To the good people of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church,
I want to thank you for the opportunity to share with you the journey of this year’s parish mission. During these last three Sundays in Tenafly, I can’t tell you how kind and welcoming you have been to me during my brief stay. The hospitality I received from parishioners, as well as the welcome I experienced from the teachers and students of the Academy have left a warm and indelible mark on me. Fr. Dan expressed a hope that I would speak warmly of Mount Carmel in my travels around our Carmelite province and in the various places that I minister, and that is the easiest request I’ve gotten in a long time. It has been a privilege sharing this time with you over the last few weeks. I also want to thank Fr. Dan and Fr. Emmett for inviting me into their world to share this time with you. Finally, I want to thank Elliot and Justin for connecting me with the Academy kids and for taking the time to help me with various preparation details.
Several people after the various Masses asked if there were any books I could recommend which went deeper into some of the topics I covered in my mission homilies. That is what I would like to offer you here on the parish web page for anyone interested. This is a curated list and is miles away from being comprehensive, but I look upon these references as a good place to start for those who are curious.
Week 1 – Expanding the narrative from front to back
There is little work that speaks directly of this topic, except for a few suggestions buried deep in rather hefty tomes of conflict management theory. Although I have expanded it considerably, I originally got the idea from a conflict professor Michael Dues at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and he happens to have recorded an entire course lecture series on conflict management for the “The Great Courses” program. If you’re interested, you can get the video and audio editions (with guidebook) at www.TheGreatCourses.com, or you can find just the audio alone on www.audible.com for a few dollars less. The course is called “The Art of Conflict Management”, and you’ll find the “punctuation” topic near the end of lecture 4.
Week 2 – Expanding the narrative from top to bottom
This is an idea which I adapted from an amazing little book called “Difficult Conversations” by Stone, Patton, and Heen. It’s only one of the ideas in this great book, and they talk about the different “faces” or “facets” of difficult conversations. I chose a different metaphor which works better for my teaching style, the three “layers” of important conversations. The visual metaphor of the wood-burning stove (with the three layers of surface conversation, feelings conversation, and identity conversation) is mine, so you won’t find it in their book in precisely that format, but those three “layers” of mine correspond to the three “facets” of their presentation.
If you are interested in looking deeper into the “identity layer”, I can suggest getting a book by Tammy Lenski called “The Conflict Pivot”. This is a brief and very readable book presenting a practical and very effective way of dealing with conflict. It was written expressly for the purpose of presenting a set of tools for dealing with conflict in the heat of the moment, especially when you’re the only party who seems interested in resolving the conflict. She presents three “pivots”, and in the second pivot, you’ll find six broad characteristics of identity which often provide the fuel in the wood-stove metaphor.
Week 3 – Expanding the narrative from side to side
This is another idea which I borrowed and expanded upon to explain the third (side-to-side)“dimension” in my “expanding the narrative” approach. The book I borrowed it from has a whole lot of excellent ideas, and this is just one of them, which I’ve adapted to my work. The book is called “Crucial Accountability” and is written particularly for people who are in a supervisory position (managers, supervisors, executives, and even parents) for dealing with repeated violations of expectations or boundaries.
I hope that if you are interested in these things, you will find some broader and deeper information in these books than I was able to present in my parish mission talks. Once again, thank you for your hospitality, your kindness, and your interest.
Fr. Glenn Snow, O. Carm.