To Resolve, Lean into the Conflict

It is important to add a qualification to the title of this reflection. To Resolve Lean into the Conflict – in Love. As spouses or religious living together, if we think we have problems with the other half, St Monica and Priya Parker, a Conflict Resolution Facilitator, have something to teach us.

Priya Parker says, “When I work with organisations, with churches, one of the things that I tell leaders is to find and cultivate that relational longing, that residual desire to want to be in community with each other.” She says she is still physically conflict-averse. “When I am in a tense situation with somebody that I love — my husband, my children, my friends — my palms get super sweaty, my heart starts palpitating. Sometimes, in a really good fight, I’ll feel slightly faint. And I have come to realise that all fighting is physical. The physicality of what actually happens in our bodies deeply affects our ability to fight or stay. As a facilitator, and in my own life, I have simple practices to notice that it is happening, to breathe, and not to exit.

Parker’s advice on how to mentally and cognitively deal with conflict aversion is not to flee but to have a productive conflict. It’s to reframe conflict as an investment in the person. She says when she and her husband start arguing, and if the children happen to be in the room, she will look at them and say: “It’s OK that we’re fighting. We’re arguing because we love each other. This is an important conversation for us. She is saying it as much to them as to herself. She says, “We tend to think of conflict as antagonistic, but conflict can actually be incredibly prosocial. So, very simply, it’s checking in and saying, Do I care about this relationship? And counterintuitively, if I do, let me get in there.”

She continues, “When conflict arises, organisations and friend groups basically oscillate between unhealthy peace — conflict aversion, avoidance, pretending everything’s fine — and unhealthy conflict, which is escalation or domination or abuse. She wrote “The Art of Fighting” to say: Look, this is a deeply, deeply important part of all group life, of all of our relationships, and we’re not taught how to do it well. It’s not immoral, it’s not toxic. Conflict is the way we figure out who we are and how we negotiate to be part of common life together.

St Monica, the mother of St Augustine, and wife of Patricius, is possibly the best example of conflict resolution with love. She did it divinely well. In the days and weeks after her marriage to Patricius, she became increasingly and painfully aware of the abyss that lay between her and her husband. He was annoyed by her prayers; he found her charity excessive; he could not understand her desire to visit the sick; he could not fathom her love for slaves. At every step in her Christian Walk, Monica met with countless hindrances. Her case was far from unique and is well described by Tertullian in his treatise, “To His Wife,” wherein he speaks of the difficulties a Christian wife endures at the hands of an unbelieving husband:

“When it is time to go to church, the husband takes his wife to the baths; if there are fasts to be observed, the husband arranges for a banquet; if she wishes to visit the poor, no servants are available to accompany her. And will such a husband allow her to be absent all night long for the paschal solemnities? Or permit her to attend the Lord's Supper, which they disavow?”

Her husband, although he loved her in his own way, was a stranger, not a soul-mate; and her cantankerous mother-in-law, who lived with them, only reinforced his fits of anger with her own. Even more grievous was Patricius' infidelity, for what wife, especially one raised, as Monica was, with high standards of chastity and marital devotion, can countenance the defilement of her marriage bed?

Monica knew that reproaches were counter-productive, and she tamed her husband's violent temper by her meekness and devotion. Other women, who endured blows from their husbands, asked Monica how it was that Patricius, whom they knew to be irascible, did not once strike her. Monica replied that instead of blaming their husbands they should blame their tongues, for “she had learnt not to resist an angry husband, not in deed only, but not even in word” (IX:9).

Prayer was Monica's strength, and the joys of motherhood further mitigated the bitterness of her circumstances. She bore two sons and a daughter, whom she nurtured in the faith with great diligence — and ultimate success. As a boy, writes Blessed Augustine, “I already believed, and my mother and the whole household, except for my father. Yet he did not prevail over the power of my mother's piety in me, that as he did not believe, so neither should I. For it was her earnest care that Thou, my God, rather than he, shouldst be my father” (I:11). To Monica's great sorrow, Patricius would not have the children baptised. When Augustine began to show promise of intellectual brilliance, Patricius sent him for higher education to Carthage, where the youth gradually fell prey to youthful passions.

Regardless of Patricius' religious indifference and often unchristian behaviour, Monica was very attentive towards him, “whom she, the better obeyed, therein also obeying [God] Who hast so commanded” (I:11). Compelled at times to contradict him and to go against his will in what concerned the Faith, she was all the meeker and more submissive to him in other matters. And although superior to her husband in education and moral qualities, she made every effort not to reveal her advantage. She firmly believed that if the light of the Gospel was reflected in all her actions, then Patricius would eventually be persuaded of its power and its truth and would submit to it more readily than if she attempted to persuade him with rational arguments. Indeed, her Christian conduct acted like a soothing balm on Patricius' soul, and, without his realising it, drew him gradually closer to the Faith. As Saint John Chrysostom wrote half a century later in his homily, On Virginity, the believing wife “will be able to save her husband by putting the Gospel into practice.” This is precisely what Saint Monica did, winning over not only her husband but also her mother-in-law.

This fruit of her prayers, of her long-suffering, and of her steadfast application of the Gospel precepts took a long time to mature. It was only after sixteen years that Patricius was baptised. Nor did Monica enjoy her husband's company for long at the Lord's Supper, for he died only a year later, in 371. Nevertheless, she had aimed to sanctify her husband for eternal life, and, by the Grace of God, she achieved it. It remained for her to extricate her wayward son from the delusion of the passions and from the Manichean heresy. This required another fourteen years of persistent prayer. When at last his heart, too, was converted, her joy was complete.

⁷ Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. ⁸ He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹ God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (1Cor 1:7-9).

-        Mathew Anthony

P.S. Much of the reflection paraphrases reporting I have read on Saint Monica and the Conflict Resolution Facilitator, Priya Parker.