Navigating through the complexities of current conflicts, like the one between Israel and Hamas, can be challenging. The Rev. Dr. Ronald Bell discusses how empathy, meaningful action and making room to see the humanity of others can help us rise above the political and news-driven narratives to model Christ’s love in a polarized world.
Guest: The Rev. Dr. Ronald Bell
- Bell, an elder in The United Methodist Church, is the director or healing and reslience for Discipleship Ministries and The Upper Room.
- To learn more about Bell as an author, speaker and minister, visit DrRonBell.com.
- Learn more about The Upper Room at this link.
- Visit this link for information on how to donate to UMCOR's response to the war in Israel/Gaza.
Popular related items on UMC.org
- "Israel, conflict, End Times and interventions of peace: Compass 121"
- "Ways United Methodists can talk together about war and peace"
- "Book of Resolutions: The Church's Response to Ethnic and Religious Conflict"
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This episode posted on Nov. 3, 2023.
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Transcript
Before we start today's episode of "Get Your Spirit in Shape," I'd like to thank today's sponsor, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, a progressive, spiritually centered, servant seminary that seeks to form courageous leaders in the way of Jesus to cultivate communities of justice, compassion, and hope. Garrett offers degree programs in different areas of church and nonprofit leadership. Don’t miss their early action deadline on Nov. 15th.
Prologue
Navigating through the complexities of current conflicts, like the one between Israel and Hamas, can be challenging. Discover how empathy, meaningful action and making room to see the humanity of others can help us rise above the political and news-driven narratives to model Christ’s love in a polarized world.
Crystal Caviness, host: Welcome to a new episode of "Get Your Spirit in Shape." I'm here today with the Reverend Ronald Bell, the Director of Healing and Resilience for Discipleship Ministries and the Upper Room. And we're going to talk about several things. Actually. We're going to start with talking about Israel and Hamas and Christianity and this trauma space that has been exacerbated by the current war atrocities happening and what we as people of faith do in the midst of all of this. Welcome, Ron to "Get Your Spirit in Shape."
Ron Bell: Thank you, thak you, thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Crystal: Before we get started, I do have a disclaimer. I am not a Bible scholar. I am not clergy. I am not a Middle East history expert or political analyst or historian or political analyst of any in any context, but this is who I am. I'm a white American woman, born in the south, raised in a rural United Methodist church. I've lived on all three coast, the west, the east, and Nashville, which calls itself the third coast. And I'd like to believe I'm still middle aged, but if that were true, that would actually mean that I'm going to be in the Guinness Book of World Records if this is actually my halfway point in my life. But I'm also a struggler. I struggle to understand the Bible. I struggle to understand where my faith, which I take seriously, intersects with secular spaces. And I struggle with how to best represent my faith to others, how best to represent God's love to other people.
And I struggle to understand what I've been taught in some of my faith settings and how that aligns with what I might see when I look through a broader lens. So today, Ron, I'm struggling to know how we can talk about these recent events and maybe through a broader lens too. And the reason we are having this conversation is because I don't believe I'm the only one struggling, and that's why I invited you to join me. So thank you.
Ron, you are a husband, father, writer, musician. You are certified in trauma response and crisis intervention from Rutgers University. You are an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church. You have been a new church planter pastor, the director over congregational development and SBC 21 for the Peninsula and Delaware Annual Conference. And for our guests who don't know, SBC 21 stands for Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st century, which is a program to assist predominantly black congregations in becoming vital in mission and ministry. You also were the pastor at Camphor United Methodist Church in Minnesota, which is the only black congregation in the state of Minnesota.
And I bring up your work in the Black church because your experience as both a person of color and as working with Black congregations is part of the conversation we're going to have today.
Ron, I've already told you this. I believe you were the person that God prompted me to call when I started thinking about this podcast. In my mind, I was just kind of hearing, “Reach out to Ron Bell to talk about this topic and this trauma.” And so I did. And now here we are. So thank you again for joining me as maybe we struggle together for the next 30 minutes or so.
Ron: Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.
Crystal: You’re welcome. So let's get started. As a Christian, what should I think about what's going on in the Middle East? As a United Methodist, what's our church's stance? I don't even know. I truly don't even know because I hear people taking sides and it feels uncomfortable.
Ron: And you are a hundred percent right to feel that way. I think you're correct. For me, when I think about what is our church's stance, what is the stance of the Christian? I think about what is the stance of the individual when you see people being harmed, right? From a very molecular basic level, just as a human, what is our stance as humans when we see others harmed? And our stance is to protect, to care for, to cover and to shield as best we can for ourselves. I think it's no different. When we talk about being a Christian, I'm reminded of, I believe it's Jeremiah 29, where before we get to that passage where Jeremiah talks about what God's going to give us and what God's going to do, there's first a piece of pray for the city, pray for the captives, pray for those who have you in bondage. Pray for those who are being destructive, pray for them for as they prosper, so do you. Our resolve as humans, as Christians, as people of faith, as United Methodist is to do that, is to protect, is to serve, is to stand, but it's also to pray.
Crystal: I'm glad you brought up the Old Testament verse. I'm hearing a lot of Old Testament quoted these days.
Ron: I bet.
Crystal: And again, I'm just sitting at this place where I don't know what to think. It's like 100% pro Israel. And I need to say this, this is not a political conversation. This isn’t in any way. This is truly just, this is not about the politics of the area. It's not about the history of the area. This is about me being a person of faith, standing in a space and hearing conflicting information, hearing people I really believe and trust their faith. I see them living really faithful lives, but I'm hearing words like, “This is the fulfillment of God. We're headed toward the End Times. This is what God's been predicting. We support Israel unequivocally.” And maybe that's starting to feel political, and I apologize if it's, but we had this conversation before the podcast and you really helped me look at this in a different way too.
Ron: So I think two things, and this will probably be the least political I'll be in reaction or response. I think language is important, and one of the challenges we have right now is language, because language helps us shape perspective, which gives us the ability to shape empathy. And we'll get to that in a minute. But language is important. So when we talk about Israel versus Hamas, we have to be careful around language because we're thinking of Israel as a people, as a country, but we think of Hamas and even in the tone and the structure in which we say it, we think of Hamas as this monstrous, dangerous thing. Hamas is a government and a militia. The people are Palestinian. So if we were to talk about this in a level of equity, it would be Israel and Palestine. These are people who are being wounded on both, people who are being harmed. And so I think the more we can see each other as people, then we get to the place where we can find solutions and find healing and understand empathy. But language is critical to how we do that.
Crystal: I read a lot, but I don't read as much as is out there. Also, that feels like a challenging space for me. I mean, there's no way that we could guard against all the things, all the words, all the information, all the images that are out there. And I read a verse and I actually, I asked my mom to help me find it. I heard it on a podcast and then I couldn't go back and find it again. But it was a verse that talked about guarding ourselves against the impact of evil and really surrounding ourselves with goodness. But what's happening there is a lot of evil that's coming right into our feeds, into our living rooms with the news. How do we feel like we are staying in tune with what's happening but not getting saturated with this? Because it is traumatic, it's trauma.
Ron: It is. And you use the perfect word saturation, right? Because what you digest, you metabolize. Whatever you digest, whatever you consume, you will metabolize. It will go into your system, right? It will get worked through your system. And when you over digest, you do get saturated. And so we have to be critical with how much we're digesting, how much news are we watching, how many stories are we responding to? How many podcasts, how many news articles, how many conversations are we allowing ourselves to be steeped in? Because the more we do that, the more to your point, we become enmeshed to the point where we can no longer see humanity. It becomes catastrophic. It's the thing it, it's all consuming. And so we have to begin to dial some of that back.
The acronym I have for engaging this work, I call it ear, EAR, ear. The first piece is around empathy and thinking about my response. Does this response come from a place of empathy? And so I think we have to, number one, distinguish between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy comes from two different words, sym and pathos, meaning together in feeling meaning my feelings can be aligned with, connected with in tandem, with parallel to your feelings. I can be with you in feelings. I can be together with feelings. That's very different than empathy, right? Empathy. Again, em and pathos comes from this idea of imputing, putting in feelings, right? Taking it in. I'm not just alongside you, but I've taken on, I'm holding the great example I have. I think about my mother's soup. My mother makes the best soup in the world, right? It's passed down from the hills of Africa. No, I have no idea…
Crystal: That's a good story, Ron. You should keep that!
Ron: From the hills of Africa. It came, right? It's the best soup in the world. So imagine, Crystal, we're hanging out and I made you the soup. I said, I want you to taste my mother's soup. I hand this to you, you hold it in your hand and you say, Ron, it smells good. Looks good. That's some great soup. And you set it down. It's very different than you taking it. And Ron smells goods, great soup, and you drank some or you sip some, right? The commenting and setting it down, that sympathy. The drinking, the tasting it. That's empathy.
Crystal: Like the ingesting of it.
Ron: The ingesting of it. Yeah. And this is critical because here's what happens. What happens is when we don't have an empathetic response, when we just have a sympathetic response, meaning we're just aligning what we see based off what we feel, right? What happens is it creates this tension, this space. How would you feel if you handed me the soup that your mother made and I begin to comment on it, and I had never tasted it?
Crystal: I would feel rejected.
Ron: Rejected, yeah. I begin to tell you why. I think maybe you should have added some more noodles, or you should have added some more of this, a less of us
Crystal: And not heard. I would've feel not heard or seen or respected.
Ron: That's the tension that develops with sympathy. And in moments like this and commenting and responding and reacting to all kinds, and this is bigger than just Israel or Palestine. This could be Democrat, Republican, this could be disaffiliated versus those who are staying. This could be liberal, it could be all kinds of things. When we don't take the moment to respond from a place of empathy, then we end up in that place of tension. So empathy becomes critical for how we interact in moments like this. Have I ingested the realities from the other person's perspective? Have I seen them as human? Have I engaged them as equal to where I am and who I am? Because if I haven't, then I get stuck in that place of sympathy intention. Yeah. That's the E. Yeah.
Crystal: We're going to move on to the A and the R for sure. But I want to ask you, because it feels like understanding other people or even just taking on that, considering what someone else may be. Our culture doesn't invite that.
Ron: No, no. Our news cycle doesn't invite that.
Crystal: Right?
Ron: Yeah, yeah.
Crystal: It feels like it takes a little work.
Ron: It does. We have to slow down, and you have to forgive me, I've got a thousand scriptures in my head. That's just how I'm wired. But
Crystal: You go ahead. We love the Bible!
Ron: But I think about Mark 5 when they're on the boat and Jesus is asleep and they're in the middle of a storm, and the disciples are going crazy and they're trying to pour all the water over the boat, and they go and they finally wake Jesus up and say, don't you care if we perish? He'll sleep. What does it look like to slow down to sleep, to rest with Jesus, even in the midst of storms, right? We are so wired to want to react and to fix, but if Jesus is asleep, maybe we should sleep with Jesus. If Jesus is resting, if God is silent, if God is quiet, maybe we should be quiet too. And so what does it look like to just upend this notion of having to fix and having to solve, and instead be peaceful and comfortable with resting with Christ.
Crystal: And not just fixing or solving, but just having an opinion. Why do we always have to have an opinion?
Ron: Yeah. Yeah. It's how our culture is wired, but it's not how heaven works. It's not. It’s not.
Crystal: A
Ron: So again, the E deals with in my responding in a place of empathy. And that's so critical. The A deals with, am I responding from a place of action, right? Crystal, this is where it happens because, and you just said that we feel like we have to say something, right? And what happens is if we don't respond from a place of action, we end up using that space to do other things. So what would it look like? And let's take Israel and Palestine. What would it look like if in this moment of uncertainty, in this moment of chaos, in this moment of just deep devastation, we started a letter campaign where we had all of our children and grandchildren write letters to kids in Israel and Palestine, “You're going to be okay. God loves you.” What would it look like if in this moment we decided to have all of our seniors in our churches send hats and coats? Winter’s coming to Israel and Palestine, Palestinian, those who are, those who are. So we have to think, how do we respond from a place of action? What can I do? I can't go over there and fight. I don't know where I'm supposed to fight or who I'm supposed to. That's not how I'm wired. But I can write a letter.
I can sing a song, I can write a poem. I can meet with some friends. We can pray. There's some things that we can do here. Every city, every town has spaces where homeless gather. I can go feed folk. I can go serve people. And this is me acting right? Wesley was big on this, right? Big on serving community and being community. Those are ways that we can begin to just reconcile with just the travesty and the harshness of the things that we see by putting ourselves in action, responding from action.
Before we continue our conversation with Ron, I'd like to take a minute for this important message. The social principles of The United Methodist Church speak to the human issues in the contemporary world from a sound biblical and theological foundation as historically demonstrated in United Methodist traditions. During an eight-year process, more than 4000 United Methodists from around the world participated in reviewing and updating this important document.
The revised Social Principles captures the Wesleyan spirit of social holiness and ethical action for peace and justice, reflecting the United Methodist response to today’s most pressing issues.
The new Social Principles have been approved and recommended by the General Board of Church and Society’s Board of Directors and is pending approval and adoption at the General Conference held in the spring of 2024 in Charlotte, N.C.
To view the revised social principles, go to https://www.umcjustice.org/who-we-are/the-revised-social-principles
Crystal: Yeah, this is related, but kind of a little detour. I was in The New Room, John Wesley's New Room in Bristol a couple of summers ago. And what I loved about Wesley's vision for building that New Room was that the benches that the people sat on to hear him preach or hear whoever was preaching were benches. They weren't pews, and you could push them up against the wall, and then that became a hospital or a place to feed people or have a town hall meeting, whatever. It became a community center. And how beautiful would that be if on six days other than Sunday morning our churches were filled with people in the community, the church was the community center.
Ron: Absolutely.
Crystal: That would be such a beautiful thing. So that was a little detour that I took. But you're right, it's very Wesleyan to be serving in our communities. There are no shortage of places even supporting to aid to the people affected by this conflict in the Middle East. And I believe UMCOR has already set up, and there's ways to give to UMCOR, and I will research that and make sure we have a link on our episode page. But there are places where we can, that's another space of action because sometimes it's hard to find a place you trust, perhaps. But I think going through finding those trusted places and then seeing how you can be a part of that, it makes it feel not so… it's hard to feel helpless.
Ron: And that's exactly what happens when we just, if all we do is sit still and consume media, then that helplessness turns to stress, turns to trauma, puts us in these cycles that enmeshment comes in and we get stuck in this place. But if we can break that just for a minute to go to UMCOR, to down to the local mission, to get with the students in the elementary school, to write letters, to do carda, to give with the churches and the seniors and the choirs and create, if we can begin to do, then that unleashes that trauma that helps us to move beyond that to the point where we're able to see and hear at a whole different level. But we got to get up. We got to turn these TVs off, turn these radios off and get up.
Crystal: R. I'm going to hold you to this. I love acronyms. I want to hear what everyone stands for.
Ron: So again, the E stands for empathy. Are we responding from a place of empathy, right? Not sympathy, but empathy. Are we ingesting, are we seeing the other person as equal to ourselves? Are we seeing their humanity and our response place of empathy, the, A stands for action. Are we responding from a place of action? Are we going out and doing something again, something as small as cards or singing our prayer visuals or whatever. Are we doing something versus just sitting and just consuming media or just ingesting over and over again? But then the R stands for room. Are we responding from a place of making room for others? I love how prior to this conversation, you mentioned some of just the deep work you were doing and learning about some of these pieces. You were making room for different thoughts and different opinions and different ideas.
Are we making room? Right? There's so much literature and so many things out there. I'll tell you, when I would do couples counseling, one of the things I would have the couples do is I would have them argue the other's position. And so I would want to hear if they could articulate in full what their partner just said. Can you make room for someone else's opinion? Can you make room for another thought? Can you make space, safe space? Because if we can do that, then it just expands how God can use us going forward as people of peace. But if we're so polarized and just in our own corners, then we become very limited to how God can use us to serve and to heal and to lead others so that R stands from responding from a place of making a room.
Crystal: Oh, I love that. I want to make sure before we're going to kind of take this out beyond the topic of Israel and Hamas in just a minute, but before we do, I want to revisit a conversation that you had that really caused me to, I mean, again, you just put a different lens on it. When I shared with you earlier that we're just living, I hear a lot about the support. We must just support Israel and all the sympathy really, not necessarily empathy, but all the sympathy and all the supportive language is for Israel. And you shared something with me about what that conversation's like in the Black church.
Ron: Certainly, I was simply saying that for a lot of Black church and a lot of Black people in general, they feel connected to Palestine. They understand occupation, they understand apartheid systems. They see in South Africa, and they understand just being brown and being in a system where there's all kinds of things happening to you and around you. And so there's a lot of, for the Palestinian people, there's a lot of connection to brown people, largely Black people, largely globally, just around this understanding of suffering.
Crystal: And I was so appreciative that you shared that with me because it caused me to think about this in a way that I wouldn't have otherwise.
So, I kind of want to segue that into, since October 7th, it has certainly been about, and then the news cycle has been all about Hamas, the terrorist attacking Israel and the response to that. But we've been dealing with divisive conflict, well since humanity was started. So we're not going to go all the way back to that, but there's been divisiveness. But when you showed me or you shared with me another lens, another viewpoint, it just was like, wow! It was so impactful to me. So how can we take that -- And I really think this falls in our empathy place and -- use that just as we go, as people of faith. How can we use that to walk through, share our faith, share God's love with other people?
Ron: I think you're right on it. It's empathy. It's empathy. It's asking that first question. Do we see the other as equal to ourselves? Do we see the humanity in people? Again, we're talking about Palestinian husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, children, sons, daughters, students. We're talking about Israeli husbands and fathers, wives, mothers, children. Can we see people? And I think that's been the issue. Do we only see Hamas? Do we only see this terror? Do we only see this or can we see people? And this goes again, this is beyond just this piece. I think whether we're talking about conservative versus liberal, we're talking about those who are disaffiliated versus those who stay. Eagles fans like myself versus the rest of the NFL. I think it doesn't matter. How do we see people? How do we see people? How do we see people? And sometimes that's why I love children. Sometimes it just starts with a name, right? What's your name? Where are you from?
Crystal: Every child I've ever, I mean, a child will go up on the playground and the first question, what's your name?
Ron: What's your name? They're teaching us how to see people, how to see people. Yeah, that's where it starts.
Crystal: I’m just pausing because it seems simple. Why can't we get it right?
Ron: Yeah. A couple months ago, I was in South Africa doing some teaching, and I was talking about this idea of serving community and the Jesus of the Gospels and just walking through, asking three questions. What did Jesus do? Where did he go? Who was he with? Just asking those three questions in terms of shaping our own ministries. At the end of my talk, one of the pastors there said, similar, Ron, this sounds great, but how do we do this? How do we get out into community? And my response was, well, it's hot. So if you just put some bottles of water in your trunk and drove down the street one block, there's somebody who's thirsty. It's simple. There's somebody who's thirsty, right? It's about to be cold. If we put some blankets and some socks in our trunk and drove down the street, and anywhere you're at, there's someone who's cold. It's simple. It's simple. Just see people.
Crystal: We make it hard.
Ron: We do. We do. We do. We complicate it. We do. Yeah, we do.
Crystal: When I think about, from what I know about Jesus's activities, which I think are, we know this much, and I'm holding up my fingers about a half an inch apart. And it's unfortunate. We don't have the whole of what Jesus did while he was on earth, but I think about the activity that we do know about, and it just really, first and foremost was about seeing and focusing on that person in front of him and wanting to get to know him. And that's the place that you're talking about, see each other as humans, as a fellow child of God. And it kind of breaks away all of those “others,” all of those “theys” and all of those stereotypes that we tend to put having a conversation about, as you just talked about with the people in Palestine and even Ron, even calling out the word “father,” “son,” that just caused me to just consider that person in a whole new way. Even just putting that label, or they are sons, they are fathers, they are loved, they have families, perhaps. And it's the same is true in Israel. The same is true in America, in South Africa, all over the world. And I think that it's a simple solution that's going to take, I think, all of us, maybe a lifetime to get right.
Ron: Absolutely.
Crystal: Yeah.
Ron: But what a fun journey.
Crystal: Yeah.
Ron: Yeah. Yeah.
Crystal: Well, before we move on, I've got a couple more questions. Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you wanted to make sure we covered?
Ron: No, I think we did it. Again. I think the biggest piece of this is seeing the other as human, and this goes beyond Palestine, it goes beyond Israel. This goes to everything that we encounter. It starts with a name, right?
Seeing each other as human, and I think doing that helps to break down some of this stuff. Again, that model I gave you in terms of EAR, empathy, action, and room, what are we physically doing? Closing these computers up, turning that TV off, turning the radio off, and just going to do something, serve the community, and doing it from a place of value. I'm doing this for.
think that's critical. And then making room, making room for others, other voices.
Crystal: I would even offer that. That R could be relationship, building relationships with each other.
Ron: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Crystal: I'm not going to mess with your acronym, but if you ever wanted to add an R.
Ron: I like that R.
Crystal: You can have room and relationships. Well, Ron, I'm going to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests, and you are a repeat guest for “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” So I think I know the answer to the question, but for our guests who don't, or our audience who the ones who haven't heard you, I'd love for you to share how you keep your own spirit in shape.
Ron: Oh, so I've got five things, and I usually do this on Fridays, and today is Friday. I get my Jeep washed. I go have a good cigar and a great old fashioned. I get my hair trimmed up and put together and just spend the day if I can with family outside if it's warm enough. Go for a long drive, that's important to me.
Crystal: Have you got your spirit in shape yet today?
Ron: Almost. I've got a few more things to check off.
Crystal: Because from where I am in North Carolina, and I know where you are in North Carolina, it's a gorgeous day out there.
Ron: It's beautiful outside. It is. It is, yeah, I’ll be out there.
Crystal: So take advantage during these last fall days. Yeah. Ron, thank you for being willing to have this conversation and for your faithful ministry and just your insight that, I mean, selfishly has really helped me kind of navigate these waters, and I just hope that it helps other people as well. So thank you.
Ron: Absolutely. And thank you for inviting me. This is a risky conversation that needs to be had and so thank you for just leading and putting this together.
Crystal: We will give God the credit for that one.
Epilogue
That was the Rev. Ron Bell, discussing how we can model Christ’s love as we move through a world filled with turmoil and conflict. To learn more about Ron’s ministry, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you will find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, [email protected]. If you enjoyed today’s episode, we invite you to leave a review on the podcast platform where you listen.
Thank you so much for joining us for “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” I’m Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we are together.
We thank Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary for being a sponsor of today’s podcast. Garrett offers different degree programs including a master of divinity; master's degrees in counseling, education, public ministry and theology; doctor of ministry; and a doctor of philosophy. If you want to take the next step in your education, you can study in person or online at Garrett. Apply before November 15, and you could be eligible for a minimum 65% scholarship, up to 100% of tuition. Visit Garrett.edu/UMC. That’s Garrett.edu/UMC.
