The conflict with conflict

This is a piece reflecting on conflict in order to share this list of conflict tenders, or people who have experience and are committed to supporting conflict in community settings. That is the punchline of all of this and I will say more about it further down.

I love that the old meaning of the word “conflict” is “to strike together.” Can’t you hear the sound of it? Bodies rushing each other, wooden sticks drawn and then - crash - a striking together. Together, striking.

It’s the word “together” that I like the best about this. But the striking, the assumption of something physical, takes the word into a different direction. In fact, most of the English words we use to try and get at what happens when there is tension between people and groups are words that are rooted in something physical. Bodies against bodies. And most of them are closer to battle than two people who disagree.

As far back as the history of the word “struggle” can be traced, it has meant things like to wrestle or to grapple. The word “strife” means to physically contend with and yes, to struggle. To “fight” comes from a word meaning to rip and tear and literally means to tear someone’s or each other’s hair out! All of the other words with meanings close to “conflict” are also words more directly about physical intensity: duel, feud, battle, combat, war, riot. They mean bodies against bodies, fighting until there is some kind of winner. Oh, and the word “quarrel”? It literally means to hisssss at each other.

The first archaeological evidence of warfare was from around 8000 BCE in Kenya, followed soon after by many others scattered around the Mediterranean and beyond. It is estimated that our species is about 200,000 years old. There was evidence of fights before then, but nothing on a large scale. A lot was going on around 8,000 BCE: the ending of the last great Ice Age, something called the neolithic extinction as animals that had thrived under cold times struggled to survive and were hunted by expanding human populations. The first walled cities are believed to have been built in Jericho and some of the microorganisms that later thrived in urban densities began to emerge. While these profound cultural tensions were causing shifts and, yes, conflicts, it wasn’t for another 5,000 years that conflict emerged as armies of people whose sole job was to protect those walled cities. All of this at the same time as taxation emerged as a form of economic control and the language that I am writing in - English - began to replace the older indigenous languages that all but disappeared. And so these older words, all of these words referring to different kinds of conflict, emerged at a time when warfare and militarism were already commonplace.

There are other words that we use, words like argue and disagree and controversy and dispute, that are not about war or battle. These are words that refer to a moment of separation. The old meaning of “argue” funnily enough was to shine, meaning that when you are building a case, you are trying to shine a light on something in front of another person. To “disagree” is the opposite of being in favor, the opposite of experiencing pleasure with each other. “Controversy” means to be turned against a person or an idea and “dispute” means to separate from what has been considered.

So, in English, the words we have that more or less mean conflict are words that are either about physical battle or altercation or words that are about disconnection. And that, my friends, says just about everything about the cultural wound that shapes how many of us deal with moments of discomfort or harm.

The only word that I found whose meaning feels like something different is the word “rival” or “rivalry.” The old meaning of this word is “to flow” which then came to mean an adversary in love, a neighbor with whom you are not in alignment: someone of the same brook (as in river or creek) with whom you are not in a good way with. We might be adversarial, this word implies, but we are still and always connected.

We don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about conflict. Conflict is something that exists. It is a part of relationship. In fact, a relationship is not possible without it. Conflict is one of the paths for relationships to deepen, to entangle, to become rooted in how we are together. In who we are. It is one of the primary driving forces of evolution, of the shifting and shaping of an ecosystem including an ecosystem that is a culture. But that is not how the English language holds or expresses conflict. If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you have been shaped and conditioned to think of conflict as a form of battle or disconnection without the inbuilt assumption that no matter how much we might disagree or hurt each other, we are still kin on this earth.

At REP, we are in the process of building a part of our work that, like all of our work, seeks to support neighbors to feel more equipped to turn towards neighbors rather than an impersonal state, and to do this from a commitment to Black love and liberation, ancestral knowledge and radical consent. This means we are having a lot of conversations about conflict - what we mean by it, how we approach it, what skills we believe our communities need or want to deepen.

In my own mind, the more I talk about this with trusted beloveds, the more times I am either holding a conflict process for a group or am talking with someone who is deep in conflict, the more that what starts to emerge for me is something much bigger than what the word “conflict” usually entails. It goes like this:

The first truth is that we are all connected. We are interconnected. Each one of us with all other life, oak and water and fire and fox and the memory of stone and the memory of fish and the way our bodies hold all of that and the way that their bodies hold more.
Second, there are many things that interrupt the truth of this interconnection, turning unconditional belonging (you belong because you are alive) into conditional belonging (you belong because you are the right kind of person, have proven your value and worth, are someone that others choose). Interruptions include

Systemic and cultural oppression in the present moment and across generations that mean some of your bodies and communities are perceived by (and then social power and control is built to act from the idea that) other bodies and communities as in need of being sidelined, destroyed or disappeared,
The fact of interpersonal violence and disconnection through things like abuse and harmful breakups and neglect and bullying,
A lack of teaching and modeling on how to be when things are not comfortable or uncertain or not aligned that is not about the binary of staying or leaving,
And far more.

And finally, what is called “working with conflict” is about attending to these interruptions as they show up in the present moment to support our individual and collective lives to remember we are part of an interconnected whole, even if we don’t agree or don’t like each other. And yes, this includes discerning between conflict and abuse and disagreement and noticing the impact of the interruption, working to end violence and destruction while also building our capacity to be part of something that is larger that our personal needs and opinions and which is not always comfortable or easy.

I remember when I heard David Miller explain that the term “sitting on the bench” used to refer to judges in a courtroom comes from an old Irish practice. Outside the home of the village elder or leader, there was a bench. If someone has fucked up or caused harm or acted in a way that could hurt the community, they were called to sit on the bench. And so they went and there they sat, on this bench outside in Ireland where it rains or is damp a lot of the time. Sitting and waiting until the elder was ready for you. Sitting and waiting and thinking about what you had done or not done. I imagine this elder sitting inside next to the fire, making some food or repairing a hole in their trousers and sensing what is happening with the person outside. I mean, beloveds, we can pick up so much from what a person is broadcasting as they sit there: pissed off and their mind making up a chaos of excuses, worried and nervous and anxious, and then maybe, a lot of the time, something breaks or starts to settle. Maybe that elder feels a shift and so rises and invites them in, knowing that they are now ready to see their behavior and to have a good talk and not stay stuck in defensiveness.

Whoever is sitting there on that bench is not, I assume, confused about whether or not they belong. From everything I have read, which is not a lot but is something, carcerality arrived in Ireland with the Christian church, or this idea of punishment as something that impacts your safety and belonging.

I have heard similar stories from Ojibwe, Dakota, Somali and South African friends: the focus of conflict work is to bring people back into relationship, to recognize if there is the need for any action to repair, and to take as much time as needed until it happens. And within this, and I have asked directly as friends have been sharing their traditions with me, there is no assumption that the fact that you have hurt someone or had a negative impact or caused pain is going to mean you will no longer belong.

Now, I have a personal fascination with the histories that got us to this present moment, but I don’t assume that in a conversation about conflict - how we tend to it and who can help us - you are all interested in some of the histories that shape how conflict is dealt with in institutions. So, before I go to the second half of this piece which is all about that, I wanted to share a list with you. This is a list of conflict tenders. It has come together over this last month in Minnesota in an attempt to respond to the conflict that rises in moments of occupation, stress and crisis. The list has a lot more language about the who and why and how at the front end so I won’t repeat it here. What I will say is this, pulling together this list and inviting people to reflect on how they hold community struggle and pain ended up being a kind of informal teaching on what conflict is and how to address it. Continued gratitude to those who stepped forward already and those who will step forward later.

And now, for those of you interested, on to a geeky historical reflection specifically about how Christian histories have impacted all of this.

Prior to the 4th century, Christianity was not a carceral system, but things changed when this revolutionary spiritual/political belief system turned into a religion that served the empire. This includes how conflict was dealt with.

The Christian practice of confession, or the moment when an individual stands in their own dignity, looks at their community and admits out loud the harm they have caused, is a practice that emerges from Jewish tradition. There, the word for confession (Viddui) refers to the practice of admitting wrongdoing to God as part of the process of atonement and repentance. It is a direct communication with God, without intermediaries. This is one of the things that the Protestant Reformation reclaimed, centering an individual’s relationship with God as separate from how the priests defined it.

In Pre-Christian Rome, taking personal inventory, similar to one of the practices in Alcoholics Anonymous, was seen as a part of living a moral life. Seneca and other Roman leaders wrote daily letters to friends and enemies where they shared stories about their failings. This was seen as a sign of a person’s moral integrity and, when I have read some of those confessions, it also seems to me like it was also a kind of kink.

In the early church, Jesus teaches about healing as something ordinary, not miraculous. Two thousand years ago, healing was all about coming back into relational balance with the land. Humourism, or a system of healing and aliveness tied to the elements that make up all life, was the framework for understanding our relationship to the world and it is a framework that lasted until the mid-19th century with the advent of germ theory. Humourism relies on plant medicine, on our relationship with the natural world and on balancing rather than fixing. If there is something wrong, it is not about our body separated from the greater context, it is about how we are the land and the land is our bodies and there is some imbalance somewhere in the web of connection.

When Jesus or any of his contemporaries spoke of healing, this is what they were referring to: this balance between bodies/land/spirit because that is what the contemporary understanding of healing was. Coming back into balance meant attending to whatever was sapping our energy. Aliveness was understood to be something wet/juicy and suffering or pain was either too little - meaning too dry - or too much of this juicyness. This included anything that caused harm to self or others because this harm took life out of balance. When I first started studying craniosacral therapy, I was fascinated to learn that when the body holds trauma in the tissues, one of its impact is that this part of our bodies is likely to become either inflamed (too juicy) or dry and tight. Oh, ancestors.

Confession was first practiced as a way for a person to come back into balance with their community: by truth-telling. Early Christians saw confession as a collective act, as a way for the community to rebalance. This is how I have hurt you, says the confession, or caused harm or prevented our shared aliveness. Jesus’ teachings responded to the authoritarianism of Rome by centering the care and interconnection of community/self/spirit/land. I have heard of similar practices from Ojibwe and Lakota elders: all collective moments begin with truth-telling, where people share what they have or haven’t done that has impacted the community’s ability to feel a sense of one-ness. When a person is able to do this, an elder explained to me, repair is possible. When a person is not able to do this, to see the impact of their actions or to recognize that they had an impact, then this is where you begin: working with the one who is hard until they are able to soften. This is not only a practice in times of high stress and crisis, when conflict is inflamed. Instead, it is part of the daily life of being part of a community. The assessment of the health of the collective is written into everything. Therefore, a collective does not turn to the hard work of decision-making or strategizing without first ensuring that there is enough relational balance to move forward as a group.

The original concept of “sin” is an Aramaic and then a Hebrew word that refers to an archer missing the mark, or making a mistake. Over time, the word started to refer to something that harmed the self, harmed the community, or in some other way caused imbalance.

So the practice of confession originally began with an individual turning towards their community and sharing the truth of their actions and impacts. And the community listened and the process of conversation and discussion in response to your confession was the practice of repair. Sometimes an individual needed to take an action to bring back relational harmony, sometimes the confession and regret was enough.

Not long after Jesus’ death, this practice began to distort. Rather than being one note in a large collective song, the practice of confession started to become THE THING, a way of becoming not only the sinner but the SINNIEST of sinners, the one whose story can MOST help the community find their way back to each other. Not about regaining balance but instead, about being right or on the right side. As I read about this, it reminded me of this mix of people craning their necks to look at an accident as they drive by or the excitement behind gossip culture. Like oh my god, it’s so JUICY to hear about what happened. Elements of this shift in the practice of confession still lasts into some Evangelical traditions where the sinner with the best most exciting most AWFUL story stands on the stage and lays out the horror of their actions to a giddy congregation, showing just how HUGE their saving way. Like the HUGEST.

Remember something else, while this was happening, this laying out of the stories of sin in gory detail, Christians were being literally martyred. Not everywhere and not nearly the numbers that some contemporary Christians like to claim but still, Church leaders and neighbors were being arrested and sometimes murdered in horrible ways. I wonder about this competition of confession as being one of the ways that people were discharging this awfulness. Or recentering it, in the same way that some beloveds in Minneapolis are still telling the stories of ICE’s horror over and over again in ways that keep it inflamed.

And then it changed again. Martyring is happening. Confession as part of Christian community is all the rage and as early Christianity is maneuvering between a mix of martyred experiences and expansion across class and region, confessing sins becomes a way to curry favor with the wealthy and politically powerful. Look, says confession, we are no longer rebels you have to be afraid of. We have no secrets. Here, let us confess our sins to you! You can trust us!!! Don’t kill us because we are not hiding from you, we are telling you what we have done wrong and you can determine what should happen as a result.

Early Christianity is this strange back and forth, it seems, between the revolutionary quality of Jesus’ teachings and the survival strategies of his followers. By knowing one’s sins and temptations, said the early Church, and by bearing witness to these sins and temptations in the presence of others, a Christian can better access the truth of God. There is a Greek word, exomologesis - which was borrowed in the Latin of the early Church - which means to public oneself. This practice wasn’t called confession (an English word), but instead a word that meant “to public oneself.” To take out of the private - which is fascinatingly enough the place where shame grows - and to bring it to the full light of the sun and public gaze in order to be dealt with.

To public yourself is to share what you have done or not done privately so that the community can continue to heal and to balance. It centers the importance of action over rhetoric, it is a traditional practice found all over the earth but then things started to change. Publicing yourself or being a penitent began to determine your access to Christian community. To determine your belonging. Grave sins that harmed the community carried with them penance that could last years and then, if the person sinned again, that person was excluded or shunned. What started as a practice that was part of relational repair to assume that the community was balanced became a practice that determined belonging. And as the years went by, and as the relationship between the Church and the State became ever more entangled, confession as a way of controlling and asserting power also grew and the Church which was the State which was the Church could determine whether or not an individual could remain part of the community.

And so now we have the present, where the carceral state determines someone’s innocence or guilt (those are the only two options) and where remorse is expected to look like a specific kind of confession, and it is determined to be authentic or bullshit by people who really know nothing about you or your family. There is no real focus on rebalancing the community, just on punishment for sin. And within all of this, of course, there are some lives that have been determined by these same histories to be laden with sin no matter what they do. That is, after all, what racial and gender and class bias are, a rewriting of the concept of “original sin.”

All of these histories awe me. They help me feel more deeply into what I am talking about, the comet’s tail of each of these moments, the tangle of meanings and experience.

Whether or not you or your people are Christian, if you live in places colonized by Christian Europe or you live in Christian Europe, then these histories impact the systems that you have grown up in and within. They directly shape how conflict is understood, experienced, attended to and avoided. Maybe you were raised as part of a people who are still deeply resisting the carcerality and conditional belonging that imperial Christianity asserts, but if you are in conflict with those mostly shaped by these Christian traditions, then you are impacted by these histories as well.

My ending for this piece is to quote Aurora Levins Morales. When I was walking across Turtle Island, someone in the first month of the walk we were talking on the phone and she referred to a piece she is working on. And she read out loud something to me and it included this quote: an enemy is someone with whom you have not yet found solidarity.

I laughed when I heard this and said, well thank you. You just defined what I am trying to practice on this walk in a single sentence and now I am going to practice how the hell you do that.

And so in ending this piece of oh so many words, I would end it in the same way. What do all of these reflections and suggestions mean? That if we are all connected all of the time, and we are, then doing the work of conflict means understanding the scope of solidarity, of connection, with those around us, and if they are causing harm, the repair that is necessary to make that connection possible again. After all, the word “solidarity” means whole, complete, connected. Wisdom is learning to parse out the many layers and weavings that have made it hard for us, alone and together, to remember that each of our lives depend on the other, shitty or glorious as we might be.

ancestors, collective change, collective care, conflictSusan RaffoApril 25, 2026conflict, Christianity, justiceComment