Tippett: From John Paul I’ve recently picked up this phrase, “social courage.” I really love that phrase. It’s what I want to have and I want us to share with each other. And then we have America Ferrera, who is on some of our very present American frontlines of danger and reckoning — this call to social courage. Do we claim this or not?

And another phrase I’ve been using lately is “social artistry,” “social arts.” And I feel like you, also, are a bearer of that, a teacher of that. Just by virtue of being yourself you end up, in yourself, grappling with a lot of the pain and fear and divisions and challenges that mark this American moment around women, immigration, race, socioeconomic well-being. One thing you’ve said about yourself: “I am the daughter of two immigrants who worked several jobs to keep food on the table and the lights on. And by the way, we still found joy in life. We still loved people and had relationships and breakups.”

[laughter]

Something John Paul has said about himself: “I have traveled most of the globe on the backs of people whose lives are held together by the wars they fight.” So what we have here is an artistic conflict transformer and a conflict-transforming artist.

[laughter]

Lederach: Brilliant. [laughs]

Tippett: America, I wonder how you would start to talk about the religious and spiritual background of your life, of your childhood, whatever those words mean for you.

Ferrera: I love that so much!

[laughter]

I really have waited so long — and last night, thought, “Oh, God, I don’t have an answer!” That’s not true. I have an answer. I was thinking about it all weekend and last night, and I feel like the simple, shortest explanation of the spiritual background of my childhood is this groping in the dark. My parents are immigrants from Honduras. I was born and raised in Los Angeles. My mother was very skeptical of religion and the Catholic church, and she’d left a country she felt was hopeless, when she left. And so I was never taught how to pray, and I was never taught what God was.
And yet, I remember making up my own form of praying by the time I was six years old. I would lie in bed and just ask God to protect my mother, my siblings; that my mother would come home safe from work on the nights she worked one of her three jobs very late. And so there was, so early on, a seeking.

And no one gave me a road map. No one taught me how to talk to God or what God was, but so early on, I was seeking, and seeking in the dark. And I think it’s served me really well, because this moment has felt like darkness for years now — as a woman, as a person of color, as a patriot, as someone who loves this country — it’s felt like darkness.

And my now dear friend Valerie Kaur gave this beautiful speech on New Year’s Eve, after the election in 2016. And she said something like, “What if this is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb, and America is a country waiting to be birthed, and we are being called to breathe and to push?” And it changed the whole context of the darkness I was feeling, and I thought, I can do this. I know how to do this. I know how to grope in the dark without a road map. And so that’s the element that is with me right now, in this time.

Lederach: Wow.

[applause]

Tippett: So John Paul, how would you — I wonder — I know about your Mennonite background and how that flowed into what you became. But just in this moment, is there something in the spiritual background of your life — also, perhaps, just what has emerged through your vocation — that is especially present to you?

Lederach: I suppose with time and exposure to a lot of these situations that have that deep level of darkness, and finding ways to seek the light, you open up — at least, I’ve found that to be true for me — you opened up to any of the sources that began to shed light, whether it’s from the daily conversation all the way up to — I sometimes consider myself a Mennonite who writes haikus and studies contemplative Buddhism, who loves Sufism and listens carefully for the divine in the everyday, because it’s miraculous. So sometimes the formal structures and shapes that I grew up with, I want to always take a sense of gratitude and deep appreciation for having had a caring, loving community that made community serious. And I also don’t want to feel bound by boundaries that sometimes our communities can create. I’m interested in boundary-less identity.

And so how do you find that meaningful “we” that is expansive? And that’s sometimes understood and sometimes not well understood by those who find more meaning in keeping the gates a bit more closed. So it’s an ongoing love affair with my own community and beyond.

Tippett: And love affairs do have turbulence.

Lederach: Yeah, they do. [laughs]

Tippett: You’ve spent so much of your career in many countries, and this moment of tumult is actually global. I mean, there’s a sense in which what’s happening here is our manifestation. I just wonder if you have been surprised at what’s happened in this country, or how you see this in the context of everything you’ve seen in terms of social tumult across the years.

Lederach: Well, there’s a part of — “surprise” would be that it’s totally unexpected. And I think it took us a long time to get from the writing of a Constitution to the Civil War, and it’s taking a long time to come to the full understanding of how deep that actually was and how it’s left remnants. One of my big — most meaningful mentors that I had was Elise Boulding, who was one of the pioneer women of the peace studies field. Kenneth and Elise were a Quaker couple. And Elise always — she had this phrase about the 200-year present. And I think it might be useful for us to think about the current moment in reference to how she would frame the 200-year present. We students would be walked through this very simple exercise. You can do it right now, in the next two minutes. So here it comes.

If you just calculate, for a minute — so when she said “present,” she meant like past, present, future. And she’s saying, you live in a 200-year present. So if you go back to when you — at your youngest age that you can remember, who the oldest person was that held you, and then just calculate back to their birthdate, roughly. Mine would carry from Great-Grandma Miller, would go back into the 1850s, actually into the period close to the Civil War. And then you do the second part of the process, which is you think about the youngest member of your extended family minus two months. And then imagine a robust life — to what decade might she or he live? And then she would always say to us, once we’ve done all this kind of work, she would look at us and say, “You were held and touched, and you will touch the lives of, people that cover a 200-year present.”

And I think that’s where we lose sight that there is a deep process of change that we are about, and it is impatient. As one of my friends, and one of the famous writers in Nicaragua, said: “It’s impatient patience.” We have a ways to go, don’t we? We have a journey to take.

Tippett: So America, you have a face and a voice in this moment. I’m curious about the evolution of your activism and the inner life of your activism, because just from the outside, there you were, a very prominent voice in the Women’s March, a raised voice. I also experience you to really be a questioning voice, to be a listening voice, as well, and asking about the world you want and the shoulders you stand on. And I’m just curious if you’d share a little bit with us about what you’ve been learning.

Ferrera: Yeah, that’s a really, really big part of my journey, is this grappling with boundary-less identity. And I think a really, really big part of what has shaped me, or my understanding of myself, is the cutting-off of my knowledge to my identity. When my parents left Honduras, they left so much behind, and they didn’t want to bring it with them. And I had always been taught to worship the U.S. soil that I grew up on — that I was so blessed, and I was so lucky to be born and to be raised on this land. And I really internalized that, and I was the most earnest American named America there was.

[laughter]

And it really wasn’t until very recently, probably about eight years ago, that I traveled to Honduras for the first time in my life, so stepped foot on the land that I knew I had some connection to but really was only in my imagination. And I was so taken by the unexpected feeling of tragedy, of the tragedy of immigration. I’d only been told to be grateful and to be glad and to be excited that I didn’t grow up in a war-torn, corrupt country.

And so that was a moment where I realized that I had never been full in my identity, because I had never been given the opportunity to mourn what had been lost to me. And how that relates to my activism is that I was so confused and frustrated by my activism for so long, because I just wanted to be an actress. [laughs] And I — again, going back to when you’re young, I thought, “I’m gonna be an actress, and I’m gonna be a human rights lawyer.” And that made sense to me when I was in first grade.

[laughter]

And there was nothing at odds with that.

And when I got into college, I had this quarter-life crisis where I thought, “Oh, no, I’ve made the wrong choices. There’s so much suffering in the world. There’s so much to fix. And I’m gonna go be an actor? How does that make any sense?” And I had convinced myself that the only right thing to do was — to make up for my 18 wasted years of life, was to quit acting and go do something that mattered.

And I had a professor of peace and conflict studies, whose office hours I walked into and just started blubbering and crying at Professor Dave Andrus’s desk, saying, “I have to give up my career.” And I didn’t even know he knew I was an actress. And he stopped and said to me that he had a young Latina female mentee who he’d been mentoring for three years. And one day, she said to him, “Do you really want to know what my life is like?” And he said yes. And she said, “Then come watch this movie with me. It’s called Real Women Have Curves,” which was the first film I ever starred in, as a 17-year-old. And the character had a dream of going to college, and her parents did not support that dream. She had to work in the factory to help her parents make ends meet. And he watched this movie with her and her friends, and they said to him they’d never seen themselves reflected in the world around them. They’d never seen the culture acknowledge their existence and their struggles. And anyway, he was able to speak to her parents, specifically through this movie, about supporting her wish to go to college.

And I could not have imagined or scripted that I would be alive in a moment where there is this ripple in our space and time, where artists and art and culture are so being called to step up and speak from an activist heart. And I feel like I was born for this moment.

[applause]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with America Ferrera and John Paul Lederach.

John Paul, one of the things you learned as a professional peacebuilder — I think you would say that just a huge catharsis and deepening in your art and practice of peacebuilding was understanding the arts. Even when we use that language, it sounds like something in a box, and we also professionalize that. But what I got from you was you, in being proximate to that kind of conflict and suffering, understood that it’s so often true that our deepest pain and the deepest things we have to reckon with and resolve lie in a place that words and analysis don’t touch, and that all the arts and just our capacity to sing is as essential as any tool or any conversation.

Lederach: Absolutely. Well, I have this running question that I’ve been struggling with. I used to write a lot of poetry when I was younger, and then, when I came into my formal Ph.D. studies, I had a 15-year hiatus. And I always wondered, what was it about becoming professional that took the poetry out of me? And coming back to it, what I discovered, among other things, is that a lot of what you have a capacity to be trained to do — which are very important things, but it’s based, quite often, on analysis. And of course, the notion of analysis is that we know by breaking things apart in some form or fashion. And analysis, in and of itself, doesn’t have the heart to put things back together.

So where do we find the capacity to think in ways that hold something that’s a wider whole, but it’s not entirely visible, because it’s gotten so fragmented? And the further you go down one avenue, it just doesn’t have that, so you have to find ways to bridge, and for me, it was definitely the arts. I mean, a tool can give you something concrete that you can imagine using, but a tool is not gonna give you persistence to know what to do when you’re in a dense forest. It’s not gonna tell you which path to take. It’s not gonna give you a sense of how you’re gonna come through a blustering storm. It’s not gonna give you the mettle that when everything feels like it’s been destroyed around you, you can’t just pull out a tool. You have to have some way that it connects much more holistically.

And then what you find, of course, is that — and this was, for me, the part that was so powerful — is that the people who were the most inspirational were the ones who were inventing things that none of the professional world had thought about, because they were — like the campesinos in Medio Magdalena: out of the blue, no formal training at all, hit decades of one armed group after another. And the principles of their organization start with quota. “If you want to join, you agree that you will die before you kill.” Principle one: “We will seek to understand those who do not understand us.” And I’m thinking, “These people are artists.” I mean, literally, they started the very first peace zone in all of Colombia that then spread to other parts of the world, the notion that a local community can simply say, “No more guns here.”

So when I look back, one of the big questions I had was: Where did we nourish and foster the creative imagination that permits you to bring into the world something that does not now exist? That’s the real challenge of a lot of the work of conflict, is that you’re trying to bring something that does not now exist. That’s the creative act. And so I think it goes back to holding these worlds together.

Tippett: Something you said that just struck me as, again, simple and so important: “Remember that the person in front of you is a human first and an opinion second. To be human is to story. So remember that before you is a person trying to understand their story, one of billions that make up our family.”

And then, Mariah — sorry, we have a Mariah in our family. America, [laughs] you’re part of what you call this “small, silent revolution in pointing the camera at the common person who is not saving the world, or the world’s best FBI agent, but who is just getting by,” and doing this — “finding the humor and the love and the stakes and the victories and the tragedy in everyday life.”

Ferrera: I so appreciated something that was said, talking about this notion of giving voice to the voiceless and how that’s, to me, very flawed — that they’ve always been talking, no one’s been listening. And being raised by a single mother who, for the majority of my life, was the manager to a department of women who cleaned hotel rooms, I was surrounded by women who other people would think of as voiceless, as powerless, as disenfranchised. And they’re not. They’re stronger, more powerful, more solution-oriented, more solution-driven, more resilient than anyone else I’ve ever known.

And going into people’s communities, into their lives, and seeing the ways in which they resist and the ways in which they find joy, is so heartening and humbling — because many of us, I think, we sit in our positions of privilege, feeling guilty for our privilege. And we live in this idea that we have something that other people might not have access to, but we don’t often think about the things that we don’t have access to that people that we would consider less privileged than ourselves somehow manage to keep at their fingertips at all times.

And I think so often about the Dreamers and the children, essentially, in this country who led themselves. They led their own movement. They realized that their salvation was in them stepping into their leadership and doing the most terrifying thing, which was to be visible in a world that demanded them to remain invisible. And as I’ve traveled the world and had firsthand experiences with these communities that are fighting for their own daily survival and their daily dignity and their daily joy, I realized that that’s what we need.

And so for me, as somebody who has managed to procure a platform, it’s scary to use that platform, because you feel like “I have to have all the answers” or “How could I possibly speak if I don’t have the Ph.D. in conflict resolution or diplomacy?” But sometimes, all we have to do is shift our attention and shift the light and allow for these people with powerful, strong voices and stories and solutions to speak for themselves. And I’ve found so much power in shifting that light.

[applause]

Tippett: I feel like when you are talking about, like right now — this is a way you’ve said it — you’re part of these multiple, overlapping, converging initiatives, some of which are very well publicized now, some of which are more emergent, and that it’s essentially leaderless; there’s no great charismatic leader. It feels to me like a lot of what is brewing — and especially in Hollywood, among artists — is kind of new-form social innovation. Are you thinking about it that way? Are you feeling that, that there’s not a path?

Ferrera: Yeah — what I’m feeling is that it’s so complicated [laughs] and that we’re figuring it out and that when you’re at the edge of what you know, and you’re at the edge of what you can see, in terms of what is evidenced about what works, it gets really uncomfortable. And we go to what we know. And so something beautiful emerges out of a moment, excitement — yeast reaching a point where it explodes into something great.

But then our human instincts kick in, and we want to control it, and we want to define it, and we want to put it in a form that we recognize and understand. And so the instinct can be: Who’s the leader? And what’s the process? And who reports to whom, and what’s the chain of command, and who gets to use the logo — [laughs] and defining the “we.”

And that part is — it’s really the creative part, because if we can’t bring our imaginations to that moment, then we just recreate what we’ve seen and what’s been created, but we’re trying to push something new into the world. We’re trying to bring something through that’s never been brought through, and it’s hard. And we have to continually remind ourselves that our discomfort and our grappling is not a sign of failure. It’s a sign that we’re living at the edge of our imaginations.

Tippett: I wonder, just as we close — reluctantly — if you have questions of each other before we close. I love bringing this generational friendship into being.

Lederach: Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant.

When you talk, it’s an extraordinary range of things. And so how do we best imagine ways to support that being strong and supple that can weather the things that will likely come? I think the great hope, I think, is in the rising generations. It’s clear as a bell in so many ways.

Ferrera: One thing that has been really on my mind is this idea of what we place value on. And I think we have a certain way of thinking about change and how change happens. And I think that’s all up in the air right now. And there are people doing the work of deep culture shift, but we have to value it as a society, with our money, with our time, with our journalism, with the conversations that we choose to have.

This is a storytelling exercise, this era we’re living in. And who’s telling the story better? And who’s out there trying to tell a new story, trying to tell a different story, trying to shift the form of the story, and how do we get behind them? How do we get behind the young people who understand that this isn’t about politicians, and it isn’t about our elected officials — this is about the stories we tell each other and that we choose to believe?

Lederach: Yeah, true.

[applause]

Ferrera: Well, I have so many questions for John Paul — mainly, can I have your email address so that we can keep in touch?

[laughter]

But I have so many questions. I guess the personal relationship question would be, has there been a relationship in your own life that you’ve built that was that unexpected relationship that shifted the way that you could see things? And if so, what did it shift?

Lederach: Oh, absolutely, and it’s been in different places. I think the one that would come most to mind is my very dear friend Ricardo Esquivia, from Colombia. Ricardo grew up in the streets because his father had leprosy, in the outskirts of a little town in the north part of Colombia. And from that starting point, as an Afro-Colombian, to becoming a human rights lawyer, he and I developed a relationship, because it traversed some things that — of times when he had to leave, came up to where we are so that he could have periods of safety for his family, and then going back.

But the shifts always came, for me, with Ricardo that were basically this: You can be angry, but don’t become bitter. You can be angry, but don’t refuse to talk. You can be angry, but don’t forget to love. And he’s slightly my elder, by about a five, maybe eight-year period. And there were periods where, to be honest, my anger was headed more for the bitter — I forgot to love. And then you have this extraordinary friendship of somebody who’s been through so much more, who just comes alongside — I love “alongside” — takes your arm, and says, “Let’s walk.”

And I think that’s, for me, what shifts it is that it’s a quality — so the big difference between trying to create a conversation for instrumental reasons — because you have a purpose that you want to try to get somebody to do something — and committing yourself to friendship, even though you’re deeply different in many things that life has brought — that’s a shift. And I learned that from — he would be an example among many, but that, for me, was very, very powerful in my life.

Tippett: I’m so glad you’re both in the world. Thank you, John Paul Lederach and America Ferrera.

[music: “In Paler Skies” by Blue Dot Sessions]