This morning I encountered a marvelous spider web glistening in the early light. It reminded me of John Paul Lederach’s peacemaking treatise, The Moral Imagination.
Lederach uses the metaphor of a spider web to describe relationships that must be managed in resolving a conflict. His words came back to me as I studied the web….
Spiders must think strategically about space, how to cover it and how to create cross-linkages that stitch locations together into a net. And they must do this time and again, always at considerable risk and vulnerability to themselves.”
Lederach describes the intricate yet flexible structure of the webs. Their flexible design gives them strength: they bend and stretch rather than break.
A web, therefore, can never be thought of as permanent, fixed, or rigid. The spider’s genius lies in its ability to adapt, reshape, and remake its web of connections within the realities presented in a given space.”
The spider web in Lederach’s analysis provides an analogy useful for conflict resolution and peacemaking.
In peacebuilding, relational centers that hold, create, and sustain connections are key. A relationship-centric approach must see spaces of intersection, both those that exist and those that can be created. These are the hubs, the heart that throbs the rhythms of change.”
The mediator or peacemaker must recognize and assess the complex web of relationships to be repaired in order to restore harmony.
The challenge of our failures is that we have been unable to understand the interdependence of different sets of people and processes and recognize how they may interact constructively.”
The task is challenging.
When I assess my personal experience, I realize I often resist acknowledging interdependence. Unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) I seek to maintain the fiction of being a “lone ranger.” I resent being trapped in the web of life.
My resistance and resentment stiffen the web, rendering its strands brittle and inflexible. Interdependence becomes a web in which I am entangled, unable to move. The web loses flexibility and my struggles cause it to rip. The web of life suffers wounds and tears.
In contrast, when I am able to love others, as my brothers and sisters, without reservation, the web of relationships that once appeared as a trap provides the pleasures and treasures of community. Interdependence that once took on the nature of a web strangling my freedom and survival becomes, instead, a vibrant web of life-sustaining connections.
The vital question, it seems, is how we go about monitoring our state of mind and heart. We can struggle and resist and become entangled, or we can love and thereby soften the world around us. Our heart determines the brittleness or flexibility of the web.
When Francis recognized the Divine present in all creation, it was that recognition that brought light and life to the web of relationships he enjoyed. When he saw the God of love flowing through all creatures he was set free within the web, and his heart resonates through that web to this day. Just as the morning light revealed the spider web’s splendor, divine love is a light highlighting the beauty of our interdependence with others.
