Be the Bridge: Racial Healing as a Learning Journey
By: Lisa Bond, Cambridge Parent and Director of Advancement
Last spring, a group of parents, faculty, and staff joined together to form a Be the Bridge group led by alumni parents, Peter and Nichole Sullivan, and current parents, Jeff and Betsy Squires, to consider how the Cambridge community can be empowered toward racial healing and reconciliation.
The Cambridge community is well-equipped to engage these important discussions for two reasons: a Christ-centered approach and the power of story.
When I reconnected with Nichole and Betsy the other day, Nichole reminded me that unity is the calling for faith-based community. She said, “Bringing Jesus into the room allows us to work toward unity because we are starting on common ground.”
That was the feeling I experienced during our weekly gatherings. It’s like David says in Psalm 133:1:
“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.” (NIV)
Life together is unavoidable. Unity is something we pursue. The goodness and pleasure are fruits of that pursuit. Our kids remind us so often, in their words, and in the way they live, that every person is made in the image of God and deserving of dignity. And that is where we always begin, offering dignity and extending grace.
Grace was hands down the word that rang out the most in our meetings and in my recap with Nichole and Betsy. Betsy said something in our initial meetings that really stuck with me: “Don’t judge yourself on your first reaction to something; give yourself the same grace you give to others. What are your second and third thoughts? That’s where the growth can be seen.”
And that brings me to the second reason there is such hope for racial healing, equity, and reconciliation at Cambridge: the power of story.
Stories are about a journey; they involve casts of diverse characters and settings. Jesus taught by telling stories. Stories are central to Cambridge’s curriculum. Storytelling has been an important part of how we as a school have engaged the topic of race in the past.
We leaned into the power of stories and storytelling each week as each participant in the group shared their race narrative. In our own unique ways and describing our own unique experiences, we answered a simple question - how has race played out in your life? There was no script and very few guidelines. Most of us went chronologically through our lives; one parent used the visual of weaving to show how important moments and experiences shaped him.
The Sullivans and Squires led the way, telling their own stories and calling us back to grace. We encountered hard things, uncomfortable things, but we had to resist the urge to “fix things” for others, correcting or judging their perspectives. Here’s how Nichole describes it:
We acknowledge that people’s truths and experiences are true even if it feels foreign to us. It takes great humility to speak our truths and our experiences and trust that it doesn’t have to reflect badly on us or our families or those we love deeply in all of our sin and misunderstanding. We are all racialized, and this is an opportunity for us to understand how that looks different for each of us.
How do I see things, and why is it that I see them that way?
We ask children to reconsider how they see things every day. Pursuing racial reconciliation in our community could mean reflecting the process of life-long learning right back to our children.