Last month, I wrote a poem for The Redbud Post. The topic for the month of June was agreeing to disagree and I was in the midst of watching this “agreeing to disagree” play out in various parts of my life in which the agreement and the disagreement were more of a collision of “them” vs. “us”; in which the two sides of any given debate blocked ears and eyes and so all involved turned and walked away. “Agreeing to Disagree” in this way, is not an agreement at all beyond an allowance of two truths to hold the same space. Two truths – battling for capitalization – working toward what is Truth? One Truth, rather than all of our individualized, separated, truths. Individualized truths are basically opinions and feelings that are unwilling to bend, combined with a complete lack of agreement on what is moral or ethical within a community. If people, living side by side within the same communities, within our global community even, cannot agree on any one thing being mutually exclusively true or right, this struggle to live side by side and continue to practice mutual respect and support without gossip and side comments becomes a ruse of “agreeing to disagree” – is all for naught. The echo chambers of our social media driven society allows for confirmation of every opinion, every feeling, and any attempt to challenge – even out of love and care, challenge to help grow and change and live more into the beauty of humanity, can be shut down – discounted as a shame tactic or an unwillingness to understand. I don’t have the answers to these issues, clearly I’m just as guilty of sticking to my own agreement and disagreeing with yours, I’m sure, but I imagine spaces and places where we can disagree in ways that help us find agreement rather than turn away.

So, just to publish on my own site as well, this is where I went with Agreeing to Disagree. Other guild members wrote about the same topic in similar and very different ways – and perhaps these are spaces where the struggle for a capital “t” Truth can begin to take shape, but if you’d like a cup of coffee and conversation where we can disagree and maybe also find a way to agree – drop me a line.

Veritas Vos Liberabit

Veritas

Words scream out from billboards, from speakers from mouths;

And the concrete used to build walls around right and wrong is rough from indecision and movement, crumbling to pea gravel, indecipherably gray stony rubbish.

Chesterton claimed “A creed is a collective thing, and even it’s sins are sociable”, but sin is a trigger word used to shame and it’s definitive bounds have dwindled along with Truth whose banner lowers to a possessive: “truth” which carries the duality of Janus.

A truth beginning and ending its path on the fickle feelings of a world that has lost all ways to argue well, signs pointing to a garden blurred by time that tells a story so soft and loud that no one hears its urgency.

And Eliot asked “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?…for you know only a heap of broken images…” The stony rubbish of right and wrong, where do we stand if we stand at all and is there a path immovable, immobile that leads to growth and unity or can we build and rebuild – we trip as we walk away.

Vos

And the dragons: those, them, us; we laugh our smoky breath and turn scaled eyes – feeling the pulse of power and following a call out of which even trees will not grow. 

My truth, your truth, #sorry-not-sorry waving upon the standard flag we bear.

And the once chiming steeples tinkle their applause while their own mirrored message says “we agree to disagree”, “we agree we are divided”, “we are bound by interpretation” 

Broken. Beautiful. Broken.

Kyrie Eleison

Grace and Mercy carry Truth bound in Love to these places 

while billboards and mouths and speakers crumble and are remade, but there is no room at the inn and they knock and knock and knock again. Cloud cover confusing our guiding stars with the bright pulse of power – and we follow trails left by long scaled tails into the beautiful forests now burnt away.

Liberabit

Agreeing to disagree, we follow our own understanding of which piece of pea gravel still makes up the true path.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Works cited:

Chesterton, G.K. What is Wrong With the World?. Dodd, Mead, & Comp. 1910

Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land. 1909-1962

King James/Latin John 8:32