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				August 2006
		Agreeing to disagree Reflections on Difficult Conversations I’m not sure why – maybe it’s because I grew up in an all female household; or because I spent almost a decade living in the ‘extroverted continent’ of Latin America; or maybe it’s simply about being a ‘people person’? Whatever the reason, I enjoy conversation. I enjoy the to-and-fro, the tangents, the insight into people. I enjoy the engagement and debate, the wrestling with issues. And when it comes to this, I have learnt that not everyone agrees with me! Now this, can take some handling. Take the radical industrial relations legislation that has recently come into force in Australia. I hold grave concerns about the legislation, especially its effects on vulnerable workers, but not everyone agrees with my concerns. In this example, it seems that disagreement occurs because of how people place different value on different factors: • individual workers compared with the collective of workers • ‘fair pay’ as a labour cost to be minimised compared with ‘fair pay’ as ‘a reasonable standard of living in Australia’ • workers (or employers) as vulnerable compared with workers (or employers) as exploitative • ‘What is “unfair dismissal”?’ compared with ‘What is a “fair-go”?’ • A workplace culture of hierarchy compared with a workplace culture of community. As another example, consider my Understanding our Muslim Neighbours workshops. Not everyone agrees with these workshops. On the one hand, ‘How can a bishop teach Islam? He should read the New Testament!’; on the other, ‘A bishop is to teach people to open their hearts in love to their neighbour.’ More generally, agreement and disagreement are also fuelled by paradox: • Even though we pay taxes to a government, we may disagree with that government. • We offer hospitality, a mark of our identity, and run the risk that in so doing we may change our identity. • A constitutional ‘secular democracy’ governs citizens who hold religious convictions. • The Anglican ‘Communion’ is facing ‘division’. Conversation is fraught with difficulties: poor expression, incomplete knowledge, lack of time and listening skills, and imperfect participants! Consider the topic of human behaviour. Are you an optimist or a pessimist? The pessimist points to original sin, with the unending saga of human pride, deceit and cruelty introduced in the Garden of Eden and graphically described by Kant: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.’ The optimist points out the grandeur of human achievement in love, courage, discipline and justice. These two approaches to a situation call forth respectively, freedom–through–protection or freedom–through–release. As citizens of Australia, we have a responsibility to participate in national life. We promote the common good through advocating the way of Christ applied to our nation, and to ‘Australian values’. The difficulty lies in the fact that our faith does not provide specific solutions to every issue in our society. While there may be agreement on basic values such as the dignity and value of every human being, justice and mercy, the application of these values to specific situations is conditioned by our life experiences, skills, community and family and often disagreement is the result. The recognition of our human frailty, mutual respect, humility, the role of the community and our Christian faith; all these help us to cope with our disappointment and frustration at times of disagreement. And we always remember that Christians have a fundamental identity: we are ‘in Christ’; our fellowship is ‘in Christ’. This basic identity then puts other considerations in their proper perspective. The apostle Paul urged the Corinthian Christians to sort out their disagreements. He used the image of ‘treasure in clay jars’ to illustrate that the blessing and power-for-life that we have ‘belongs to God and not to us.’ Living in this Spirit – allowing Jesus to rule over the vulnerable ‘clay jar’ of life – increases celebration and humility in agreement, and patience and hope in disagreement. Your brother in celebration and humility; and in patience and hope.		Bishop John Harrower