Trust and Welcome

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
October 19, 2014

What does it mean to trust someone? What are the depths of being hospitable? How far do you go with people who take you places you didn’t want to go? These are life-balance questions that we must address on the road to emotional and spiritual maturity, both as individuals and as a congregation. We get a chance to practice here.

I meet in my office with the Healthy Relations Team every month, and we talk about the covenant. A while ago, we were reviewing the covenant, not because there was a thing wrong with it, but just to keep it fresh, to remind ourselves that it’s a living document which changes as our understanding changes. In the original, it said that we were going to interact with one another in an atmosphere of trust.

What do you think that means?” we asked one another. I said that it felt almost dangerous to me. When someone who doesn’t know me well says they trust me, I start to worry. What do they mean? I worry that they might mean they trust me to be who they would be if they were me. Do they trust me to be a friend the way they would be a friend? Do they trust me to keep secrets I should not keep? Do they trust me to have the same values they do, to look at things the way they do? To be cool the way they are?

People will disappoint you, and you can’t imagine that they will be like you. I’ve heard people say “I thought she was my friend!” their voices distressed and sad. “A friend wouldn’t do that.”

Perhaps that is not how that person thinks about friendship. Maybe a friend would do that, in their system of friendship. Someone wrote that trust meant she could be know that the other person would never hurt her physically or emotionally. It’s trust like that that scares me, because when you’re in a large community, trying to get things done, talking together about deep things, and we don’t know the issues about which each person is sensitive, it’s possible that someone’s feelings will get hurt. Then they’ll think “Oh no! I trusted you!”

People expect confidentiality when it’s not necessarily assumed. Anne Lamott is a writer who writes about the people in her life. All writers struggle with how much they can write about friends and family. If you’ve heard a story but you weren’t there, can you write that? If there is a family secret, what price will you pay for writing about it? Once, at a family reunion near Charlotte, NC, I told a cousin I was thinking about writing the story of my upbringing, about this family that sets off fireworks at weddings, that has eighty people every Thanksgiving, where there are sometimes bull rides in the back yard after dinner, where we all line up for flu shots while the turkey is being wrapped up in the kitchen. Word spread around the reunion, apparently. Uncle Norman, a retired orthopedic surgeon in his eighties, crooked a finger at me to come with him. We went around the back of the house and he started shaking that finger at me. Normally when someone shakes a finger at me, I feel like reaching out and grabbing it, to attain some control of the situation. I was taught to revere my elders, though, so I just stood there while he lectured me with his finger in my face. “You will not write anything embarrassing about this family, do you hear me?” He went on to talk about Presbyterianism and Unitarianism and missionaries and lots of other things that I just let wash over me because Uncle Norman doesn’t have the same kinds of connective tissue in his conversation most people expect. One cousin said that talking to Uncle Norman is like surfing the internet without a pop-up blocker. You’ll be cruising along, talking about Gurkha fighters in Nepal, and suddenly he’ll say something about when Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. Anyway he lectured me about not writing embarrassing things about the family, which confused me because I don’t really know anything embarrassing about the family. I feel a lot of affection for that family, and I admire them greatly. If someone said they were writing about the family, I would respond by telling them I was very much looking forward to what they would write, and could I help in any way…. Anyway, writers struggle with this, and Anne Lamott said she finally figured out that if people wanted you not to write them into your books and makes them look bad, they should behave better. Some people trust you to keep their bad behavior confidential. If they did it in public, they obviously don’t care about keeping it confidential, so why do we feel we must protect them?

One person’s idea of trust is different from another’s. I asked some friends what they would think a covenant would mean when it said something about “an atmosphere of trust.” Some people said that it meant they assumed good will. Others said they needed that in their covenant because people had squared off, not believing that they were being told the truth in meetings, believing that there was some kind of cabal running things. Many of you remember my friend from a church far away who….CORE COMMITTEE STORY. When a church goes through a period like that, it needs to address the distrust directly, so people will look at it and know something isn’t right if they think there are secret machinations going on. It makes all kinds of sense that you would put it in your covenant if that is your situation. I think it’s just all my questions about trust that make me want to talk about it with you.

In books about trust, people write about public trust and private trust. They speak of different levels of trust granted to different people. Some people you would trust to drive well enough with you as a passenger, but you wouldn’t tell them something you didn’t want everyone to know. Some people you would trust enough to tell them a guilty secret, like that you enjoy Stephen Segal movies, even when they are really bad. I have no idea where that example came from. It’s about …. A friend. Public trust has to do with trusting people to stop at red lights, to stay in their lane of traffic, not to walk up to you in an airport and hit you, not to get on a plane if they have an Ebola fever. Can you trust people like that? Mostly. So we drive defensively. Because you never know. That driver in the truck ahead of you might have just gotten out of the hospital. She might be addled from some good news or bad news or a six-pack. You need not to cast yourself into the social net unprotected.

Some people you would trust with your life. They can know everything about you. They’ve seen you at your worst and they continue to love you. They’ve seen you make bad decisions, they’ve seen you be grumpy. You’ve forgiven one another for things because you’d rather go into the future with them in your life than go without them.

I like to know what someone is trusting me to do. Do they know that I’m trying my hardest, even if I fail? Do they know I want to be the person they want me to be, even though, over and over, I’m just able to be the person I am?

Mostly I think you can trust people to be who they are. Over and over. That’s a pretty safe bet. You cast yourself into the social net, or into a beloved community, trusting people to be who they are. They’re trying.

We say in the goals of this church that we welcome all people of good will, and assuming good will is something we ask of everyone. We tell all of our incoming members that one of the expectations of membership is that they bring their good will to the church and that they assume good will on the part of others. I think this is probably the same thing as operating in an atmosphere of trust. Even if someone is doing something you think is wrong, you can be pretty sure they are doing it because they think it’s best. That doesn’t stop you from being able to say “I disagree with you on this one. Can you help me understand your decision to do things this way?” We covenant with one another to disagree from a position of curiosity and respect. We don’t covenant never to disagree. That would make for an unhealthy community. We have to be able to trust one another to talk about things.

We want to make this a welcoming community, which means several things to me. It has to feel safe enough. It has to have hope and joy and challenge. Trust isn’t in the covenant any more, but respect is there, kindness, curiosity. The bones of trust are still there, in other words. We do have an atmosphere of trust here right now, in that we trust people to have the best interests of this community in mind, and we trust that people are aspiring to treat one another the way we said we wanted to do so.

This is a church which aspires to be hospitable. Part of creating a hospitable environment is being friendly, and part of it is making a place where people can feel reasonably safe. Not that someone won’t hurt their feelings by mistake, but that you won’t get assaulted or emotionally brutalized. We have only banned one person from the community since I got here. That was my first year, a man who had shoved someone in the gallery, a man who sent me emails full of lies and accusations about the people in the church, who finally, after months of conversation, wrote me that he sure understood why that fellow went into the UU congregation in Knoxville and shot it up on a Sunday morning. Usually it’s the President who does the talking to people in a serious breach of covenant, but this time I wrote him that he couldn’t come back. Knoxville was the one word that did it.

Our job is to be hospitable to all people of good will. Our job is to be welcoming in an intelligent way. You don’t have to welcome being treated badly, being stolen from, being deceived, being scared. The Buddhists have a concept called “idiot compassion.” It’s not good for someone who is stealing to be allowed to keep stealing from you. Whether they are stealing things, your sense of safety, your trust, or taking liberties you did not invite. It is respectful and compassionate to set a boundary and say “we don’t do that here.” We are co-creating a church here, one that has been through storms and sunny days, and we will do what we can to make it strong far into the future.

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