There is an ever-pregnant crack that runs down the Atlantic Ocean called the “rift.” The word focuses attention on the separation of the continents in exactly the way the fear mongers try to focus us on what drives us apart. Look closer at an actual rift and you’ll see nothing but molten possibilities welling up. New earth forces through the thin part of the crust millimeter by inch by yard by mile as new rock grows between the Americas and Europe and Africa. A rift connects by rearranging power and place.
We flew one way down the rift from Washington to Cape Town as a human politician looked invincible, forcing proud law firms and universities to the knee. Two weeks later we flew back the other way just as four million citizens from around the world rose up like new lava. One man dividing with emergencies and fears. But as lava does, people rose up in the thin places with new land to stand on. where he pushed us apart.
All human fields of thought is connected by the upwelling of change: academic disciplines, political theory and movements, racial identities, nations, peoples, skills and techniques that seem stable enough to imagine even a few decades of time called “career.” It is easy to gin up fear of the new lava, people and relationships. But fear has so little to work with, really.
We were in South Africa where the Leading Causes of Life learned to walk over the past three decades. We met at Goedgedacht Farm and retreat center whose name means “well thought.” This is difficult land getting harder; Mediterranean climate until twenty years ago; now moving rapidly toward dry and hot, semi-desert. The Karoo is just over a few ridges and coming closer.
The farm has deep Christian roots, but now it has an interfaith chapel and a vision increasingly tuned to life logic. It is a laboratory of mercy, justice and, well, life. And it is a real farm growing olives for market just like Koinania Farms grows pecans. In COVID-19 they had no money for pesticides and fertilizer. Peter, their Afrikaner farmer, had to look with new eyes at the dirt, bugs, trees, bees and all that rots. He liked what he saw and learned how to live in the rift between old ways and new regenerative ways. He is now the happiest farmer of olive trees I’ve ever met.
Leading Causes of Life grows well here, too. LCL-I is about more than Faith and Health, or as we learned in Lesotho, FaithHealth. Peters says that when you see something that troubles you, look closer; pay attention and do not look away. Good advice for growing olive trees near the Karoo or democracy in times of rift. Whenever we gather it feels like Iceland; molten, connectional, expectant, unfazed by the structural uncertainties.
Some time ago The Carter Center built an Interfaith Health Program built on the upwelling of Faith and Health. We didn’t have to pull them laboriously toward each other one footnote at a time. They were already linked by new energy the way Iceland works, riding lightly on the lively connectional rift. That can be hard to navigate as the field look broken with fractures and gaps. I don’t know Icelandic, but in the Appalachians a gap is the way through the otherwise impenetrable barrier. A gap is a geological fracture that allows one to walk through; not unlike walking on lava once it cools. The gap is the place to head to what comes next in your life. Gaps connect.
This is practical way to navigate in a time of radical rifting. Personally, I’m happy with as big a gap as possible between me and Proud Boys. But even there, it is hard to miss all sorts of new molten organizations, networks, and such emerging. My favorite new upwelling is the organization “Indivisible” which helped liberate the global energy on April 5th movement. Hold.Health, We in the World and Rethink Health the also rise up out of space in between.
The five gaps helped us to look more closely at the rifts so we can head toward those people, ideas, places, values and perspective we could build with.
- The Gap between people we know and those we do not yet know, or could know if we wanted to.
- The Gap between knowledge we already have and the new knowledge that might extend or complete what that knowledge might make possible.
- The gap between places we think of as separate from places that we now see are actually quite intimately connected.
- The gap between values we have and new implications and possibilities to fulfill those values.
- The gap between what we think we need now and what our childrens’ childrens’ children’ childrens’ childrens’ children will need. That’s a seven generational span, counting us and our parents, long enough to expect radical difference, but short enough to imagine caring.
Each of the five gaps is a fluid emergent connection on which we can live like Icelanders or sub-Karoo farmers. Each gap is a way through something that feels like a dangerous barrier. Each gap is a kind of opportunistic connection that might shape our curiosity and active search. We can ask and follow the answer through each kind of gap.
On the harsh South African land our thoughts turned toward the cause of life we call generativity, intergenerativity or simply blessing. This focuses on how we find our life by the flow of life among the flow of people. This speaks to finding our way when we know we are poised appropriately on the rift between what has been and that which is still potential.
We can navigate the unknowable time between stabilities by looking for the new relationships, new relevancies of existing values, new knowledge, long term needs of those who will live on the other side of the rift.
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