Re-Conciliation: The Hidden Hyphen

Pendle Hill Pamphlets

by Mary C. Morrison

Reconciliation is an easy word to say, smooth and flowing, speaking itself almost as gracefully as a dance. Why, then, when we try to live out the word, do we often – perhaps usually – find it moving in quite a different way, more like a karate match than a dance?

The word is a much sharper one than it seems, for there is a hyphen hidden away in it. Re-conciliation. The “conciliation” part of the word is a cousin to the word “council” and carries the sense of “together.” The “re-” part, however, implies a break. Gathering together has to be done again in the face of some kind of break, some kind of relationship-disaster. A wound has already been given and taken somewhere, somehow, even though we may not know exactly where or what it is – the first karate-chop, perhaps.

Re-conciliation: with the emergence of that hidden hyphen the word no longer flows smoothly. It is a razor’s edge, painful, dangerous, cutting; a narrow ridge along which we walk, dizzied by the headlong fall-away of the land to both sides of us; a tightrope on which we desperately balance – all uncomfortable images and all true.

24 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 11, 2015

About the author

Mary C. Morrison (1910-2003) devoted her life to family, teaching and writing. A major focus of her work was the gospels. She taught in a variety of settings, including Pendle Hill. The open-ended study questions she honed over years of teaching are available in Approaching the Gospels Together: A Leader’s Guide for Group Study. She recorded her own views on Jesus in Jesus, Sketches for a Portrait.

Mary Morrison and her husband, Maxey, raised a large and loving family. She considered herself 51% Episcopalian and 49% Quaker. She wrote her final Pendle Hill pamphlet, Gift of Days, out of retirement at 92.