"Proclaim Peace" Season 2, Episode 5 // Enoch's Lessons on Peacemaking in Zion, with Melaney Tagg
- 4 hours ago
- 36 min read
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch on YouTube.
Melaney Tagg joins Jen and Patrick to share her insights on building Zion through peacemaking from her personal experiences with facilitating local community dialogue. She emphasizes the importance of seeing others as divine manifestations of God, the need for divine assistance in peacemaking, and the role of language in conflict resolution. The discussion also covers the Venn Diagram Project, which aims to bring together opposing sides to find common ground, and offers practical advice for everyday peacemakers. Ultimately, the conversation highlights the interconnectedness of humanity and the divine call to love and understand one another.
Chapters
00:00 Defining Peace: A Personal Perspective
01:55 Enoch and the Call to Peacemaking
05:56 The Divine Nature of Humanity and Conflict
10:14 Seeing with Divine Eyes: The Role of Perspective
14:02 Building a Refuge: Inclusion vs. Exclusion
18:11 Finding Common Ground in Polarized Issues
21:56 The Venn Diagram Project: Practical Peacemaking
25:59 Advice for Everyday Peacemakers
30:00 The Importance of Language in Conflict Resolution
33:49 Creating a Culture of Hospitality
38:00 One Heart and One Mind: Unity in Diversity
42:04 The Long Road to Peace: Patience and Understanding
46:00 Finding Peace in Relationships and Faith
Transcript
Jennifer Thomas (00:00)
Welcome to Proclaim Peace, where we read the Old Testament through the lens of peacemaking. We're excited to be here today with a special guest, Melaney Tagg, and we are gonna talk a little bit about one of our very, very favorite topics, Patrick and I can't get enough of it, which is Zion.
Patrick Mason (00:14)
Yeah, I'm actually really excited about this episode. Not that there's something like I'm not excited about, but this is, I think for Latter-day Saint peacemakers, Moses 7 ⁓ is just one of those foundational texts, right? Where it describes Zion, where it describes the kind of community that the prophet Enoch built. And I think this is really one of our great inheritances as Latter-day Saints. Along with like fourth Nephi, you know, that gives us that vision. This is the distinctive vision that we have in Restoration Scripture that you just don't fully get in the Bible itself.
Jennifer Thomas (00:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And I think Enoch gives us, or sorry, these scriptures about Enoch and Moses give us insight into what it is like to build Zion, what some of the external conflicts are that are not found in 4th Nephi, right? Like 4th Nephi sort of an event set them on this path that was separate from, you know, they weren't fighting against a prevailing counterculture. Enoch has to fight against a counterculture and has to build Zion in that context.
I love that it gives us a little more depth to understanding how we might build Zion in different situations.
Patrick Mason (01:22)
That's what I love. I really appreciate that point. It's one of the things I've always loved about Moses seven is that Enoch builds this like brick by brick, person by person. It doesn't drop down from heaven. If anything, they go the opposite direction, right? Eventually, but
Jennifer Thomas (01:30)
Yes. Yes. Yeah, it isn't the result of like a cataclysmic problem that Jesus solves, right?
Patrick Mason (01:40)
Yep. And it takes them a super long time. I think it's over 300 years that it takes them to do this. Now that's not going to happen in my lifetime. Their lifetime seemed to have been a little bit different back then. But this was multi-generational. And so when I think about Zion building, frankly, I think about Martin Luther King in the very last sermon he gave the night before he died, where he said, I can see the promised land. I'm not going to get there with you, but like keep going.
Or I said, I don't know if I'm going to get there with you. And that's the way that I feel. I do not expect that we're going to build a Zion and a world of perfect peace and harmony in my lifetime. But that's not what it's about. It's about the building of it, the effort and the hope and the faith that at some point we actually can build communities that are more peaceful, more hopeful, more united than they were yesterday or 10 years ago.
Jennifer Thomas (02:34)
Well, and I am gonna be a little bit more positive. Usually I'm more negative. I think there is the possibility that we can build and live in at least Zion adjacent communities, like within our lifetime, that we can all experience that reality. I don't think it's just a labor and I don't think you're implying that, that we're just doing on behalf of others. Certainly we're building on behalf of others, but I also think one of the things that I have felt in my own dedication to this work is it's transformative for me. It changes how I live every day. It changes ⁓ my sense of hope and perspective. And one of the things that I hope our listeners get from this conversation is a couple of these things. First, that it's possible to make these changes just by someone individually caring about a situation and that those changes and those efforts can actually result in positive impacts that improve the lives of other people and decrease the sense of rancor and turbulence in our lives. It is possible for all of us to make a difference in this regard and to follow the path of Enoch and to build Zion.
Patrick Mason (03:32)
Absolutely, couldn't agree with you more. And yeah, thanks for that clarification. Even if I can't live in downtown Zion, I can live in the suburbs of Zion. Zion adjacent. But absolutely, we can build it in the circles that we're in and then that influence can ripple outward. And that's exactly how Enoch did it. So that's why I'm excited about our guest today to hear about real life applications of these principles.
Jennifer Thomas (03:39)
Yeah, the suburbs are...
Well...
Yeah, so what we're going to hear today is what discipleship looks like in action. And we're really excited to share that with you. So Melaney Tagg is an engineer by degree, a teacher by profession, and she currently volunteers as a hospital chaplain. She is also the director of the Venn Diagram Project, an organization and model for bridging divides in communities based in Northern Virginia. She directs efforts to bring individuals together from opposite sides of a variety of issues, then facilitate civil dialogue between them.
She helps to build goodwill and ideally that results in finding common ground that allows groups to move forward together to building something more constructive than what was happening before she arrived on the scene. So welcome Melaney.
Jennifer Thomas (04:38)
We are so grateful to have you with us today and excited to have this conversation about your perspectives on Zion. But before we jump into that, we would love to start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is to start with sharing with us how you define peace.
Melaney Tagg (04:54)
Don't we love peace? Peace is so beautiful. There are stereotypical synonyms like serenity or calm. I'll tell you one way I don't define it. I don't define it as difference or conflict or absence of conflict. Peace is where we can sit together in love and in forbearance and in understanding in all of our beautiful differences.
So for me, peace is a state of being among the variety of life.
Patrick Mason (05:22)
That's terrific. I like that a lot because it think it connects really well to the text that we wanted to talk about today and the stories that we wanted to talk about about Enoch. And of course, Enoch is this kind of mysterious prophet in the Old Testament. But in Restoration Scripture, we get a lot more about him in especially in Moses, chapters six and seven. So.
You know, he's dealing in a world of difference, right? He's dealing in where there's a lot of conflict in his world. So Melaney, I'm super excited to talk about your particular work, but before we do that, I sort of want us to spend a little time in the scriptures and to think about the kind of principles that we can learn and the themes that we can pull out of this story about Enoch. So I'm just curious, as you were kind of reading Moses 6 and 7 in preparation for this, was there anything that kind of jumped out at you, particular principles about peacemaking that kind of leapt off the page?
Melaney (06:20)
Yeah, for sure. More than usual, actually. Moses 6 especially is a beautiful account of the Lord revealing to his ancient prophets the creation story. And where most accounts of the creation story spend a lot of beautiful time on water and light and nature and animals.
This account in Moses 6 seems to really emphasize the creation of humans and they are a divine manifestation of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ's creative practices and creative ability. And this elevation of the notion that humans are the divine manifestation of God's greatest creative ability should be stunning to us. It should be overwhelming to us that every human that ever walked the earth is divine and a divine expression of a creative heavenly father and heavenly brother. And so Moses 6 does that beautifully in the image of his own body, male and female, created he them and blessed them. And then on a dime, very startlingly, Moses 6 talks about violence.
and about how humans don't get along with each other and how there's so much conflict. I attended a wonderful talk many decades ago by the great Zionist, Elie Wiesel. he asked the question, why do you think in the book of Genesis,
Patrick Mason (07:27)
Mm-hmm.
Melaney (07:44)
You know, there's the creation story, there's all the narrative about getting things rolling, but once the earth is populated, the first narrative act is Cain killing Abel. And Elie Wiesel posed the question, why do you think of all the narrative there could have been to share that God would have honed in as his first thing to drive the story was conflict? And he proposed the notion that wherever there are two humans, there will be conflict.
And then the rest of scripture is a tutorial on how to conflict in peaceful and divine ways rather than in destructive and violent ways. And so we shouldn't be surprised that this same narrative is told in Moses six that same way, all these divine humans created and then boom, there's conflict. And Jesus's response to that.
is not surprising and it's quite typical. His response was, as recorded in verse 23, he calls upon all men everywhere. So two really absolute words, all and everywhere.
to repent, or in other words, to change. Stop conflicting the way you're conflicting. Start being more true not only to your own divine origins, but to how you view the divine origins of the people that are around you. So Moses 6 seems like a big fat charge to peace that I had not seen before this reading. I especially love a very practical invitation.
in verse 27 where it talks about the Lord being angry. We could talk all day about what that really means, but he explains the reason for why he wishes it was different. If the Lord being angry means he longs for it to be a different way, he says he feels frustrated because
The people's hearts have waxed hard, their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes cannot see afar off. We see themes like that all through the scriptures, right? Hard hearts, deaf ears, blind eyes. And I have always thought of those in terms of being deaf to God, being blind to God, being hard-hearted towards God.
This reading, this time, made me wonder if he's telling us we're too deaf to our brother. We're too blind to see our brother as God means us to see our brother and that our hearts are cold towards our brother. I think you probably ultimately can't extricate whether it's about God or our brother because those two commandments to love God and brother are so inextricably, yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (10:11)
Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing, right? Those
two commandments are so tied together that you almost can't, by being immune to the power and force and nature and goodness of God, you also by definition then stop seeing the divinity in your brother.
Melaney (10:25)
Right, So yeah, I think he's saying, so I'm cluing you in on how you can find peace by conflicting well. And that is to have an open heart to the other guy, to have open ears, to truly hear for understanding the other person, and to have eyes to see them as divine manifestations of a loving Heavenly Father, not as annoying creatures that get in our way of doing good or being good.
Patrick Mason (10:50)
Yeah.
Yeah. I love that reading of chapter six. I don't think I had fully pulled that out of chapter six either, because I'd always zeroed in on this theme, the way that it gets presented in chapter seven, when Enoch has this incredible vision, right? And God shows him everything. And this is famously, you know, the devil is laughing and God is weeping. You know, always think of Terrell and Fiona Given's great book, The God Who Weeps, you know, and
You know, I think this is something that as Latter-day Saints, we really cherish, this idea of a God who feels so deeply for us and with us that even God has moved to weep. But I think we sometimes stop short of reading what it says in terms of why is God weeping? God is weeping in chapter seven in this vision because he says, know, in verse 33, I gave you one commandment to love each other.
Right? And instead, you hate each other. You're without affection. You hate your own blood. So this goes back to what you were talking about in chapter six, right? I mean, this commandment coming out of the Garden of Eden as they began to populate the world, this foundational commandment to love one another. And we can't do it. We're so bad at it, right?
And that's what God is weeping over more than anything else is our inability to love one another, the hatred that we have for our own blood, our own sisters and brothers.
Melaney (12:16)
Yeah, and then in turn for our heavenly parents.
Jennifer Thomas (12:19)
Yeah,
Patrick Mason (12:19)
That's right. It's all connected.
Jennifer Thomas (12:19)
I was just going to say that that seems so inextricably connected because I just think if we are the creation, if we are God's highest form of creation, if we are what God is most proud of, if we are his work and his glory, and yet we hate one another, then by definition we are not drawing nigh unto him, we're not like him, we're not becoming him, right? And so it's not just
I think what's really important to me is that it's not just God's disappointment that I'm not behaving well or that I'm not showing love for others, but it's God's disappointment that I myself am not living up to the divinity in me, that I'm denying the divinity in me when I deny the divinity in others.
Melaney (12:56)
because if we want to read between the lines of what's absent here, there's no talk of keeping the Ten Commandments, there's no talk of paying tithing or of being honest or... It's almost like the only measure for this life, for coming to understand who our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are, is through our brother, not through some other form of piety that we kind of pile on.
I wanted to pick up on Patrick's notion of how hard it is in Moses 6 verses 35 and 36 while the Lord is speaking to Enoch. He beautifully offers divine assistance for this exercise that we're so bad at.
Patrick Mason (13:35)
Mm-hmm.
Melaney (13:35)
and
he uses holy words like anoint and wash and those have strong priesthood themes, strong temple themes and I think what he's saying when he says anoint thine eyes with clay and wash them and thou shalt see, he did so and in verse 36 the first thing he saw was the other guy.
the spirits that God had created. And so I think when we acknowledge that we stink at this individually, collectively, institutionally, we need his help. We need divine assistance to see as he sees, hear as he hears, and then we can love the other person. You know, short of some of the awful violent atrocities that are recorded in Moses six and in the early Old Testament, there are softer ways that we're disconnected with other people.
Patrick Mason (13:55)
Mm-hmm.
Melaney (14:23)
Sometimes I feel so indicted when this happens, we're just bored with the other guy. Or, you know, that can elevate to disagreeing. But Jesus is never, ever uninterested in another human, ever. And that's because his eyes have been anointed and washed and he sees.
Patrick Mason (14:28)
you
Melaney (14:42)
He sees with divine eyes, and every time we look with divine eyes, we behold the spirits that God hath created, and it becomes holy.
Patrick Mason (14:50)
Yeah, I love these passages about this calling of Enoch too, because he begins to see and that sets him apart. As you said, there is this kind of priesthood language in terms of the anointing and washing, but there's this kind of setting apart that he can see things that other people can't see, namely he can see other people, right? Sometimes we think that seership is this amazing gift of being able to see the future. And obviously, Enoch will have this incredible vision.
But mostly, as he said, what he sees is other people and he sees what is, he sees the kind of brokenness in the society around him. He sees it in a way that others, and that sets him apart both in the positive sense of that, right, as a prophet, but it also sets him apart from his society. He's bit of an outcast. And in verse 38, they say, where's this wild man come from among us, right?
This guy doesn't belong among us. And I know that Jen and Wag and other peace builders, Melaney, you probably have stories about this, right? That when you see and speak differently than a world that does contention as the norm, then it does set you apart and it doesn't always make you popular.
Melaney (16:01)
Language matters.
Jennifer Thomas (16:01)
Well, and I
think it's so threatening when someone, in this case, Enoch, sees something so clearly and perhaps you know that you should and you are choosing not to, that is an incredibly threatening thing. And my guess is that one of the, I feel like for me, one of the first steps to truly walking a path of peace has been willing to see my own flaws, my own...
the own my own issues that I have and been willing to accept when I was not seeing things correctly. And that means giving up a little bit sometimes of identity. It means giving up a sense of self and just saying, okay, wait, where where have I seen incorrectly and how do I need to change to see better? And I really I love that you've brought this out to us. Can I ask you a question sort of I think related to this? I one of the things that has always appealed to me about Zion.
Melaney (16:48)
Sure.
Jennifer Thomas (16:55)
is that it will be a place of refuge. But I think there are competing ways to think about refuge and I think it's important for us if we want to be builders of Zion to not fall into the trap of having the wrong kind of sense. I think one sense of refuge is that everybody out there is not awesome and I'm creating a place for all the people like me that need to be protected from everybody else out there.
And then there's the other sense of refuge that I am creating a place for others to come to, right? Not like one is exclusionary and one is inclusive. Like I'm trying to create a place of health and refuge for others. And I'm just curious, you do a lot of work around difference. How can we get to a place where we are wanting to be builders of refuge, but understand the importance of that containing diversity?
and that we're bringing people into refuge that might not look like us rather than creating sort of ⁓ a ghetto of people that are just same-same.
Melaney (17:55)
Yeah, that's a huge question, I do, your exclusionary characterization, any time, anything that we do creates an us and them construct, we need to look closer. We need to see what it is that's creating division, especially in activities where we're trying to create Zion.
or refuge. So I appreciate the exclusionary thing. I think I'm going to go down kind of the religious path to answer this. I think those that are in the peace building space, there's a lot of secular work done in the peace building space. And there's a lot of religious and especially Jesus motivated work done in the peace building space. religion, for as long as it has existed, has been us and them in some form or fashion. And we kind of feel
like, well, I love Jesus. If they don't love Jesus too, how will this work? In Moses 6 39, right after Patrick's reference to Enoch being referred to as a wild man, it says, came to pass when they heard Enoch, nobody laid hands on him. For fear or awe came on all of them that heard him, for he walked with God.
And so these people that didn't walk with God had awe and respect for Enoch's version of walking with God. That doesn't mean they were converted to his version or even remotely believed in his version, but there must be something about our divine humanity that we all understand that we have a basic connection, even if our narrative of where that divinity came from is different.
⁓ It will talk more about our Venn diagram project, but everybody's familiar with a Venn diagram and what's in the middle and how we're different, how we're the same. And when you ask a group of people, is there any such thing as two people that have nothing in the middle of a Venn diagram? Immediately people say, well, no, everybody's got something in the middle. And then when you ask what is in the middle,
It's very basic. While we all breathe, we all feel. Sometimes LDS audiences will say we're all children of God. And then someone else might say, but we don't all believe that we're children of God.
So we can't throw things in the middle that everyone doesn't agree are in the middle, right? But there are some magical, very primal basic things in the middle that when the rhetoric is turned down enough so that we can talk and listen and hear each other, we are connected. We are included. We all are part of this Zion project, regardless of whether our methods are secular or religious.
Jennifer Thomas (20:26)
So are those points of sameness where you build the refuge? Like how do you build refuge? Like in situations of difference, right?
Patrick Mason (20:27)
Yeah.
Melaney (20:35)
Yeah.
That's a great question. I spent a wonderful hour a couple of months ago with the professor and author Verlin Lewis, who wrote the myth of left and right. And he really develops the notion of how tribal we are in our opinions, whether it's political opinions or social opinions. And we think we're thoughtful when, in fact, we're much more social and tribal in coming to those opinions. He offered an idea that I'm captivated by.
is that very rarely will a strong red convince a strong blue to come join him in a common Zion place because their tribal trench is just too deep.
And he said, but you can get that self-proclaimed red and that self-proclaimed blue to talk about one piece of that, issue by issue, item by item. And then this very, I'll say exhausting, but so important building of refuge happens one idea at a time, one issue at a time, one relationship at a time. No magic sauce, no.
No big conversions to Unity expected.
because it is a slow, slow slog that regardless of your motive has to be accompanied by love for the other person, interest in the other person, respect for the other person. And we do it one bite at a time, issue by issue, idea by idea. And you've all experienced it. A safety develops between you. And all that Zion is is a bigger collection of people that feel that safety together.
Patrick Mason (22:03)
Yeah, I love that. And I want to hear more about the Venn diagram project and have you describe the work that you do. With Jen's question, it immediately sent me back to section 45 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which was one of the first revelations that Joseph Smith receives about Zion and the concept of Zion. And he receives it at a very similar time as he's translating the Old Testament and receiving these revelations to become Moses six and seven. So I think it's not.
coincidence that some of these ideas kind of go back and forth. But in section 45, when the Lord, through Joseph Smith, talks about Zion, he talks about it as the new Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God, and the glory of the Lord shall be there, the terror of the Lord shall be there, inasmuch that the wicked will not come unto it. It'll be called Zion. So at first blush, it's like, oh, this is just for us.
Right? is the ultimate Zion is the ultimate exclusionary us versus them. But literally like a breath later, it says, it'll come to pass among the wicked that every man that will not take his sword against his neighbor must needs flee unto Zion for safety. And there shall be gathered unto it out of every nation under heaven. And it shall be the only people that shall not be at war one with another. So what is Zion? What is refuge look like?
It's the people who don't want to be at war with each other. And so it's actually not about, you know, which church you go to. mean, literally, you know, there's this sense that if you're willing to drop your swords, if you're willing, even if you don't quite know how to be a peacemaker, but you don't want to be part of the opposite, right? That you can come and there's place for you, place for people out of every nation out of heaven.
Melaney (23:42)
Great.
Patrick Mason (23:46)
It's the one place that we won't be at war with one another. And I think that is a beautiful, I think that that revelation in combination with these revelations about Enoch and the city that he builds, there's always this sense of, yes, the gospel of Jesus Christ prepares us to be peace builders, right? But it's not an exclusive preparation. And there's other people out there who feel the same way, right? And we can create a community together
that provides refuge for everybody who wants to come into the tent. It doesn't require a confession of faith. It just requires a certain orientation of the heart.
Melaney (24:25)
There's a beautiful, not often quoted, that I can tell little passage in the Book of Mormon in Mosiah 9. If all of this sounds very lofty to the person who feels like peace is elusive, there's this little nugget in Mosiah 9 where where Zenef
is a dyed in the wool Nephite, hates the Lamanites. He's charged with being a spy so that they can destroy the Lamanites. he even says it's in his heart to destroy them, that that's what he wants. That's his heart's desire. And in the very first verse of Mosiah 9, he was among the Nephites, sorry, the Lamanites as a spy, preparing our army that we might come upon them and destroy them. So the ultimate anti-Zion. But when I saw...
that which was good among them, I was desirous that they should not be destroyed." And so that little practical suggestion, seeing what is good about another person can have extraordinary heart-changing benefits and results that allow for this Zion construct that you're laying out so beautifully to happen. And we have to do it all the time. That's not a one-time exercise.
Jennifer Thomas (25:30)
Well,
and to tie back really briefly to what we've talked about at the beginning, that it sounds like seeing, truly seeing another group of people by definition makes you unwilling to do them harm. Like if you, the way we do harm to other people is we dehumanize them, we call them names that make them into animals, we distance ourselves from them, we say that they're nothing like us, and that makes it possible for us to do harm to
But if we actually are seeing, if we're acknowledging that they are like us, that there are good things about them, then we become unwilling to lift our swords against them. And that maybe is the most important step to helping us become of one heart and one mind with them. And the most important qualification, therefore, maybe of being able to enter into a Zion-like state is just being able to see. You're not really a great person yet, maybe. You haven't figured it all out, but you are willing to see.
Melaney (26:26)
think that's right. The culmination of this chapter six in Moses is the verse that we go to often, Moses 6 63, where we talk about, I'm flipping to it real quickly, where we talk about how, do, do, do, all things have their likeness and all things are created and made to bear record of me.
Our brother, the other guy, is the premier example of those all things. And so what if we walked around trying to see how does that person bear record of the Savior Jesus Christ? And that sounds really lofty. People think you're a religious zealot if they think that's the lenses that you're viewing the world, especially if you're in a secular setting. Do it quietly. Do it privately. And it's magical.
Jennifer Thomas (27:02)
of God.
Patrick Mason (27:07)
Hahaha.
Melaney (27:14)
Do it in your family. Do it among the people you already love, and you'll even see them in a more elevated way.
Jennifer Thomas (27:19)
the C.S. Lewis quote, that you would be in awe of every human if you knew who they really were, right?
Melaney (27:22)
Yeah. Right.
Patrick Mason (27:23)
Yeah.
Okay. So let's talk about working with other humans. So Melaney, can you, ⁓ exactly. So can you tell us a little bit, and we can come back to scriptural passages at any point if you want to, but I'm just, I think our listeners would love to hear more about the Venn diagram project. What is it? What do you do? What does it look like? What are those brass tacks and mechanics of what you implement there?
Jennifer Thomas (27:29)
Brass tacks.
Melaney (27:48)
Sure. So the Venn Diagram Project, can learn about us at VennDiagramProject.org, is a small, hopefully mighty, little nonprofit.
whose aim it is to literally bring people together on opposing sides of selected polarized issues to see if they can find common ground. And then once that has been achieved, how to share those results with the world in hopes of incrementally making us a more Zion-like, peaceful place to be, place to live. Our origins lie in...
in a rancorous situation in Loudoun County, Virginia. Loudoun County, Virginia ranks in the top three typically in residents with higher education and in per capita annual income. It also ranks often in the top three of family size. And those two things don't usually go together. Usually,
impoverished areas have more children. So it's a unicorn in its demographic. And so you can imagine that this group of highly achieving families have high demands of their educational system.
And there were some unfortunate incidents with sexual assault and other things that appeared from the outside looking in to have been swept under the rug. Lots of feelings. There were allegations that some of the aggressors were transgender. At simultaneously, the Commonwealth of Virginia had addicted that every school system have transgender protection policy in place by the first day of school in 2021, September 2021.
And so the school board crafted a policy. The state of Virginia had offered models and the school board adopted as liberal aversion of that model that they could. And that was praised. And I'm going to unfortunately use words like left and right, but understanding that they're more complex than the way I'm going to use them. The proposed policy was praised by the left and abhorred by the right. There were school board meetings, one in particular in
June of 2021 where I had never in my 63 years heard such disparaging remarks about our LGBTQ plus humans, nor had I heard as disparaging remarks about Jesus from a podium.
It was awful. It was awful. There was police activity. The meeting was shut down. There was bad behavior on all sides. There are plenty of blame to go around in this whole story. In the back of my mind, I'm remembering, what do I know about?
Fairness for All campaign. What do I remember about the 2015 Utah Compromise? And with a few friends, we tried to apply those principles to our little neck of the woods, to our little corner of the world. We received no interest or support from any elected or public official. In our naiveness, we just thought we'd craft our own panel of enemies and see if we could do something to bring some kind of conciliation to the process.
So I have a dear friend who has, do we say the word Rolodex anymore? The biggest Rolodex I know. Okay, there you go. Thank you for bringing me back into.
Patrick Mason (30:44)
you
Melaney (30:48)
And we ended up crafting an agenda and a panel of strong proponents of religious freedom and strong proponents of LGBTQ plus protection. And we got lots of great advice from beautiful people, people that had worked on the Utah Compromise, people that knew sociologically how to build trust. We got a lot of gratis good counsel.
We crafted an agenda, we crafted a guest list, we had a date, we had a meeting room, we sent it all out. And both sides, when they saw who else was coming, said, I'm not sitting at a table with them, no can do.
Patrick Mason (31:19)
Well...
Melaney (31:20)
And so I'll credit the Holy Ghost with giving us the idea that maybe if we met with them separately so that they could trust us and build peace with us as an organization, they might be willing to dive in and take the next step. And in fact, that's what happened. The evening that everyone met together was extraordinary. Three hour meeting. We use practices of like everyone gets a turn to talk, talking one at a time, no interrupting.
and trust building exercises. And by the end of that meeting, we had 10 statements proposed that we thought all of us could agree on. We spent a lot of time online massaging them. Everyone had a vote. Only eight of them got unanimous consensus. And so as promised, we scrapped the other two. The eight were then shared with the school board before the vote on the policy would take place. The school board was all of a sudden interested in us.
And one school board member proposed several of them. One was passed and included in the policy. But the extraordinary part is two things. One is after the fact, a school board member emailed us and said, I wish we had done this. His point being, yes, his point being, this is accessible. This is work that all of us can do in our own capacity.
Jennifer Thomas (32:23)
at the front end.
doesn't
require some PhD or it just requires goodwill and trust building.
Melaney (32:36)
Yeah,
and a belief that it's possible. We have really found that it's easier to find consensus among enemies than it is to convince people to want to find consensus with their enemies.
Jennifer Thomas (32:46)
Okay,
Patrick Mason (32:46)
hahahaha
Jennifer Thomas (32:46)
I could not agree with that more.
Patrick just saw me like start out of my chair. But this has been so true in our work at MWG that it is harder we find to find people that are willing to try to work together than it is to actually work together with other people. People, when you get down to it, they're like, yeah, we'll work with you. But convincing people to get into that position is hard.
Melaney (32:49)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah,
in our efforts, we have crafted panels on local issues like these school board things, but also we've just kind of not randomly, but tackled bigger issues where we're not gonna affect any policy like abortion and parental rights in the schools. And we currently have an ongoing Trump anti-Trump panel. Our track record is 100%.
that by the end people find things on which they can agree. It's almost, I worry a little bit that I'm too comfortable with how foolproof it is when we get over that hump of believing that doing it in the first place is a good idea. Or that it's even more.
Jennifer Thomas (33:45)
Yeah, or that it's even possible. Because a lot of times there's
just a cynicism. There's like, yeah, there's no point in me engaging in that exercise. It's not going to be productive. And no matter how many people say, no, it is, trust us, it is, you know, sometimes it's hard.
Melaney (33:53)
And the one.
The one group we can't even get to come to the table because that point of view is so much a part of their dialogue is the gun issue. So we'll keep trying, but that's been our slog. We don't count that in our 100 % because we haven't even gotten them to the table yet.
Patrick Mason (34:04)
Mm-hmm.
Jennifer Thomas (34:13)
So if you had to give three pieces of advice, two pieces of advice, I don't even want to make it three, you decide, to your average person listening to this call, who a lot of this call of our guests on the podcast have had PhDs or have been doing peacemaking work for a million years. And one of the things I love about your story is that it's born of goodwill. It's born of your values and goodwill and the way you were already embedded in your community, a love of place and people in a very specific place.
So what are maybe three pieces or a couple pieces of advice that you would give to our listeners about how they can be practical on the ground peacemakers, you know, and conflict and transform conflict.
Melaney (34:52)
Sure.
Sure. These are not in any order. They'll just be in the order that come to my mind. One is that language matters and that we should not shun the notion that we should be more careful in what we say and how we say it. That it's a true reflection of the divinity in us, not in our worst nature.
We had a, we had a, ⁓ an ad hoc Venn diagram project panel at BYU on immigration. And we didn't know the participants very well, which is unusual. We're so localized that we usually know our participants pretty well. And those that we couched it as open borders, closed borders. And the folks that were in favor of more open borders mostly spoke first. They just happened to be all be sitting together. That was not by design.
And then the close borders folks took a turn. And one young man, a lovely young man, used the language illegals.
His heart was very good. He said, we don't want people to suffer. We don't want to separate families. We need to treat illegals with dignity. And every time he said illegals, you could see the folks on the other side of the issue physically cringe. And because it was instructional and not actual, we could pause. And I could say, hats off, all you open borders folks, for letting him speak, for working hard to understand what he's saying.
When the whole event was over, he came up to us afterwards and he said, what's wrong with illegals? Why did that make them feel uncomfortable or feel bad? And so it was a beautiful example of he didn't even know that his language was charged, but he was willing to learn why it was charged and to maybe speak differently. So many advocates.
Patrick Mason (36:12)
Mm-hmm.
Jennifer Thomas (36:26)
and the people who felt it was charged
were willing to give him space and grace.
Melaney (36:30)
both sides win, right? And I think every issue and every group that advocates for every issue has co-opted language to one degree or another. And we have to be forbearing in our seeing, like we've talked about, and in our unplugging our ears and hearing to learn what they mean not to count them out because they're using charged language that gets us riled up.
So one piece of advice would be to live both sides of that. Be more careful and deliberate and kind in the language you use and be more open to those that use language that you might otherwise think was objectionable at worst or narrow at least. Another, this is kind of a weird piece of advice but it's just so extraordinary to me.
We have found in almost every issue that we've impaneled a group on that somebody at that moment in time has the upper hand on that issue. So maybe we could use the Loudoun County LGBTQ plus that our school board at the time was very liberal leaning. There was no question that the LGBTQ plus policy protection policy was going to pass as is. In other words, they had no reason to listen to us.
Nor did the folks on our panel that wanted this protection policy as it was, why did they even come to the table? They were gonna win what they wanted, and yet they did.
And we asked them why, and I'll badly paraphrase, but most of the participants were part of a formal advocacy group for that community. And their answers were things like, because we want to work in the community, and we've seen that we need to be conciliatory and forbearing in all of our interactions so that we can be better in the hard interactions. And so they participated fully, knowing they would win anyway.
knowing that if they didn't come to the table, the outcome would be the same. So there's something in there about a power dynamic, right? We could think about that when we conflict with our children, where one's in power, where there's a power imbalance. We could think about that in how we work in the church, where we say we're not hierarchical, but we act like we are. And so what if the was the best listener?
had the most unplugged ears and the most divine eyes to understand. so I would say another practical piece of advice is especially if you are ever in a situation where you're on the winning team or you're higher up in the flow chart, you have to work doubly hard to create Zion so that your power balance or the majority, simply the majority.
Jennifer Thomas (39:00)
or in the majority, right? Or in the political majority, yeah.
Patrick Mason (39:04)
Yeah,
it with responsibility, not just privilege.
Melaney (39:07)
Right, right.
And so that's a thing that's counterintuitive to our human nature, especially it's almost rewarded in our polarized culture ⁓ to be the winner.
Jennifer Thomas (39:11)
Yeah.
Patrick Mason (39:11)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (39:15)
Well, and I tell my kids all the time that they don't believe me, but there was a time in politics when winning an election didn't mean that you got to do whatever you wanted and stampede over everybody else. It meant you got to set the agenda. And that's a very different thing. It's like saying, here's what we're going to talk about. Here's what we're going to address, but we're going to do it together. Here's what we're going to prioritize. And that's a very different dynamic when you're trying to...
position just to be able to drive the conversation or set the agenda rather than to force everybody else to do what you say. And I think it's a really it requires a lot of humility.
Melaney (39:49)
Yeah, and it requires a lot of players that agree to use that higher model and not resort to the one that you've talked about. If I could share one last one.
This work, depending on what the nature of someone's difference or conflict is, can be long. We have playground things where he pushed her down, and then he says he's sorry, and then we hold hands and run to the swings, and it's fine. Most issues aren't that simplistic. So this is kind of a two-part piece. If we, number one, agree with our adversary on the ground rules.
Let's have this Trump voter and this non-Trump voter agree. Let's not not talk about this. That's not peace. Let's have some rules about how we can talk about it so we understand each other better. And then once we have the ground rules and we agree to live by them, allow yourself all the time in the world to come to understand this other divine person.
Nine times out of 10 in our experience, it's more often slow than fast. We very rarely have a panel that completes in one session.
because people have a lot to say, people have a lot of feelings. I've neglected to say we're very adamant that we're not inviting anyone to consider changing their core values. But like we talked about earlier, you don't even have to have the same core values to still have something humane in the middle of your Venn diagram between those two people. So we're not trying to persuade somebody to be different other than listen more, seek to understand.
and then find the goodness in the other person as a result. And you have to have a construct that allows you to do that, to turn the temperature down, and then you have to stick with it for the duration.
Patrick Mason (41:28)
love that. Chad Ford, who's been on the show a couple of times, he talks about the long short way of peacemaking and that you to do it right, especially in relational spaces in transformative spaces, you can't take shortcuts. But that actually the patience that you have and the time that you give it the space that you give for relationships to be built and for people to be heard.
that will actually be the long short way. Because if you take shortcuts, you're just going to be right back where you were and you're not going to get anywhere. As we start to kind of wind down on time, I do want to hear you talk about one phrase from these chapters, specifically from chapter seven that we use all the time in the church. And I want to hear you talk about it, especially in the context of the Venn diagram and what we've talked about today. In verse 18, this is probably the most famous description of
of Zion, the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt together in righteousness, and there was no poor among them. But especially in your work, what does that phrase mean, of one heart and one mind? You just said, you're not trying to change people's minds, you don't assume that everybody's gonna be on the same page, that you're trying to find this shared space.
So how do we think about one heart and one mind in a way that isn't sameness, that has a kind of unity that isn't sameness?
Melaney (42:51)
Right, right. It's the question, right? That is the question. Because on the flip side to how you've couched that question is we bristle a little bit about all being the same. We don't like that either. So there must be some sweet spot. Maybe we need to make a Venn diagram about sameness and variety and maybe Zion's in the middle of that. ⁓ To go back to our original panel that we held, the most magical thing was that at the end of it,
Patrick Mason (43:01)
Yeah, right?
Jennifer Thomas (43:01)
Mm-hmm.
Patrick Mason (43:06)
Hahaha!
Yeah.
Melaney (43:17)
where people had found common ground. There was embracing, there was back-slapping, there was phone number exchanging, and there have been additional interactions between these otherwise enemies since then. So that teaches me anecdotally that one heart and one mind maybe doesn't agreement on everything. Maybe it's more about our unity in the process than our unity in the outcome.
Maybe if we go all the way back to divine eyes to see, divine ears to hear, divine hearts, the one heart and one mind is, I love you, you love me, we love them, they love us, we all come from God.
That's oneness. That's huge. Regardless of whether you like corn and I like peas, that becomes inconsequential if the thing about which we are one is that we are all divine. And it even works if one of the participants doesn't know that they're divine.
Our humane behaviors towards each other are evidences that we are, whether we ascribe to it philosophically or not. So I have to think that this notion of being of one heart and one mind means I am using every mortal human capacity I have with some sprinklings of divinity mixed in to see the good in you.
And I'm hoping more than anything that you're affording me that same beautiful effort to see the good in me. And then we're of one heart and one mind. In all of our differences, we sit together in wonder of the other with so much to learn from the... These people didn't even know everything.
And so there's no way that one heart and one mind could mean they agreed on everything because they were still mortal in what they knew. So that we haven't even reached infinity yet. So there must be something circumstantial about that oneness. And I have to think that that oneness derived from not only a knowledge of their own divinity, but a knowledge of the other guy's divinity, allowing them to enter that space of full forbearance. There's a beautiful gentleman.
Jennifer Thomas (44:58)
Mm-hmm.
Melaney (45:18)
I'm gonna have to look up his name, who suggests that we replace words like tolerance with the word hospitality. And I have to think, you know, a Thanksgiving table where we're tolerating each other does not sound enjoyable. A Thanksgiving table of hospitality sounds like a place I want to linger. And so there is something about how we receive each other individually and then cumulatively and collectively that allows us to be one.
Patrick Mason (45:26)
you
Melaney (45:44)
of our wonderful difference.
Patrick Mason (45:46)
Arthur Brooks says, yeah, if you heard me say that I was civil towards my wife or tolerant of my wife, you would refer me to marriage counseling, right? So ⁓ we need a little higher bar than that.
Melaney (45:56)
Right. Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jennifer Thomas (46:01)
Well, and I think this idea of the heart, this is where, know, we traditionally think of all of our emotions lying and kind of the goodness that comes out of our heart. And I'm reminded of this, there's a film that we've used a lot in our work that's called The Basement Talks, which is basically a documentary about two groups of women that came together to talk to each other over a conflict around abortion in Boston in the 90s.
One of the things that's incredible about that story is that they've met together for years and none of them changed their minds at all. But what they did change is their hearts and and they love each other to the degree of like I would give you a kidney, you know, and so they can hold these positions that are in direct opposition to one another and yet love one another deeply fiercely. And I think what's important for me from that story is that while this was happening,
People didn't know they were meeting, but they saw externally, people are like, the dialogue's changed, the heat has turned down, something has happened, there's less tension in our society. People saw that and were experiencing that, but did not know the cause. And the cause wasn't that two people, groups of people had changed their mind, it was that two groups of people had changed their hearts and were unwilling to villainize the other side. They were just willing, they were willing to oppose them, but not villainize them. And...
I just think you've given us such a great roadmap today about how to get to that point for ourselves by seeing, by hearing, by truly ⁓ trying to find similarities. And I'm just so appreciative of your willingness to spend time with us today and share with us your lived experience because I love the chance that we've had to bring someone onto this podcast who's just doing it, who's not thinking about it or philosophizing about it or running a nonprofit that does it but is...
said okay I'm just going to practice this and I'm going to put my actions where my words are. So thank you. We do want to end today with the question that we ask all of our guests which is ⁓ where you personally find peace because that's a little bit different than how you define it. You know we can define theoretically what peace is but it still can sometimes feel elusive so we'd love to hear where you're finding it in your life and in your heart.
Melaney (48:14)
Yeah, that's beautiful. I am thankful for this framework. The more that we talk about this in a macro and public way, the more likely those in the trenches are to feel empowered to be able to do it, even if they're not fancy or credentialed or academic. So thank you for this forum. I am an unabashed disciple of Jesus Christ.
Jennifer Thomas (48:29)
Mm-hmm.
Melaney (48:34)
And I have lived, on the one hand, a storied life, but I have also known something of tragedy and heartbreak in my life as well. And can say both intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually that Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace. I have no doubt, none, in the resurrection. It's real.
And boy, if you believe in resurrection, that takes out a ton of trauma and lack of serenity in life. It's a big thing. And then add in all the other infinity of what Jesus has to offer us. And the peace comes. I will have to say that that doesn't mean that that's the only construct or emotion, for lack of a better word.
that we feel when we ascribe to Jesus Christ. I think we can feel worried and peaceful. I think we can feel grief and peaceful. I think we can feel a lot of things, but still be sustained by, upheld by, and surrounded by the peace of Jesus Christ. He barges onto the scene of our mortality and saves us from how awful it could be.
I think sometimes when we're down in the trenches, it doesn't seem like it's doing enough. I think it's doing way more than it would be doing if it were absent. And so, I ascribe as a disciple of Jesus Christ any peaceful thing that enters my life to Him. And it's my heart's desire.
that I could have eyes to see my neighbor that he has and ears to hear my neighbor, to be interested in them, to understand them, that he has and a heart that loves them like he loves them. And I find that that peace that he brings is then magnified in the second origin of my peace, which is in the human relationships in my life that I value so extraordinarily. So thanks be to Jesus for all the peace.
Jennifer Thomas (50:17)
Melaney, thank you.
Patrick Mason (50:17)
It's beautiful.
Thank you so much for being with us and for all the amazing work you're doing with the Venn Diagram project.
Melaney (50:23)
Thanks, you guys. Great platform.
Jennifer Thomas (50:24)
Thanks for listening to this episode of "Proclaim Peace." To hear more, you can subscribe on a podcast app of your choice or on YouTube. You can always find full show notes or transcriptions at proclaimpeace.org.
Patrick Mason (50:37)
"Proclaim Peace" is a partnership between MWEG and Waymakers. You can learn more about Waymakers at waymakers.us. Thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time.
