another church in Texas. At his final farewell service, he invited two others to speak: a woman rabbi, and Judy. In her interfaith activities in Los Angeles, Judy regularly runs into members of Neil’s church. “Every time we see members of the congregation,” she said, “it’s like greeting a dear friend.”

Here’s another clip from the end of the documentary, showing the conclusion of dialogues between Rev. Thomas and Father Alexei, a Catholic priest.

16:45-20:55 — Closing conversation with Neil Thomas and Father Alexei until end of film

So that’s how the Way of Openness worked in a dialogue over one of the thorniest interreligious issues out there. But an even thornier situation is intrareligious dialogue, between people who share a religious tradition. This is where everything blows up. This is where the knives and brass knuckles come out.

In January 2015, during a time of heated debate over women’s issues within Latter-day Saint culture, my auntie Annie sent me an email. Did you get the essay from Carolina Allen that I sent yesterday?

Yes, I had read this essay. It discussed “Maternal Feminism” which to me at the time sounded suspiciously like emphasizing women’s domestic roles (their abilities to jiggle babies) while ignoring their brains and ability to make sound decisions. It had been written by someone named “Carolina Allen.” Thinking about the suburban, well-to-do community in Spanish Fork where Auntie Annie lived, I imagined that this Carolina Allen was a 67-year-old white lady with six kids and three grandchildren, who listened to Rush Limbaugh. I replied to Auntie Annie:

“I felt that a lot of Sister Allen’s perspective is influenced by the particular problems that she faces as a North American white woman who lives in an affluent society.”

Imagine my surprise when Carolina Allen emailed me directly. She said, “I am a 35 yr old first generation Latina Brazilian immigrant. . . . My family immigrated to the US back in 1986 with 8 suitcases and $400 to our name. We have undergone many challenges through the years (poverty and even homelessness at one point) but now I see that these experiences have been in reality opportunities to overcome.” She then graciously asked for my input on some ideas she was developing for her organization, Big Ocean Women.

Carolina and I got to know each other. We discovered we were both the same age, our kids were about the same ages, and we both drove red minivans. Using the dialogue conventions of the Way of Openness, we had a Skype conversation discussing our different approaches to Latter-day Saint women’s issues and recorded it (you can find it online, though we were very amateur recorders — the baby wakes up around 8:00, which is amusing).

Today I see Carolina not only as a friend but as a valuable colleague though our ideological views often diverge. When I was writing the tricky essay on gender for my book, “Crossings,” I ran my draft past Carolina. She pointed out several places where I inadvertently said something that people like her would find off-putting. The essay became much stronger because of her candid feedback. I played the same role for her when her organization, Big Ocean Women, launched their new website.

We’ve had a fair share of heated conversations. But when I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2017 she was among the first people to reach out and offer strong, unflinching support. I trust her to wish the best for me, act with integrity, and do a lot of good in the world. Once she said — I’m paraphrasing: “There are enough problems in the world for all kinds of women, and all kinds of feminists — maternal feminists, egalitarian feminists. Let’s stop arguing about who’s more correct. Just go out and do something!”

Doing things in the world of real people and real places takes time, energy, resources. It’s much more difficult than raging at people in snarky social media comment chains. It takes an investment of intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual energy. These investments have become rarer in the Information Age, as disagreeing has become more convenient. The anonymity and distance of an internet environment remove us from the liability of disagreement and even from the consequences of being disagreeable. If we want to be really cowardly, we can create an anonymous account, trash someone on Twitter, and take no personal responsibility. Hit and run.

The fast-moving culture wars of the Internet Age have also primed us to strike first, ask questions later, at the expense of thoughtful deliberation.

Just to raise a recent example the other day I was at the Draper Library and I saw a book: “The World’s Worst Conspiracies: The Truth They Don’t Want You to Know.” The back cover talked about the Illuminati. One of the section breaks bore the subtitle, “Faked mass shootings.” Outraged, I plucked the book off the display stand and marched over to talk to a librarian. I demanded to know who had ordered this crazy book. Would they order science books that taught the moon was made of cheese? I asked. Would they display books that taught people how to be terrorists!?

The librarian said I could fill out a feedback form. While he looked on his computer for the form, I paged through this horrible book. Reading more closely, I noticed that the section on mass shootings did not say they were faked. Reading even more closely, I realized that at the end of every discussion of a conspiracy theory, the author debunked the theory. This book was actually very cleverly designed to show people that the vast conspiracies they imagined were improbable. I said, “Errr, actually, this book appears to be about disproving conspiracy theories,” and told the librarian he could stop looking for the form on his computer. “I guess I judged it by its cover.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, trying to conceal his glee. “The form does say, please make sure you have read the whole book before you complain.”

My early onset outrage is a symptom of today’s culture that prioritizes platforms over people. The Way of Openness prioritizes people over platforms. The model works because the premise works: Most people are pretty intelligent and their hearts are pretty good. As a Latter-day Saint who believes that we have a loving Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father who give us inspiration and revelation through the Holy Spirit, I believe that the model also works because when people open themselves up to each other, and make themselves vulnerable to each other, this invites the Spirit to be present.

I have seen the Way of Openness succeed over and over again in situations that I felt were impossible. There have been times when in the midst of the dialogue process I have despaired and fumed to think of the other party’s hard heartedness, stubbornness, arrogance, or willful blindness. I felt that a positive outcome was not possible. And then, miraculously, in a moment of shared vulnerability, the Spirit came into the room and transformed us all.

The solution is not new arguments or new information, but new experiences and new relationships. People have their views because of their experiences. You can’t explain their experiences away. You can’t explain what their experiences mean to them. However, when two people with different worldviews form a relationship, the relationship itself can become the basis for something new. Relationships create trust. If I care about someone, I am more likely to view their experience as valuable and their worldview as valid.

I have a Facebook friend named Tom whose opinions I value highly because very often I find them infuriating. We have nearly opposite views on politics and many social issues. His family was in the same stake growing up. His sister and I took piano lessons from the same teacher. We’ve been friends on social media for years.

Generally speaking, the pattern goes like this: I will post something slightly political. I get a flood of affirmation from like-minded friends, and then there will be Tom, saying, “But . . .” In other words, he also finds my opinions infuriating and inexplicable.

And yet, we don’t scream at each other over cyberspace. We have a relationship. The other day, when I wrote an impassioned post promoting an MWEG editorial and quoting Alexis De Toqueville, he messaged me privately and said:

“Not posted to your heartfelt post, but that ‘America is great because America is good’ quote is spurious. Tocqueville never wrote it. It first showed up in a 1941 book.”

As an academic, I’m used to taking criticism. Still, I was touched that he would privately message me instead of publicly blowing me out of the water, as so often happens in online discourse these days. I especially value Tom’s friendship — not because we have many shared views in common, but because we have so few shared views in common.

When I was in elementary school, my father passed on some advice that his father had given him, which was, “Make friends who are better than you.” Now that I am a parent myself, to this I would add, “Spend time with people who are different from you.” We all need people in our lives to check our assumptions, to show us our blind spots, to remind us that every person has worth and dignity and that the purpose of life is not to be correct but to be good.

Sometimes we place such a premium on being correct and monitoring others who might be incorrect. Let someone cross a certain line, and Pow, they deserve to be blown up. Or do they? Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. But let me ask another question: Will blowing up our sisters and brothers pave the way to a better world, a world where God’s children can flourish? Will expressing contempt for someone’s beliefs make them more or less susceptible to your attempts to influence them?

Someone is more likely to listen to you if they trust you. Someone is more likely to trust you if they know you care about them and are listening to them. This takes time and it is very inefficient. You can’t listen to people en masse. You can’t care about people en masse. It has to happen one on one.

We today are living in a historic moment, a moment in which the people of the world are both connected and divided as never before. The Information Age has given birth to 500 new technologies to help us shout and 200 new ways to call names. We have perfected visually striking ways of distorting our enemies’ words and know the sounds of some voices so well we can turn off the volume as soon as we hear the first few words. But where does this leave us? Surrounded by idiots, in a world full of garbage. Who wants to live in that kind of world?

I don’t want to live in a world full of patriarchal jerks, partisan scumbags, and ignorant hypocrites. So often it’s hard to remember, but actually, as a Latter-day Saint, I believe we live in a world filled with the children of God. I believe the purpose of life is to learn to look after each other, to help each other become better. But our experiences are so incredibly different. No wonder we disagree.

The more people we know and love, the more likely we are to know and love someone with completely wrongheaded ideas, who supports political and social views we absolutely despise. This is the blessing, but also the curse, of religious communities and other communities, like large families, whose members we did not personally select. Living with the tensions created by difference can be uncomfortable. They can suddenly derail Thanksgiving dinner, or the Sunday School discussion, or a Facebook thread. But imagine life without such tensions! How horrible would it be if we really were surrounded by people who were nothing but racists, socialists, ignoramuses, bigots, and liars, instead of by our beloved uncles and aunts, loyal friends, eager students, helpful classmates, and hardworking colleagues?

In a time of global pandemic our shared existence is more apparent than ever. Some have called for more walls and stronger borders. But germs, social instability, and pollution are no respecters of borders. All who currently live and breathe are passengers on a tiny marble-shaped blue spaceship, flying around a burning sun in the middle of freezing cold emptiness. We are stuck with each other. We have to accept this.

Be willing to see someone through more than one lens (this lens is different for everyone — for me, it’s often gender issues). See, but see again. Seize opportunities to cultivate relationships with people who are different from you, who might possibly hate you, who are uninterested in the things that keep you up at night. Do not spend your valuable time going back and forth with anonymous interlocutors — people you can never know. Only disagree with people you will surely meet again. Only contend with those who know your love for them is stronger than the bands of death.

Still “on the way” (not “there” yet)

This sounds like a big ask, so I would like to temper it with a little perspective from my personal life.

In the spring of 2017 I was diagnosed with colon cancer. I had surgery, then six months of chemotherapy. In the spring of 2019 I learned that the cancer had recurred, was stage IV, metastatic, etc. etc. I had chemo, then surgery in January of this year, and have just started chemo again. (I’m feeling really well despite the chemo — thanks for asking!)

As we all know, in our life we go through difficult periods (a few hours, a few weeks or months or years) that change how we see the world and how we understand ourselves.

I remember waking up in my bed at 3 a.m. one morning in June 2019. My abdomen was full of ascites fluid and very swollen (like being pregnant, but with a tumor). The fluid pressed on my lungs and made it hard to breathe. Recent scans indicated the cancer had spread to my left ovary, small intestine, peritoneum, and possibly a lung. When I shifted positions, there were stabbing pains in my pelvis, where the tumors pressed against things. I realized, this is how it feels to be dying. During the daytime I helped my kids with their homework, cooked meals, helped my husband pave a garden path, and played with the dog. But at night, by myself, lying awake in the dark, feeling the unrightness of my body, I fought against despair.

In times like this, one realizes something: Life is too short to fill it with Donald Trump. Like him, dislike him, life is too short to fill it with him. Perhaps things are not as outrageous as they seem. Perhaps we don’t have to personally supply the solutions to every problem.

“Fixing the world” is a tenuous goal, because the law of entropy dictates that we are bound to fail. Something will always be broken, or breaking, or on the verge. Sometimes the broken thing is me, and sometimes it is you.

And yet there is a Japanese proverb my Uncle Dillon once shared with me: If a person will spend her life in the pursuit of one good thing, then surely by the end of her life, she will have something to show for her efforts.

What is this “one good thing”? Is it to advance a political or social cause? Is it to leave the world’s people better than you found them, including, for instance, one’s family, friends, students, rivals, and enemies? Is it to suffer as Christ suffered, in order to lift and heal others? Is it to taste the fruit of the tree of life, which is the love of God? Is it to sit down with others on the side of the road of life and weep?

I am not sure this “one good thing” can be reduced to a single noun, sentence, or proposition. I believe the point of the proverb is not to prescribe the “one good thing,” but to encourage humility. We do not have to “do it all.” We should not take it upon ourselves to fix all that’s broken.

But if you, and I, and all of us persist — in our variable, unreliable, and largely unremarkable lives — in seeking righteousness for ourselves and good for the children of God who cross our paths, in speaking honestly to people when they are close, and being generous to those who are far away, I believe we will have something to show for our efforts.