Telling a different story | June 14, 2026 | Rev. Liz Olson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkgkThdzX-8

Dear friends… Our country appears to be descending into deeper and deeper polarization, and just about every day it feels like I can’t listen to a podcast or the news without being outraged or feel defeated, or dumbstruck by the Orwellian “reality” that we now live in. Our news and our social media create and deepen the narratives that pervade our minds and hearts… social narratives that we absorb and are shaped by, and that fuel this circus of polarization. Who controls the stories and the histories has always been an avenue of manipulation by those in power. But now, with innumerable channels of instantaneous 24/7 transmission of information, we are drowning in narratives and conflicting presentations of “truth.” How do we transcend that? How do we reclaim our commitment to “love our neighbor” across the escalating divisions? Are there different stories and narratives that we can tell that counter the polarization? Can we imagine new stories for the future that we want to live into?

When I bring my attention to it, I can center myself down to a place that is deeper than my outrage and despair, an “island of peace within one’s soul,” as Thurman would describe it. In this “island of peace,” I can return to a calm and intentional place in myself that refuses to be drawn into the… well… “fight cage” - to use current imagery, or be yanked around by the tantrums and bizarre outbursts of an unhinged leader. My even deeper desire is to connect in this sacred place with others - even those whose beliefs may threaten me. This is a desire to experience an ultimate peace of connectedness, a safe place, an experience of “oneness” with others. As a chaplain, I have been blessed/challenged to have experienced some bridging and unity amidst polarization. I’d like to share with you some of my stories of these one-to-one personal encounters … both difficult and transformative.

As I have mentioned before, I lived and worked as a chaplain for nine years in rural Oregon where 50-80% of voters chose Trump. How does it happen that rural areas tend to vote Red? One reason is that, for broad swaths of our countryside, it is hard to get good reception for television or internet, and so these are the areas where cable TV and Fox News got in early and took hold. Over the last several decades, the traditionally conservative narratives on these media outlets have devolved into bitterly divisive, conspiratorial, and even apocalyptic misinformation and myths. There is a local radio station in the Rogue Valley whose popular host rode high on the emotional wave of polarization and would often proclaim about Portlanders (and “Libs” in general) that “They HATE us! They just HATE us!” And then he’d be sure to add “But I love you.” Sound familiar?

I have such a strong memory of a conversation I had once with a tradesperson who had come to my backroads home. I knew we held very different political and social viewpoints, and yet I had respect for his quality workmanship and for the impressive truck that he had built himself. He knew I was a chaplain, and he must have felt safe enough to talk with me because, as we sat on my stoop to settle up, he decided to share the painful story of how his father had betrayed him after all the years of care and support he had given him. He spoke openly, vulnerably, and expressed an understandable bitterness towards his father. Then he continued to share what he had gone on to do with his life. At this point I sensed a distinct shift in his comportment - more cocky, more ego involved, and more hard-edged. His narrative started to be peppered with derogatory and conspiratorial comments about things like how we don’t need universities and college educations, that higher education is just a way for the government to make money off us… inflammatory and ridiculous stories about Obama and Kamala Harris that more described the corruption of Trump.

I think that I remained present to his sharing, but to be truthful, inside I was shocked to hear the dramatic change in the tone of his stories. He had shifted somewhere into sounding like a regurgitation of Fox News and online trolling. It was hard to witness, and I felt sickened and angry – angry that his spirit had been twisted by the popular media rhetoric. I’m no psychologist, but I had to wonder about a correlation between the pain and humiliation he had experienced with his father and the bitterness he directed at the liberal establishment. It seemed to me like a media narrative had been pumped into him which became his own story, and which fed him a needed sense of empowerment, gave him a sense of dignity for himself. Gaining dignity and personal power seem to be so key to how the polarization narrative works. Are there other ways we can help to provide dignity and personal empowerment that don’t require blaming, hurting, or dominating someone else?

Across history we have been inundated with, marketed to, and shaped by stories that serve to divide and conquer. We do well to be aware of who controls the narratives, the lies, the “truth.” We do well to examine even the stories that we ourselves think are “right.” Now we are moving into the AI Age where the data used is derived from existing and dominant narratives and information. We need to ask: who will control those narratives? I suspect most of us may not personally have much control with this huge technological transformation that is about to change our world, but we can take some control by stepping back and refusing to be enflamed and emotionally whiplashed. We can re-tell the stories and histories that are being intentionally censored or just ebbed out on the browser search.  We can step back and see a larger, more sacred perspective, find a deeper common ground beneath any propaganda, and imagine our way into being different stories.

Sherri Mitchell, Wabanaki elder and author of Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change, writes about polarization as “a tool of conquest” that trains us to find fault and condemn others. She explains in an interview that we are living in a “distortion” that we fall into and perpetuate. She encourages us to step outside of it and ask if this is really the life that we want for ourselves?

…How do I find who I am beyond all of those images that are being reflected back to me?  I think that’s the great challenge of our time, when we are living in such a distortion that has been so normalized across sectors…There’s a part of us that knows it’s not true, that knows it’s a complete fabrication, an illusion… an illusion that is serving some, harming most. … Why are we allowing ourselves to be a reflection of a collectivity that’s destroying our capacity to continue to exist?

As a counter-narrative, Sherri promotes an “80-10-10 rule” that encourages us to spend only a modest amount of time being against the things in the world that we see as wrong, and instead put most of our energy focused on creating the world we want to live into.

…use 10% of our energy to look around, see what’s coming at us. We have to use another 10% of our energy being in a protective stance to stop the flow of harm. But then behind that protective wall, we have to be actively building with the other 80% of our energy, the life that we want to be living, the world that we want to be able to walk into.

Along with affording dignity, one of the key human capacities that helps us to bridge across divides is our innate ability for empathy… but the story we’re hearing now by many in the current administration is that empathy is bad and weakens America. George Lakoff and Gil Duran of FrameLab wrote a 17-point treatise of sorts at the start of the second Trump administration entitled Here's What You Can Do to Keep Democracy Alive During Trump's Second Term. Zeteo published this and subtitled their article: Authoritarians thrive on fear and hopelessness. Here are 17 things you can do to not give into such negativity. 

Cultivate empathy. One way authoritarians defeat democracy is by trying to destroy empathy. Their strategies depend on dehumanization, demonization, and division. One of the best ways to resist is to actively cultivate empathy. Do your best to understand other people’s feelings and perspectives. Empathy is a powerful antidote to fascism and hatred. Democracy depends on empathy – you can't have democracy without it.

Along with the need for empathy in a healthy society, we know that all living things have a primary need to feel safe and that this need often drives how we interact with others. We can have visceral feelings of being unsafe and even threatened just by someone who votes differently. In the preface to Kern Beare’s book Difficult Conversations: The Art and Science of Working Together, he states:

According to a recent survey, if you’re a democrat, there’s a 60 percent chance that you view the Republican Party as a threat to the United States, and a 40 percent chance that you regard it as “downright evil.” If you’re a republican, the same odds apply to your perceptions of the Democratic Party. 

He explains the neuroscience of how our fight/flee/freeze survival drive is often triggered just by having our deeply held beliefs challenged since our beliefs are so connected to our sense of self.

Research also shows that when that happens, we lose a host of cognitive capacities that are at the heart of being human, including empathy, moral reasoning and even intuition. Bereft of these capacities, the conversation — and sometimes the relationship itself — typically comes to an unsatisfying and even ugly end. It doesn’t have to be this way. Evidence abounds that differences in values, attitudes, and beliefs become far less significant when a deeper basis of relationship is formed — especially when it’s rooted in our common humanity. At the same time, we’re learning that our identity encompasses far more than our story. Studies show that a more expanded sense of self emerges when we “switch off” our story-self, unleashing a host of positive emotions and attributes. 

How do we develop that sense of safety so that we can be truly present to another human who “threatens” our beliefs? A couple of weeks ago we were fortunate to have seen preview excerpts from Arleigh Prelow’s film The Psalm of Howard Thurman and I was happily reminded of the famous teaching by Howard Thurman about how you can come to find this sense of security in yourself by listening for “the sound of the genuine in you.” He explains how this then allows you to feel secure while truly seeing the other. From his commencement speech at a Spelman College in 1980:

…as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill is...that I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself, and having learned to listen to that, I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you. 

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in [my spirit] and come up in [your spirit]. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. [Then] the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one -- because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

Thurman’s pilgrimage of “going down in my spirit and coming up in your spirit” is an experience that I often have as a chaplain – and is really one of the compelling reasons that I stayed with the challenging work. Chaplains are trained to be fully present and to support people who may have very different beliefs from themselves. We are trained in how to see beyond the story to the pain underneath and address that. We are taught how to be self-aware when our buttons are being pushed.

I was certainly put to the test. In Southern Oregon, not only did the majority of our patients hold MAGA or certainly differing political and social beliefs from myself, but our small team of 6 or 7 was usually divided politically as well. I’d marvel at the mastery of how one of our clinicians so skillfully and empathetically guided a family with making a difficult end-of-life decision, only to return to our office and computers and catch her reacting in disgust upon seeing Biden’s face on some news story. It felt so incongruent to me! I know that she went home at night and consumed stories and narratives that were very different from what I took in... AND YET – we were able to work beautifully together and make a difference for many patients and families. We transcended our differences and found common ground in our desire for the larger goal of serving others. The years of exposure to this discordant (for me) environment actually strengthened me and helped me to find the common humanity under the “blah-blah-blah” (to quote Greta Thunberg) media narratives of how we are supposed to be against each other.

I’ll close with another story from the common ground of the hospital – the common ground of being sick or injured, the common ground of death and loss. On this common ground of humaity, it did not matter that I was a Liberal and they were Maga. Politics almost never comes up when someone is at end of life. The focus is about the connections with others and saying goodbyes, and if there is time, there might be reviewing one’s life to find the meaning and purpose. Trained in facilitating difficult conversations and breaking bad news, the palliative care team would be consulted in taxing situations to provide extra support to patients and families in order to help them understand a serious illness or to help them to make a hard decision. Creating a safe space, using active listening and empathy are key in the success of conversations, along with affording dignity in very undignified situation. With that quality of caring presence, decisions can be made and transformations can happen.

This was a situation in the ICU, the Intensive Care Unit. An older woman had been found down at home by her husband - he didn’t know for how long. Her loving husband did what many of us would do - he called 9-1-1 and the paramedics performed cardio pulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. But in fact, she was not just unconscious, she had had a massive heart attack and had died – and yet they were able to “bring her back to life.” In the ICU she had to be intubated on a ventilator to stay “alive”, but sadly, since her brain had gone without oxygen for too long, it had stopped functioning.  A week went by and the family could not bring themselves to a decision about stopping the ventilator. The intensivist – the ICU doctor - tried to address it with them every day and a rift began to develop. The tensions were felt by both sides. A second week went by with no change other than more polarization. The intensivist was at a loss for how to “get through” to them and so she called in the Palliative Care team to help “convince” them. Our team doctor wasn’t available on that particular day, so just our social worker and I went to the room to start an initial conversation, see if we could break the ice a bit and gain some trust.

The husband sat quietly on a bench and two daughters stood beside their mom in her bed. There was an air of defiance and mistrust when we entered. We could feel the resistance and anger that the Intensivist had described. We spent the first part of our meeting getting to know the patient as we heard about family and friends, her passions and hobbies. I always ask if they have a faith tradition or spiritual practice that is meaningful and supportive. This slow beginning together always has such a warming effect - for all of us really. Our hearts ease and open up. There usually ends up being some good laughter as the stories get told. Turned out they had lived in Minnesota at one point, as had I, so we forged a little common ground there.

Slowly the husband felt safe enough to reveal his ambivalence… and voiced that he didn’t know if they were doing the right thing in keeping her on the machines. We let that comment hang in the air for them all to digest. But one of the daughters was fiery and she declared through tears that she would take care of her mom at home, no matter what: “I’ll wipe her and feed her just like she did us.” We didn’t point out that it was not actually possible to take her home on a ventilator. Instead, I just affirmed the emotion under her words - her fierce love for her mom, her willingness to do what it would take to keep her body cared for. The daughter calmed down. We let there be some more silence after that.

When I asked about her faith, the husband explained that she was Catholic – but just her, not the rest of the family. “She prayed every day and she read her Bible every day.” Then he shared a detail that had suddenly come to him… recently she had been reading a book about what happens after you die and she had been talking to him about death. Wow, I thought. That is more than a coincidence to my way of thinking. I mirrored back this extraordinary bit of information to them and we let there be another long pause in the room while they processed the potential meaning of this.

With less than an hour of gentle curiosity and conversation, with the honoring of their emotions, we could sense that the energy in the room had shifted significantly. It was softer now, tired, sad. The social worker and I met eyes and silently agreed it was time to go. We were not going to lose this trust by venturing to talk to them about their decision regarding life support. Not today anyway.

I did, however, make a suggestion that she receive the Sacrament of the Sick, which is very important for someone of the Catholic faith. I explained that this has replaced the old “Last Rites” but that – lest they think I was pushing for removing life support - this anointing can be given at any time when someone is quite ill. I added that it was a beautiful ritual, and that the family might really appreciate seeing it. And I knew the power of the ritual for providing closure.

They agreed that she would want that. I had to leave the hospital for a training, so I said my goodbyes and made the arrangements for the priest. A couple hours later I checked in on the patient’s chart. I saw a new note posted from the nurse. “Priest arrived and provided an anointing for patient. Family was present. Afterwards family decided to allow natural death. Terminal extubation at 16:32.”

Well! It certainly was surprising that the family made the decision so quickly especially as we had not had the typical medical discussion. However, it seems that what they really needed was to be heard and validated – not more medical explanations and data. We had listened to them carefully, to their pain and their grief at the sudden loss of her. We honored their love, and they celebrated her through sharing stories. We brought dignity where there had been a build-up of polarizing anger at the medical establishment. We honored her faith, and the priest made beautiful and sacred her life and that ultimate moment.

Empathy, presence, trust, safety and dignity… these brought about a story of transformation from fear and anger to one of acceptance and release. My years of working there were filled with interactions like this. Despite the narratives of angry division that I could hear at any time on my Southern Oregon local radio station, I was living stories of humans helping other humans to get through a hard time. This is the kind of story I choose to live, to remember and to tell. This kind of myth-busting, this kind of real, on-the-ground human interaction and re-connecting is what we can promote. Like the work of Fellowship member Libby Traubman and her late husband Len who developed the Israeli-Palestinian Living Room Dialogues. Like what communities are doing all across the country today celebrating Race Amity Day. Like the Commitment we speak in unison at every service. We can create and lift up different narratives, the ones we want to live into.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUUhDoCx8zc