Be Loving. Be Loved. Be The Culture

James Whitfield
Kirkland, WA
March 2020

My family moved a lot as I grew up, however I was a firmly rooted resident of two television communities, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and "Sesame Street." 

"Yes, Mr. Rogers!" I would exclaim each weekday, "I would like to be your neighbor!"

Growing up on the same virtual blocks as other residents in these neighborhoods, such as, Bert and Ernie, Maria, Marilyn Barnett, and Officer Clemons allowed me to see myself as a fully embraced and well-represented member of a diverse and highly functional community.

As I matured, I made fewer and fewer return visits to these TV hometowns, and more and more interactions in the real world - at school and at play, in places of work and places of worship – that disabused the PBS expectations I had come to take for granted.

All too frequently, engaging with people other than the people who lived in the neighborhood of Make Believe, and my other TV companions didn’t feel like community at all. The dreaded high school "group project," toxic work teams, or volunteer experiences characterized by misdirected intensity or overwhelming apathy.

Eventually, as I moved into leadership in my organizations and communities, I sought a systematic understanding of the common characteristics of groups that thrive vs. groups who do not.  My quest brought me into contact with idea of "Beloved Community" in a quote by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraging me to believe we all can expect more from our group dynamics.

All of the work we do at Be Culture is rooted in the equity and systems change tenants of Beloved Community and Adaptive Leadership. There are myriad ways the fusion of these approaches, which we have synthesized as the Beloved Culture Framework, supports equitable, thriving relational systems from spouses and families to enterprises and communities.

We believe any system of relationships can by thriving and equitable. At the most fundamental level, however, it requires the individuals within the relationship to commit to two ways of being.

The first is to be loving.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Our society today stokes significant ideological and identity division.  Take, for example, the physical bubbles in which we live. People with different political views tend to live in different towns. Or if they live in the same town they tend to live in different parts of town. And if they are employed by the same company, they have different functions – each tending to have their own brand of politics – and usually physically separated from one another. This may or may not be the cause of the ideological differences among these different groups of people, but this physical separation is certainly reflective of it.

And, of course, our online existences are algorithmically inclined to engorge us on what we already believe.  Our feeds, stories, pages, and posts attract the attention of the people who think like us. And we are rewarded by clicks, likes, and being spoon-fed reflections of our own wisdom in the form of like-minded feeds, stories, pages, and posts. And so, the cycle continues.

One might think this polarization would lead to being loving to the people in our bubbles and unloving to the people on the outside. That’s only about half true. The not-in-our-bubble part is pretty straight-forward, how can we love people who are so wrong in their thinking, so unaware of the harm they are doing, so gullible to believe the leaders on the “other side?”  The people outside our bubbles are ripe for our contempt, if not outright hatred.

However, it can also difficult to be loving to those in-our-bubble. When we are surrounded by people who are like us, our differences are magnified as we compare ourselves - and one another - to a more and more “pure” ideal. When people spend time in their own ideological or social bubbles, their pursuit of the ideal begins to force them apart. This can be called a purity spiral.

If you are curious how Democrats can be so vicious to one another as they claim the all agree the goal is to defeat Trump – the answer is you’re watching a purity spiral.  Ever wonder why churches implode upon themselves and split up to ever smaller denominations? Purity spiral. And if you look closely, the same thing is probably happening in your life.  You are surrounded, more and more, by people who are more and more like you, and when you find out that they hold some belief or practice that is outside the tolerable confines of your belief system, the two of you un-like, unfollow, or avoid one another. Purity spiral.

If you wish to live in a culture – in your politics, in your faith community, at work, or in your family – where you can be accepted just as you are, then you’re going to have to love other people within and outside your bubble, just as they are.  This doesn’t mean agree with them. Just love them. Be for them. Want what’s in their best interest. Replace contempt with caring.

Which brings us to the second way of being required for equitable, thriving relational systems, and it might be even more difficult.

You must allow yourself to be loved.

When people from the other side express some nicety or reach out to make a connection, do you see an olive branch or a Trojan horse? We’ve gotten so good at “othering” that it’s almost impossible to perceive the good in people when they try.  Of course, our world is littered with all kinds of phishing and scams. But let’s not let the people who are trying to break into our bank accounts force us to armor off our hearts.

If you can be loving, others can as well.   Maybe once make an effort, they will try to respond in kind. Or they might already be trying to break through the contempt and polarization. Are they really offering up a bit of a peace offering? Might they be ceding a little space for common ground? To find out, you have to be willing to take the risk to receive it. You’ll have to open yourself up to the possibility that the “other” may be looking for a way to stop othering you.

In an executive leadership program that I have taught, we facilitate an exercise where each attendee, all highly accomplished senior leaders, have to ask for help.  This is quite an uncommon thing for most of the participants. They know how to delegate and/or hand-off work to others, but to ask for help from people who are under no obligation to give it is a level of vulnerability that’s foreign to many of them.  and, I would argue, foreign to many of us.

To believe that someone would do something good for us, that’s not in their job description, not a part of family duty, just an act of love and caring, has somehow become so out of the ordinary that we tend to see all such acts with suspicion.  I find this terribly sad.

If we are going to risk being loving, we’ll also need to risk being loved. This sets the groundwork for relationships and culture that has the power to thrive and break-through rather than spiral and break apart.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way, “The goal is not victory. It’s justice and reconciliation.” If you wish to see a culture where people build success upon justice and reconciliation, then be loving and be loved.

And that would create neighborhoods that would even make Mr. Rogers proud.