There’s an exercise called “Broken Squares” that’s part of the Children’s Creative Response to Conflict program. In the exercise, you arrange five paper bags with a few irregular pieces of wood in each. The pieces are all different shapes and sizes, but if you can put the right ones together, you will end up with five complete, same size squares, one in front of each participant in the exercise. 

Five different people get one of the bags. The challenge is cooperating and sharing pieces until everyone has the pieces they need. There is no talking or gesturing allowed. You can only offer your pieces to others and accept or reject what you are offered. Depending on how willing participants are to surrender and share, the exercise can take five minutes or forever (especially if one person has a square quickly, just the wrong size, and won’t give it up).

Broken Squares is one of the “cooperation” exercises in the CCRC curriculum. Cooperation is one of the four themes of the program, along with affirmation, communication and problem solving. The conviction of the program is that if children are able to affirm themselves and others, develop their listening and speaking skills, learn to cooperate and solve problems, conflicts will be resolved more easily and develop less often.

 Personally, I’ve discovered the program is helpful for adult children as well. Since most of the curriculum is activity oriented, it’s a chance for grown-ups to play with others and not feel childish. I’d like to see the program in Congress. (In my minds eye, I see Ted Cruz, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Thune and Mitch McConnell playing Broken Squares … what a sight!)  Obviously, many people in Congress have never experienced conflict resolution training. They could also make use of other components to the program like: bias awareness, violence prevention and mediation. 

The continuing conflict over immigration and the southern border is illustrative. Instead of going to the heart of the problem, assessing needs and working together to make sure people have the pieces to the puzzle they need, we instead build verbal and other walls between potential problem solvers and increase the climate of blame and hate. The result is what we now call “hate crimes.” We can do better than “white replacement theory,” Tucker Carlsons’ 400 references to it and mass shootings in Buffalo and elsewhere, aimed at people of color.  

The body politic seems reasonably comfortable with the idea of accepting refugees from Ukraine. After all, they are white and European; and it’s likely many will want to return when the war is over. But most of those at the southern border are people of color, who according to the replacement theory, will soon overwhelm the white nativist population unless the walls are higher and tighter. And no one seems willing to sit down with their bag of blocks to sort out the needs and solutions. Where is the international conference on refugees, as this population soars? Where is the bi-partisan Congressional committee, working to mitigate this crisis?

May I suggest there are reasons why people pile up at our border? An increasing driver is climate change. If drought and floods and fires and hurricanes make subsistence agriculture impossible, and governments are too inept, poor or corrupt to help, you may just feel the need to take a long and hazardous journey searching for an alternative. Or if war or rampant criminal activity threatens one’s life and livelihood, you may be forced to flee in the hope of a compassionate reception someplace else. 

For me, the most bothersome response to the human need of refugees and immigrants comes from some segments of the Christian church. They align themselves with a former president who loved walls and swore off doors; who practiced to perfection racist dog whistles and gave white replacement theory and Christian nationalism a place at the table; who continues his endeavor to divide and conquer. 

There is nothing Christ-like about stiffing the neighbor because of their color or their need. These Christians have forgotten the story of the Good Samaritan and the woman at the well. They are ignoring the stateless nature of Jesus, who had no place to call home or lay his head. They ignore where their savior was born. Their fear of the “other” has overcome their commandment to love. 

May our better natures, Christians or not, lead us to share what we hold in our Broken Squares bag as needed, that we might build something together of equity and peace.