- Photo credit: Cast a Line via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-SA
Several years ago, a colleague’s father died. I had only been working at the firm for a month or two, and did not know this colleague particularly well. However, he was on one of the litigation teams that I had just joined, a group of people that was personally close. The day of his father’s funeral, I got a rushed call from another team member inviting me to join them at his father’s funeral. I declined.
I regretted that decision almost immediately. I later followed up with a card and a donation in honor of his father, but it wasn’t the same. What had held me back? Well, I had reasoned, I was a private person, and I wanted to respect his privacy. And, I told myself, I did not know him very well and did not want to intrude on him and his family in such a personal time of grief.
I failed, in that moment, first, by making it about me. My worries about being an outsider at the funeral, about intruding, caused me to focus on how I would feel attending, rather than on how he felt. I failed, too, because I believed that there was a distinctly public-private line to our relationship, one that would be wrongly crossed by attending his father’s funeral.
Two years later, as I sat in a community organizing leadership training learning about the value of relational meetings, this concept of the public and private relationship resurfaced. One key tenet of community organizing is the relational or “one-on-one” meeting. In a one-on-one meeting, you have a face-to-face conversation with another person to learn about that person—what motivates her, what keeps her up at night, what worries or angers her, would she like to do something about it?
The presenter at this training emphasized the importance of distinguishing between our public and our private personas during the one-on-one meeting. Through the one-on-one we seek to build public relationships. Not private ones. The difference is a crucial one, and one that, the trainer emphasized, can make organizing so effective. In public relationships are we more likely to hold each other accountable for our actions and promises. True, you may also have a private relationship with that same person—you may know about her children or her favorite baseball team—but it is through the public relationship that accountability will flow.
Yet this distinction between our public and private relationships gives me pause. I bought into this distinction two years ago. It was one reason I declined to attend the funeral for my colleague’s father. And yet that nagging feeling that I should have gone taught me that we cannot so easily cordon off our lives into public and private, work and home, friends and family and strangers. I do not believe that our relationships with each other are as distinct as they were defined at this training. As Parker Palmer writes, “We are constantly engaged in a seamless exchange between whatever is ‘out there’ and whatever is ‘in here,’ cocreating reality, for better or for worse. . . . When professors—or politicians or parents—think they can mask who they are, they delude themselves and make the situation less trustworthy for others, contributing to the sense of danger that leads people to withhold self-investment.” Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2004), 47-48 (public library). We mix our public and personal relationships all the time. When done respectfully, I believe that’s O.K. In fact, I think it makes those relationships stronger, and allows us to embrace our whole selves, and in doing so, embrace the whole selves of others.
Two years later, grieving the loss of my own child, it was my turn to feel the embrace of the friends, family, colleagues, and strangers who attended her funeral, who sent food, cards, flowers. Through their actions, these friends, family, colleagues, and strangers, acted with their whole selves. They showed up regardless of the origins of our relationship. My public and private worlds collided. And it was for the better.
Now, I do not hesitate to talk about my daughter in either realm. When my husband was interviewing for a new pastoral position (a “call”), he gauged, in part, how well the interview went for both sides on whether Eliana came up in conversation and how the call committee responded. No doubt he is held accountable as pastor of his new congregation. But, I believe, that the congregation also knows about our daughter’s life and death strengthens that relationship. And, as I gradually return to work, I revel the opportunity to talk about my daughter too.
I no longer believe that my public and private lives should be kept distinctly separate. For we spend so much time with each other worshiping, working, parenting, neighboring, we owe it to ourselves, and to each other, to open up, to show up. We do a disservice to each other when we focus only on our public personas—in relationship-building through one-on-ones, on social media, or at work. We omit entire pieces of our ourselves in the name of privacy, respect, accountability. We miss opportunities to get to know each other truly.
Remember that colleague, whose father passed away? He and the rest of the team each attended Eliana’s funeral. They showed up. And for that I was wholly grateful.
What ways do you mix your public and private lives? What challenges do you face doing so? What keeps you from living wholly?
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For more on the values of wholeness, including the journey to reconnecting “soul and role” and “living divided no more,” see Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness (public library).