TIO op-ed
The Courage to Belong
by Rev. Dr. Michael Reid Trice, PhD, EMBA
When I was nearly five, my mother took her four children to the balloon fiesta at the frigid state fairgrounds in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Bystanders were encouraged to hold the drop lines until the pilot signaled to let go. I felt strong, and so I held on to the tail end of a handling line, along with many others. Signals were given. The air was cold, so the balloon whooshed upward. I did not let go of the rope. I remember the surprise and delight of suspension, my feet no longer touching earth, and the changed expressions of alarm on the faces peering up at me. “Let go!” they pleaded. I released my hold and fell, flailing clumsily into the arms and hands of my mother and strangers.
I have thought often about the difference between attachment and connection. Attachment can hold us without locating us. I held on with all my strength, and the ground still fell away. Connection is location: knowing where we stand with others and being able to move within those relationships.
In my life, I have been located in relationships.
In personal and professional life, we may sometimes hold the rope too long, held aloft between a deteriorating connection and a promise we still hope will be kept. And sometimes, as I learned that morning, we let go of one relationship through the shelter another makes possible.
Leadership today requires particular courage to know how and when to hold. You may hold a title, an office, and the trust of a board of talented people, and still feel dislocated, your feet off the ground. An easier response is to grip the rope tighter out of fear, and to let go of our neighbor, our friend, our co-worker. I believe courage asks something more complicated of us: to discern how we belong, what it means to stay connected, and to remain principled and still close, even in disagreement.
In a time when difference is used to foment animosities, communities don’t dissolve because they disagree; they grow weaker when they no longer share a location that connects them. I don’t mean a precise geographical locale, of course. We are located in relationships in context; leadership requires us to act together without pretending our differences don’t exist, or that they must divide us.
This fall, while on a sabbatical to write a new book on this topic, I spent time near the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico; it is a river that has drawn living things to it for as long as there have been living things here. Near Taos, the Rio Grande runs through a deep gorge whose two banks face each other across the water, each distinct in rock, light, and slope. Neither bank becomes the other. Yet together they hold the river. These two banks change and are redefined through many inlets and outlets along the way, so that numerous kinds of surfaces hold the water.
Belonging works like this: the river belongs to the land in a way that doesn’t erase, and indeed depends upon, the distinctiveness of all these surfaces. In a time when we are tempted to see difference as failed belonging, we underestimate the true nature of both belonging and identity.
I am a professor at a Jesuit university and executive director of its Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement, where I often teach about the inherent beauty of dialogue and solidarity across differences. Fr. Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, reminds universities that “our identity calls us to be agents of hope, justice, dialogue, and reconciliation. [We] must accompany our students and our societies with wisdom and hope, nurturing vision, resilience, and solidarity.” Accompaniment is what the arms beneath that balloon offered me. In What Universities Owe Democracy (2023), Ronald J. Daniels names “cultivating purposeful pluralism” as a key obligation.
Building on both, I would opt for the practice of appreciative pluralism, which is not diversity alone, where differences sit side by side, unengaged. It isn’t tolerance, a shoulder-shrug relativism, or assimilation. Instead, appreciative pluralism attends to a particular person and their specific life, by which all are changed through what we receive from one another. Appreciating a person is never identical with simply affirming every position they hold. Doing so need not be a litmus test for friendship.
Like the many banks of a river, we hold together what none of us can hold alone.
In a healthy democracy, our collective commitment is not to reach consensus about what we believe. I don’t need you to agree with my position for it to matter, and vice versa. Our work, as the First Amendment affirms, is to protect each other’s freedom to believe, through which we question, dissent, and participate in shared civic life. Together.
The courage to belong amid difference is leadership. Our work is to shape places and to provide spaces, so people may know when to let go of the rope, how their assessment matters to what happens next, and that our collective worth exceeds partisan usefulness.
Leadership is for all of us. Participate no matter what the outcome. It is a profoundly important moral discipline that the world desperately requires of each of us. It means your belonging cannot erase mine, or hers, or his, or theirs. The practice of appreciative pluralism, of leadership, is the courage to take up location again in the relationships around us.
