Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Michael McRay 0:00
We can talk all day long about reconciling relationships and trying to build, nd when I talk about reconciling relationships, I'm talking about building relationships of trust, of interdependence, of mutuality, of goodwill, of forgiveness, these sort of qualities. But those cannot be sustained if they're active oppressions and systems of inequality that are separating people how on earth you build, close relationship when there are things keeping you apart. So you can't reconcile in a long term sort of way. If there's active injustice that's continuing to perpetuate society. At the same time, you can try to solve all the problems with the systems and structures that to keep people apart. But if you don't ever deal all the relationship between them, then the people will find new ways, new injustices. to create.
Seth Price 1:00
Hello there. How are each and every one of you? happy you're here. This is the Can I Say This At Church podcast, which you should know, because you hit the download button. But it's entirely possible that some automatic playlist fired you up. And if that's true, hit subscribe. Tell your friends, or just grab like your neighbor's phone, your mom's phone, your brother's phone, whatever. Pull up the podcast app, and then just hit subscribe there for no good reason. Let it be a surprise, you know, in a few weeks when the next episode drops, it could be fun. Anyhow, I'm glad that you're here. And I'm excited for the conversation today. However, before we get started, extremely happy to say welcome to the patron community both David to both David Ball and Vivian Wildeboer and I'm hoping I'm saying your last name correctly, Vivian, if not, I apologize. Many of you listening are not in that community and I would ask for you to do so.
So this is a free podcast and I will always have it be that way for everybody on the internet. However, it's not free to make. And so there are quite a few people there that have pitched in. And I do my best to try to give other things there that make it worthwhile. I'm begun to actually write a bit more long form. And we'll see how long that takes. And I've begun to share snippets there, I actually have a little bit more that I'll put up in the next few days, just to you know, see what people think. However, head over to the show notes, click the button, support the show. And again, you can do that one of two ways. You can just hit subscribe in whatever your podcast choice player. That's not a good sentence. However you play podcast, the conversation today, I brought on Michael McCray. And what we talked about is a divided world about the divisiveness of you and I, politics, religion, and the othering of people.
And so, Michael did something really, really different. He went around the globe, interviewing people that figured out ways to work through things and be a bridge to break down “othering” and use that to literally bring justice and peace and help work for a more beautiful world. And I think that's what we all need. We constantly yell at each other, myself included, and in a very unhealthy way. And we just isolate and insulate ourselves in ways that do not show love, justice, mercy, anything of that sort, and it's not really acceptable. It's just not. So I really hope that you enjoy this conversation with Michael. Here we go.
Seth Price 4:20
Michael McRay, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on although slightly…the stories in your book are really uncomfortable for me over the last few months living in America with everything going on to really talk about as two white guys talking about it, but either way.
Michael McRay 4:41
That makes two of us.
Seth Price 4:43
And the nice thing is they're not really your stories. So that helps a little bit. One of the questions I like to ask people every single time I start is, if I was to ask you, or you were telling somebody, hey, I'm Michael, these are the things that actually made me me. Not that “I'm a husband“. That's the trite elevator pitch that anybody could say. You know, I'm a son or whatever, like, what are the important things as you look back over the course of your life, however old you happen to be that you're like, yeah, these are the things that actually make me do what I do now that drive you.
Michael McRay 5:11
Mm hmm. Great. Well, firstly, thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. What what makes me me?
I, for as long as I can remember, I have wanted people's attention. So I don't know if you're familiar with the enneagram.
Seth Price 5:34
I am.
Michael McRay 5:37
I'm a three on the enneagram. And yeah, so I can, I just always remember trying to be in the spotlight. Now I've learned how to tame that a bit more as I've gotten older and control it but the the drive is always still there. Like am I building a big enough platform how many people are liking posts like it's still very much about like, being seen. So that's definitely something that there. And then in a less kind of vulnerable level, I suppose the Yeah, I've always had a very deep love of stories. So early on that was looking like, you know, Disney movies or Lord of the Rings or whatever it was and I always had to act out I had a very vivid imagination. So I always needed to act out every story that I encountered. My parents had to start, like really being careful about what stories I actually get to see, like, what movies we watched, because then I would go just like act them all out and try to fly or something after watching Peter Pan.
But I yeah, I've always had a deep love of stories, and I've always been, I've always been a really empathic person and wanted wanted to be in kind of community and sharing things with people. My mom tells a story about how when I was five, I think it was my birthday and I have an older brother and that when I came down from abroad Based on my presence, I said, “John! John, look what we got!” even though it was my birthday, but my sense was like these presents are for all of us. Like, that's also been, I think part of who I am, is I have a sense of wanting to connect to the pain of other people and wanting to be part of healing in some way, which is led me to most of the work that I've done throughout my life.
Seth Price 7:24
Did John feel the same way when it was his birthday?
Michael McRay 7:31
(Laughter) No! John’s a one on the enneagram so he's very much just like, this is mine. This is not yours.
Seth Price 7:36
Yeah. So I made a commitment to both myself and my family to slow down in the summer, last summer about broke me recording episodes week after week, because up until three days ago, today's Wednesday, right Thursday, up until Monday. I had not missed a week for like two and a half years. And it was just a lot and I refuse to talk to people if I don't read their book, at least if that's what we're talking about if it's not a book, it actually requires more work because there's you did the outline, you did a great job. You know, although those are some of my favorites, they just take a lot more work is exhausting. As I told my wife is like, you know, when the summer comes, which actually hit a little earlier, I kept the school year summer. It's like, I'm only going to do one every other week. Because of that though, you are only the second person I've talked to this month. The last person was a three. When I told him I was a five. And then I started asking questions. He kept blowing me up saying, “Yeah, not everybody needs all the answers”. Like I understand that you've got to read 97 books.
He's like, and that tells me something about you. We'll talk about that for a minute. However, the question doesn't hold as much weight for me. And that's a paraphrase of what he said. And I'm like, that's fair. Can we talk about it though? You know, it’s fine. Yeah. I think it was the publisher or the the person reached out and said, “Hey, do you want to speak with Michael”, I read a little bit about the blurb of your book, but read a little bit about some of the other stuff that you've written about as well. was really excited, and you alluded to it a minute ago. I don't know if I was recording it or not. But yeah, the lady had said, Well, he just had a baby. Can we hit pause for a minute? So congratulations on the baby. You're absolutely right. You're never going to sleep again. But like I told you earlier, you’ll just stop caring if the house is clean, so it gets easier. You'll get a minivan, it's gonna be fine. They're really great. utilitarian, it's perfect. I wouldn't trade mine in for the world.
My wife drives the sexy car. And I drive the minivan every single day. So I have questions about your book. So your book is called I Am Not Your Enemy. And it is laced with stories that predominantly are not yours, really, when your voice kind of comes into view it's more of a segue to the next story or a fleshing out of a larger conversation. So how did you come about wanting…how did this come about? Like in the back of my mind, I can see questioning everything and then not doing anything with that information. So what in somebody makes you want to go? Okay, I need to basically go across the continents, all of them, and talk to all these people and then somehow flesh it out into paper. Like, how does that happen?
Michael McRay 10:13
Yeah, the original impetus for the book? Well, first of all, I had no intention of writing the book initially. In fact, every book that I published, did not start out writing a book. My first book was just kind of letters, I was writing to people back home, and I was living in the West Bank. And then my second book was a master's thesis that I expanded and then my the third one was an Advent reader that I did on my blog that turned into a publication. And then the fourth is this one started out as actually started out as a proposal for a Fulbright Fellowship, where I, Michael Brown had just been killed in Ferguson and Israel was bombarding Gaza. ISIS was in the news all the time, and it was an overwhelming amount of just terrible news. And I had a sense of like, the stories that we tell matter the stories that we tell directly affect the breadth of our imagination. And if we, the way that we tell stories will inform our ability to, to engage the world provides a framework for us.
And so we've got to be really intentional at telling stories, and listening to stories, that point us out of violence and not just keep us stuck in cycles of violence. And I spend a lot of time in Israel-Palestine, you know, I'd made a dozen trips or so, you know, I'd done grad school in Northern Ireland in conflict resolution. So I had connections in those places. I'd studied a lot about South Africa and knew some people there but hadn't been.
And so I put together this proposal to say, you know, what I want to do is actually go to places that are known for their division, and talk to people who are finding ways to live well together in the midst of that division and see what wisdom they have for the wounds that we have back home. And by the time I got around to doing the project, Donald Trump was rising in the Republican primary and my sense was people, especially a lot of white people, were being like, wait, what is happening? And they're like, I didn't realize that Obama was just President. I thought we were done with race.
And like, it was sort of this sense of this country's not where we thought it was. And so I wanted to go and find these stories to to say, this feels really new to us, maybe in the United States, even though it shouldn't but it does feel new to us in the States. Well, people in other places have been dealing with this for a very long time and what do they have to say that we need to hear?
And so it started as an educational collaboration with with Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and but as I was gathering these stories and sending them to students to engage with, I had this sense of these can't be limited to this one project. These stories are compelling and I want to tell them and now the big task then was taking the 60/70 interviews that I did and turning them into only 10 chapters. You know, there I had to cut out most of the stories. But the ones that made their way into the book, I think were really, really powerful ones.
Seth Price 13:12
Now I really want to read the other 50 but that'll be volumes. Maybe we'll talk about the other 50 if it comes up, so I'm curious. So the students at the TCU, I'm from Texas. It's the bullfrog horn frogs, green frogs, Horned Frogs. Yeah. How did these stories are? Did you have a line of sight? Like were you teaching there? Or were you sending these to a professor like how did these stories flesh out kind of the views of the students there? Like Did you get any communication back from that have lives impacted in real time?
Michael McRay 13:43
Yeah, I got some. Trchnical I was called a visiting scholar, but they were trying to reverse model where instead of bringing the scholar to campus, you send them abroad and then you interact through technology. apart with the political science class, a world religions class and a world literature class. And so, yeah, they some of the students would just, I would post some of the pieces to my blog, and they would comment, I would post short little Instagram Stories of some of the ones that are in the book. And then students would comment on that. And then they also had to make video projects based on them. I also filmed all the interviews. So I have like 180 gigabytes of footage of all the whole trip. And so students also would watch the video, the interviews that I did, they'd make videos from them. And so there was there was quite a bit of interaction. And overall, I mean, it seems like the students were really taken with the stories, (though) definitely some students that couldn't care less, but there were a lot of students who, whether it was kind of like, I had no idea that was happening in Israel and Palestine or oh my goodness, how does someone ever forgive someone who killed their father?
Or also saying, this reminds me of what it's like to be a black person in America, you know, like, and so there were all those sorts of conversations that happened. And then I get to come back at the end of the trip, I was gone for three months, I came back and spent a week at TCU interacting with the students in person. And so that was a really, really meaningful engagement as well. But it was really through those conversations and being on campus with everybody and talking in person with the stories that made me think I think this is gonna end up being a book. That was in 2015, it took four or five years to get the whole thing together.
Seth Price 15:23
Goodness. I would assume a visiting scholar is not paid the same as a tenured scholar on campus then, that's why they send you abroad, they pay for your passport, and they just send you off?
Michael McRay 15:33
They funded the whole project. I had no expenses while I was there, but I didn't make a lot of money.
Seth Price 15:39
I guess that's not nothing. Um, so you've said that I don't I'm not good with words, the word “this” the word “that” you talked a little bit about race. You talked a little bit about someone's murder, or killing of a family member in Israel Palestine. So can you name a little bit of what you mean when you say this? Or that just because most of the people listening to this will most likely not I've read your book. So can you name what you mean when you say those two things?
Michael McRay 16:04
Well, I don't remember exactly what I was just referencing when I said “this” or “that” but I was thinking of a lot of things, but I can give sort of some quick examples of stories. But if you can remind me what I was talking about?
Seth Price 16:16
So you talked about kind of…you wanted to talk about the stories in the book, and how it reminded you a lot of what is happening right now.
Michael McRay 16:25
Oh, yeah.
Seth Price 16:27
And then you said, you know, like things like this and things like that. And then you referenced Israel and Palestine, someone having a family member pass away and being reminded of being black in America right now.
So just for those that haven't read the book, if you were to say “this or that” as a theme of the book, what are you trying to get at when you say this or that you're talking about struggle to about trauma? You're talking about racism, like what are we talking about?
Michael McRay 16:51
Yeah. I mean, it's some of all that. I don't deal at great length with the issue of like American racism, but what I do try to talk about is look(ing) at the particular stories in these places and see kind of what universal applicability they have, or at least even what particular applicability they have to our own context. And so in places like Israel in Palestine, you're dealing with issues of oppression, you're dealing with issues of occupation, you have one group that has power over another in a very real way. And this is Israeli control over Palestinian life. Which I know many people want to debate. But it's just a fact. And, so, that dynamic is similar in a lot of ways to the United States. And the more that I've traveled to Israel Palestine, the more I've seen the parallels between Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the way in which police control black neighborhoods (in America), and it's become more and more obvious to me.
And what I think we're seeing now in a lot of ways is a black Intifada, which is an Arabic term comes from out of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Over the 60-70 years of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, there have been two major what are called Palestinian Intifadas, which in Arabic means “shaking off”. There is an uprising, a major national uprising, one in the 1980s and 90s. That was primarily kind of organized civil disobedience: boycotts, strikes, citizens, things like that. And the late early 2000s, it was suicide bombings, so it was terrorist tactics. But but it was a response to this feeling of control. And that's what I think is happening in United States right now, when in Minneapolis and all cities across the United States, essentially, is that there's this sense to which black Americans in particular are trying to shake off the control of white supremacy in the United States and are feeling done.
And so that type of struggle was evident in a lot of the stories. You know, there was there was a conversation in chapter two where I talked with a guy who does a lot of work with trauma. He talks about how the Palestinian people have no PTSD because he says
…there is actually no post trauma here. We face the same trauma every day. So we don't actually heal from our trauma, we have to learn how to cope with our trauma.
And that was another parallel that I am that I could imagine was true. I'm not a black person in America but if you pay attention, there's a sense to wish there's not a lot of healing that can be done because how could you ever truly feel safe? So I think those are some of the things that came up..
Seth Price 19:29
Yeah, one of my past guests, I was gonna have him back on earlier this year, and then he decided to run for president. So I've had Mark Charles on way back, I love Mark. One of the things that is he said, and he’s said a lot of times since then, really stuck with me, stuck stuck with me. That's the word I'm looking for, is you can't have a conversation about reconciliation when there's never actually been conciliation.
So first, we have to have conciliation before we can even talk about reconciliation because we can't pretend like it ever happened. This has never been a conversation that we've had at all, it's really struck with me.
Michael McRay 20:03
We could talk a lot about the theme of reconciliation. There are lots of conversations about that. There's one chapter called When Reconciliation Means Nothing, which is a conversation with a woman of color in South Africa. The basic summary is that she was saying in all her work,
reconciliation means nothing if it's not built upon a platform of social justice,
and in the South African context, which is actually quite similar to a US context. If the idea of reconciliation is not built upon ideas like black empowerment, economic empowerment, reparations, redistribution of resources, if it's not built on these, then it's shallow and pretty much uninteresting; and and not even just uninteresting but it can be harmful. Which was a similar kind of language to the way I start the book. And obviously I was intentional with how I started the book because that's how I started the book the way that I did. But the stories that I started with in the book, were not actually the first ones that I encountered, I chose to start with them because—and for those listening the book basically starts with two short to one short story—and one longer one.
The short one is that I reached out to a Palestinian woman, in Nablus, to ask if I can come speak to her about how she thinks about reconciliation and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians and so on. And she writes back and says that it's an inappropriate conversation because they're being occupied. So maybe we should talk about justice and not reconciliation.
And then that leads me into this conversation with the Palestinian peace builder named named Ali Abu Awwad, who at one point says to me…
look dialogue is not my goal. Dialogue is a tool for my liberation. And if dialogue is not a tool of my liberation, it can become a means of oppression.
And that was so convicting to me because I can remember, I know how many times I've listened to basically to the well meaning white people say, I just actually heard again today. So just basically being like if we could all just stop being so angry, just sit down and talk together. And there's no imagination for what comes beyond the talk! Like what is the talk leading toward? And what is the shift in behavior that has to happen. And Ali's language, the Israeli imagination, in my context, the white imagination of America tends to stop with dialogue and just says this is what we're working toward-the ability to talk to one another.
And his point was no talking to one another as what leads us toward changing the behavior and making things right.
Seth Price 22:35
Yeah, Ali’s story and that's a thread that you weave throughout. Although in Eleanor’s story, which, oddly enough that page that I told you about I base I basically have highlighted the whole page.
I realized after the fact I'm like, there, I basically missed the commas and the semi colons outside of that everything else was highlighted. Yeah, her story specifically, and maybe it's because of everything that's going on right now.
Really, I don't know what the word is just was hard, hard and…either way, it doesn't matter. So there's and I don't remember what chapter it is, I don't know if you say it or if one of the people that you are interviewing says it but you say that grief is used as a fuel or as a weapon for peace. Can you break that apart a bit for me? I honestly didn't write the page number down, I can't remember exactly where it is, but grief being used as both a fuel or as a weapon for peace.
Michael McRay 23:25
It could have appeared in a couple different places. I think it may be in the last chapter, which is the story of two men one named Rami Elhanan who is an Israeli father whose daughter was killed blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber when she was just about to turn 14. And the other is Palestinian men named Bassam Aramin, whose 10 year old daughter was shot in the back of the head by an Israeli soldier on her way home from school.
And I don't know if I remember, they said it to me then or if I've heard them say in other places, but clearly it's in the book somewhere but they talk about how they have learned to use the power of magnitude of their grief as a weapon for peace. It's an interesting use of the language of “weapon”. But it's essentially this idea that the very thing that could compel them to take up arms and fight one another is actually what is demanding that they put their weapons down. So they're part of an organization called The Parents Circle-Families Forum, which are bereaved Israelis and Palestinians who are using the power of their grief as the kind of common ground between them to say, because we have lost the most that anyone can lose, we've lost our families to this conflict, we have a responsibility to make sure that nobody else feels that same pain.
And this also appeared in Jo Berry's story who's an English woman whose father was killed by an IRA bomber during the Troubles. And so I guess it was, even if it wasn't explicit, it was a consistent theme in the book to see people who were overwhelmed with grief from living life in conflict and for being bereaved themselves, but who refuse to be locked into a sense of victimization and are instead using the power of their grief to drive them to make a change where hopefully people have to grieve less.
Seth Price 25:21
What made you choose…so you’ve got South Africa, you got Ireland, and you've got Palestine, Israel why those three areas because conflict like this happens all over the planet. So why did I zone into those three specifically?
Michael McRay 25:38
At one level, it's because I had, as I mentioned, I had connections there. So my family's been going to Israel since 1967. My granddad was an archaeologist and New Testament professor. So I made my first trip there when I was 10 years old, and I've made 13 trips over the last 20 years. So I had more connections there than I have anywhere else in the world. And then I lived in Belfast for grad school studying conflict resolution. So I have a lot of connections in Northern Ireland. So I knew that those two places I could, I could find the conversations I was wanting to have. And because I've studied conflict resolution, I teach reconciliation and forgiveness in college here in Nashville, I've studied a lot of South Africa and I wanted to go and see some of the places for myself.
And so Desmond Tutu is a really well known figure, one of his daughters used to live in Nashville, so I knew her and she put me in touch with her father and the family. And so I was able to make some connections. So there was the sense to which these were the places that I had connections. There was another sense to which they are three places where…that are well known, especially for people probably 50 and above, like as places of deeply divided societies. You know, my dad said growing up, you know, he had to, there was this sense of the, like the three B's that you didn't go to Belfast, Baghdad, and Beirut, I think. Because The Troubles, that conflict, in Northern Ireland raged from the 1960s till the Good Friday Agreement in 1999.
So people who were kind of paying attention during those years would very much know Northern Ireland is a place of deep division. And South Africa had their first free elections in 1994. And of course, Israel Palestine is still going on. So, for me, it was just like, I want to go to places that don't require me to convince people about the division and those societies just like we have a backdrop in mind. And now I want to tell you about how people are figuring out how to live.
Seth Price 27:50
I want to talk a bit about justice and reconciliation. I hear those two intermingled, almost interchangeably, as people especially lately on you know, social justice warriors or whatever on the internet that I honestly just think and myself included should just have a “Hi, my name is Dunning Kruger”, right on my shirt and just wear it constantly. Because we're all experts, right? Every single one of us.
How do you make a distinction between justice and reconciliation? Because I think often people conflate the two that justice for one means that we had to have reconciled. Or maybe reconciliation means that I lose justice, like I have to give up power in some way, shape or form, or though giving up that power is a loss of justice.
Michael McRay 28:32
It's great question. I think the two are at their best, they're in a very rich conversation with each other. And I think that in shorthand, I guess I would say justice is the way we talk about how to make right the structures and how to make sure that that they're treating each other with equity and equality and fairness and reconciliation is dealing more with the quality of our relationship with each other. And I think what ends up happening is that people do enormous damage to both when they pit them against each other. And so the idea that well, what we really need is just justice, who cares about reconciliation, or what we really need is for people just to reconcile and you know, not worry too much about justice. And I think what we're needing is for these two to be in a good relationship with each other. Because reality is that neither of them is a sustainable pursuit without the other, you know, like we can talk all day long about reconciling relationships and trying to build and when I talk about reconciling relationships, I'm talking about building relationships, of trust, of interdependence, of mutuality, of goodwill, of forgiveness, these sort of qualities, but those cannot be sustained if there are active oppressions and systems of inequality that are separating people how on earth you build, close relationship when they're things keeping you apart. So you can't you can't reconcile in a long term sort of way, if there's active injustice that's continuing to perpetuate throughout society.
At the same time you can try to solve all the problems with the systems and structures that are keep people apart. But if you don't ever deal with quality relationship between them, then they'll people will find new ways and new injustices to create. You look at it in terms of slavery, the United States, so chattel slavery is is abolished, but the quality of relationships, the narrative of white supremacy is not addressed. So then it turns into convict leasing, then that ends and it turns into, you know, decades of lynching, and then it turns into Jim Crow, and then it turns into mass incarceration, and we just find new ways to do the same thing over and over again. And so I still find a lot of value in the language of reconciliation. I think there's benefit to it. But I'm a firm believer that you can't have any conversation on reconciliation with integrity, unless you are very much aware that it cannot. It cannot stand up straight without a foundation of justice and equity and being in right relationship with with the way that we organize our society to kind of, it's not gonna be able to stand up straight without those things, you know.
And so they're distinct, but they are deeply interconnected I think.
Seth Price 31:15
There's a, literally dead center of the book, so on page 113, the sentence I highlighted as you say,
there's a theory in peace building that it can take as long to heal from a conflict as the conflict itself lasted.
Now, I'll be honest, I don't remember the context from the pages before and the pages after that, but every time that I've read that I actually wrote it down at my desk, I've kept it on my desk and as I pull up CNN or Fox News or whatever news source I want to read for the day. I keep hearing that in the back of my mind haunted as I watch our country just explode. And I wonder how long…like I literally want to read the Old Testament like just how long like for how long for how long?
So is A is that theory like my First, well, I guess in sociology or anthropology or whatever that theory needs to be versed in, I don't know enough about the conversation to have it. But does that have much ground to hold on? And if if true, how do we ever work our way towards that? Because it appears that we're still in the oppressive part of the trauma. We haven't even crossed the threshold yet to begin to eat the years to resolve conflict.
Michael McRay 32:23
Yeah, the first time I remember encountering that theory is from a world renowned peace builder named John Paul Lederach, who is another name you would have seen that endorsed the book. But he been working in international conflicts as a peace builder, I don't know probably 30 or 40 years anywhere from East Asia to Colombia to Israel-Palestine to Northern Ireland everywhere. And so this was the theory that he put forward and say from what I've seen, you can typically expect it it will take as long to feel like you've gotten out of a conflict as it took to get in it. So 30 years to get in. You're looking at a 30 year kind of post conflict, healing kind of period. And so on one level, I find that utterly overwhelming because I say I think I say on the next page, let's let's just talk about racism in America as a conflict for the sake of argument. And let's just say that that conflict lasted from the time that first kidnapped Africans that were brought here to the signing of the Civil Rights agreement. And I think I don't remember what it is it's something like a period of 345 years or something like that. It's like even if that was where it started and ended and we're not even close to being out of the woods yet. So to have this sort of language and this idea of black people have all the same rights Obama was President everything's fine. It's just like, it's not that they're it's not that they're being disingenuous. I just think like, you just don't you don't understand how this stuff works like this will take generations to unlearn generations to unlearn.
And what's difficult is like you're saying, how do we know when we're on which like when we get on the other side of it, are we in the kind of post conflict thing like, is this just part of the this is just part of the healing process is going through these these really painful kind of growing pains? Or are we still very much in the “Oh yeah, we're deeply into the conflict” and it's hard to know where we are. But, bu on the one hand that's completely overwhelming to me, on the other hand, where it has helped me, it's just to say, I don't have to feel the sense of this is all going to be solved soon.
Like, it's this end. And there's a former Archbishop named Óscar Romero who, from El Salvador who has a prayer that said something around the lines of we're ministers and not messiahs. We cannot do everything. And there's a sense of liberation, that because it lets us do something and to do that something very well. And I think that's what I find helpful, which I have to be careful as I say that to not let that be sort of a white person cop out to be like, Oh, well, I can't really do a whole lot. You know, it's just to say it is, for me a challenge to be like, you're not going to be the savior of this, you know, I won't be quite savior of the problems in America. But the call is to be like, I can't abandon the work there's work to do. But I have to hold in my mind that we're part of a much larger story that we won't see the resolution in a sense in our lifetime.
Seth Price 35:20
Óscar Romero is someone that I knew nothing about until his I'm gonna say the word wrong…beautification, sanctification. I don't know what the word is, but when they we became Saint Romero, yeah. And I've had many conversations with friend of the show and just friend overall, that I don't believe worked with him directly, but worked with someone that did work with him directly and has all these—very similar to your book—all these stories of here's what happened. I mean, we've talked at length about it, and I honestly, I walked away from those conversations feeling like man, I really wish I had known this 15 years ago. That would have been fantastic! Because I think he could have changed a lot of the way that I approached life and people and relationships. And who knows what could have been? How much benefit that could have had for so many different people that aren't even me and the other person in the relationship? Yeah, Oscar Romero was somebody I didn't know about until the last few years.
Michael McRay 36:15
He is remarkable. People should look him up.
Seth Price 36:18
Yes, stop right now. Hit pause, Google it, and then come back. Yeah, and actually, I'll just throw that episode that we did an episode on it we'll throw it down in the show notes for people that are too lazy to Google it and just hit the button. And I think there's a just google it link or something like that.
So where's it at? Alright, so I had referenced earlier. So it's that conversation that you had with Eleanor and I'm not going to say her last name, right? The title of that chapter is called When Reconciliation Means Nothing, which honestly is I talked with some good friends of mine. That's what I feel like the overall mentality of America is at the moment of it Burn it all down. I mean, I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. And he's like, “Well, I think it's too” much like all of this is too much. I was like, I can promise you if that was my child, I would burn the world to the ground. And he's like, how can you say that I thought you were a Christian? I was like, I am. And I would burn the world to the ground. And he's like, really, I was, like, I just said, it's not acceptable. And there's a part in here. Yeah. And if it's alright, I'll just read this. So you talk about you were in Nashville, you learned of a kind of truth and justice hearing at a local university. So you go in the first speaker is a guy that you'll call Jay, and basically, you quote him as saying,
we have a problem with the culture of policing it's a scary job, I often had to walk up on houses and such and you never know what's going on.
And then you go on to say
the training that we get trained you to be fearful of the people you're supposed to protect and serve.
And, then you go on to say even later in that in that paragraph, that
police killed at least two unarmed black people every single week and that black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. And that we have a saying that I know it's highly unlikely that I'll be convicted if I'm indicted, but I would rather be tried by 12 than carried by six.
And I literally was at a loss. I thought about that. I thought about everything that's happened. I got more angry. Which is why, honestly, I was thankful that we had about five weeks in between this conversation because I was really angry. You just said a lot of things yeah, I didn't know how timely your all of these stories would be. So can you walk me through a bit more about reconciliation? Because Eleanor, I'm gonna say her name wrong, she has a lot to say about reconciliation as well.
You know, she's like, either way…can you walk me through a bit of her story what she does kind of what she has to say about reconciliation because it's very powerful. Honestly, just sell that chapter by itself.
Michael McRay 38:58
Eleanor Du Plooy is she at the time was a youth worker at a place called the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town. She now is the executive director of another, another nonprofit in Cape Town, but I cannot remember the name. But she talks a lot about her work with the youth in Cape Town and how there was a…South Africa is known for reconciliation, right? Most people who think of South Africa if you're thinking of it in terms of the conflict and apartheid will think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was filmed, it was broadcast across the country, (and) became a model for a lot of other countries; Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, all these names that are associated with that. And it's an amazing story of being you know, of having the the apartheid government come to official power and that is 1948, and for 50 years to subjugate an entire population, the vast majority of your country that was a different color than you. And this whole system of separateness that was created. And then to have a guy who spent 27 years in prison, come out and decide to forgive and to not try to seek attention. Like it's an amazing story.
But many of the young people in South Africa have been growing up feeling like and this was what Eleanor was telling me that there's a sense that Mandela maybe sold them out. She called them anti-Mandela's that there's because with a lot of the young black people, especially if South Africa, according to Eleanor, are feeling is a sense of this new South Africa was promised to us it's supposed to be so much better, but we're still just as impoverished our schools are just as terrible like we're still you know, that the white people that stole our ancestors lands still got to keep the farms! Like they still have all the land that they took from us! We don't get the land back! Like it was all these sorts of things. So the conversation is really it's a reconciliation and it's hard to talk about a country being reconciled when it's hard to see where the efforts have been to rectify the actual wrongs that happened, you know, and the TRC made some really intentional choices that were probably good choices and a lot of ways to basically tell perpetrators with the apartheid government and the violence that if they confessed, made a full confession, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as long as their violence was for political means, that they would be given amnesty.
And so, you know, a lot of the perpetrators of apartheid did not go to prison, there was no justice in the way that we might think of it. And so what people were needing then I think, in lieu of that was to have a sense of, “Okay, so, so much was taken from us, how are we going to get this back?” How are you going to repair this and, you know, we there's a lot of conversations about reparations, but that's not the root of it, it's about repairing. How do we repair this? Because the wrong what I think sometimes people, especially people who were in power mean, when they talk about reconciliation is basically saying, Can we just be friends? Can you forgive us?And then can we move on?
Seth Price 42:14
Yeah. And I want to keep this.
Michael McRay 42:16
Yeah, exactly. There's a story that Desmond Tutu tells, kind of this parable, a very short version would be. There's a guy who has a bike, he uses it for everything. He rides his bike to work. Everything he does, is on this bike. Somebody comes and steals the bike. They're devastated. The thief shows back up the guy's door with the bike and says, I'm really sorry that I took your bike, Will you forgive me? And the guy says, Yes, I'll forgive you. And then the thief rides away on his bike, really happy that he was forgiven.
And it's this idea of like, this is what people often mean when they talk about reconciliation but that's not reconciliation. You know, nothing has been reconciled here. He's gotten cheap forgiveness and he has done nothing to actually make right the wrongs that he's done. And this was what Eleanor was talking about in terms of how do we think about black empowerment for people that were oppressed? How do we talk about redistribution of resources? How do we talk about repair, healing of trauma, you know, and the next chapter, another black South African, Themba Lonzi, he talks about the same things and there is a sense of how am I as a black South African to feel as if my country is reconciled as a beautiful new country when I am still living in a deeply impoverished township or you know ghetto or whatever language you might use even slum some people might say? Whereas I can take the train to Cape Town and see these lavish white neighborhoods and so you know, things look kind of like they did and apartheid? So where's the change?
Seth Price 43:44
You tell a story in here. I think he tells a story of like a slum, but like there's like one or two working toilets for thousands of people.
Michael McRay 43:54
It was unbelievable. (I’ve) never seen that in my life.
Seth Price 43:58
Yeah. So I want shift gears a bit. You don't talk a lot about you in the book. So I'd like to end with a couple questions about you. So you weave a little bit of the Bible and Christianity…you talk a bit about Jesus at the beginning, and I believe you talked about mark at the end. So I'm assuming you're a follower of Christianity.
Michael McRay 44:22
Yes.
Seth Price 44:23
So how did these conversations and then the years since then, and working through all the other conversations, the other 50 that aren't in the book, how did that change the way that you do faith or the way that you see church or the role of the church or whatever word you want to give to that? Like, just personally what did that do?
Michael McRay 44:38
Yeah, I did grow up with a very active faith. It's very, it's a very long story. It's actually what my next book project is.
Seth Price 44:48
So it's an unintentional book, or you're accidentally writing this one?
Michael McRay 44:50
I'm writing a book, the current title is called Leaving the Right for Whatever's Left
Seth Pricr 44:58
I like the play on words.
Michael McRay 45:00
Yeah. So it's basically about how I grew up in the conservative Church of Christ in a small rural Appalachian town (of) 2700 people with all the trappings of sexism, homophobia, racism, all the things that happen when you grow up in that. And how did I then move to marching in Palestine, being a prison abolitionist, being an ally to LGBTQ people and trying to combat white supremacy, like, how does this shift happen? So that's the story that I want to tell.
I'm considering writing the whole book as a letter to my new son to kind of say here's my story. So all of that to say that it's a very long conversation we can have about this and I'd love to do it at some point. But in short, how did my views change?
I don't actually know how much they changed because I think honestly, it was my…it was in a lot of in other ways, the foundation of my faith that led me to want to find those stories anyway. So despite a lot of the conservative upbringing of my childhood within my actual family, my dad especially, was on a journey out of way of thinking. And so it was kind of pulling us along on that journey. And he talked about Matthew 25, he used to call it a cheat sheet for the final exam. So chapter in my new book is gonna be called cheat sheet. It's all about this.
So basically, he was just for those who are listening who don't know, the short of it is Jesus has the disciples together, and he's talking about the judgment day and it says, you'll be divided up and you know, also say, I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. I was in prison, you visited me. I was sick, and you comforted me I was naked, and you clothed me. And they'll say, What on earth do we do this? And he says, Well, we did it for the least of these. You did it for me.
And so Dad said, basically, Jesus said, here's the final exam on Judgement Day. Here's what you're going to be asked. And was interesting and what Jesus says is that nothing that was on the final exam had to do with what we actually believed theologically, in a sense about Jesus, no questions about who is Jesus, who do we believe that Jesus is? It was about where are you spending your time? And who are you spending your time with?
And so that was presented to me as a child as the foundation of the entire faith not like the divinity of Jesus or how do we talk about who God is. To put it in a different way. There's a German theologian who died in Nazi Germany called Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There's a book that was published after he died called Letters and Papers from Prison. And he at one point says,
it is of incomparable value that we come to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the suspects, the maltreated, the oppressed, the reviled, and short from the perspective of those who suffer.
And I think that's what I hear Jesus saying is like, that's what matters is are you are you in community and in care and in healing relationship with people who are suffering. So it's just to say like that framework has been with me since I was a kid, and it's what led me to work with people experiencing homelessness in college to become very active in prison work for years, to want to be part of of healing conflict and doing peacebuilding? And so I think the stories that I heard that are recorded in this book fit really well within the theological framework that I had. And that's that's partly why I wanted to go, why I was compelled to go find them anyway, because it's the stuff I believed and I wanted to introduce other people to those stories.
Seth Price 48:25
100% agree with Matthew 25. Somehow or another almost the entire first year of the show. Matthew 25 as I went back and revisit it and kind of listen back through just to do like a urine review for myself. It came up in like every show, and I can't remember exactly who it was. It might have been Brad Jersak. He's like, yeah, that's pretty much the litmus test, like how do you know that you're Christian? You do these and if you don't use these, then I pretty much told you what to do. It's not difficult. It's uncomfortable, you're gonna get dirty. You're also not going to get unclean either; you are entirely fine, (but) you're gonna have to do something.
Michael McRay 49:02
Yeah. It was the whole impetus that took me into prisons to begin with in college. Some professors said, I go into prison on Saturday night for a group do you want to come? And I thought, you know, if there's a judgement day, I don't know that I want to show up and not have…like, there was only like five things that Jesus said to do and I want to make sure I do. But then I ended up falling in love with the people that I met. And so this is because she's in prison, and then it changed the course of my life.
Seth Price 49:36
I would love to talk about that with you. Matter of fact, that is a lot of my story and the outpouring of why I do this show. I needed an outlet to work through it. And I'm stupid enough to do it in real time on the internet, where everybody can hear it for free. They don't even have to buy a book. They can just hear it. Why not? Because that's what we do.
So last question is question I've been asking everyone this year. I think I've asked everyone, so, and I'm doing it intentionally. It's become probably my favorite question I asked anyone. So, when you try to give words the concept of God and you're like, Alright, Rowan, he's like 10, (and he asks) who is God? And you're like, here's what God is. And you try to give words to whatever that is.
So for you right now, Michael, if I was going to try to give that flesh, here's what I would say?
Michael McRay 50:31
Gosh, what a nightmare of a question.
Seth Price 50:34
(Laughter)
That's a common response.
Michael McRay 50:39
What language would I get to God? Well, the first thing I would say is that I'm immediately struck by…I first heard it from Peter Rollins, I don't know who said it before him. But the idea that whatever I end up saying about God is by definition then not God because God is unspeakable and unknowable in fullness.
So to even talk about God is to not be talking about God actually. So I just like us to be an awareness of that. But I, golly I don't know how I would describe what God is. I think I would just say this.
God is an expanse that is beyond what we can, what we can understand. But the part that that feels accessible to me is to think about whatever God is, God is...
Wherever there is resurrection in the world, wherever there is life coming from death. Wherever there is healing, and hope, and love in the midst of difficulty and hate, and hope in the midst of despair, that is God; that's where God is.
Yeah, I don't know how to explain it. I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to have those conversations. I’m hoping my wife will do it. She went to seminary and she…Brittany you take this one!
Seth Price 52:14
I tried that. And by the way, it's a beautiful answer. I love it. Everyone's answer for the most part has been entirely and wholly unique. And every single time have been beautiful. I'm aware of how hard of a question it is.
Yeah. So there was one time I was like, Alright, I'll do these with the sun. You do whatever the conversation is. I'm not even talking about the sex talk. Like I just relate easier to a man. I'm not emotional. I'm a five like I don't if it's not logical. I don't care. I don't even know why you're crying. There's no blood. This makes no sense. There are no fractures. (Laughter Michael) Just take a big breath, hold it for 15 seconds, so your heart rate down and move the heck on. So I told my wife, I was like, I'll do this with him. She's like, that's fine. But you're also gonna do it with like, you can't do that. Like, you can't Just one and then I have to do two,because I have two little girls after him. She's like, it's got to be some kind of fairness here. So it's never really worked out well ever, ever.
So I find though, if you'll ask your son that when he's older, he'll have a much better answer than you. At least mine do. They're brilliant. That's the best word I can give. So plug the places Michael, where would you put people to get the book to get involved in some of these stories? Like literally as they're reading, if they're like me, and they're like, Oh, this is unacceptable. I have the resources to do something (and)I need to do something like where would you send people to?
Michael McRay 53:35
If you want to get the book my encouragement would be to buy it from your local bookstore. Local bookstores really needs support right now during COVID-19. So please do that.
It is available in paperback, hardback, but also ebook and audiobook and I am reading the book. So if you want to get the audio book, you can do that through audible or wherever you buy audiobooks. I'd love for people to go to my website. It's just my name MichaelMcCray.com, subscribe and stay in touch. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook.
If you want to support a lot of the stories in the book, I name a lot of the organizations that are in there. So you can just google those and donate or support. But if that's the Al Basma Center or (see book) whatever it might be find whichever ones really convicting compel you then reach out there. But my my strong encouragement would be to do some research and that’s what it's going to take it.
What are the places in your own neighborhood in your own cities that are doing that kind of work? So if you're compelled by if you're compelled by, you know, Corey Mila, trying to do kind of reconciliation work in Israel, Palestine, who's doing that and Nashville, who's doing that in Chicago, and in New York, and mine, I say, I don't really want to name organizations, because I think the tendency that some a lot of us who are white have is that we want people to just keep giving us the answers. And we actually have to do the work ourselves. You need to go and do your research, type in into Google, the things that interest you They're compel you from these stories and find the places that are local. There are amazing places in the United States, they're doing great work.
Seth Price 55:09
And I'll piggyback on that answer, and I can't remember where it is, but I believe as Eleanor as well, again, that chapter just crushed me. She had said something to the effect of, or maybe you would ask her a question, you know, how can I do this? Like, I'm a white guy, like, I don't have always like the best voice here. And she's like you do because I can't go to your circles in the meetings that you're in. Sometimes I don't have the same “language”, even for the same words. And so your role is to learn do something, and then actually say something like, I can't do this. You're gonna have to do it, you're gonna have to help.
Well, thank you again, so much to both you, you five week old, your wife, especially because I'm aware of the sacrifice that she just made for this conversation. So thank you to all of you.
Michael McRay 55:52
Yeah, thanks so much, Seth. Really appreciate your time.
Seth Price 56:00
I hope that your summer is going well. I cannot wait to talk with you in a few weeks as we continue with the summer rotation schedule. Huge thanks to Heath McNeese, for your music in this episode.
Talk with you soon.