If you work full-time in an office job and attend six meetings a day, that adds up to over a thousand meetings a year.
Even if you take ten weeks off.
It’s a lot.
And if you hear the Acknowledgement of Country in most of those meetings…
… plus in other contexts, like seminars and when airplanes land…
… well, that’s also a lot.
Over the break, an Indigenous woman told me Acknowledgement of Country is a religious thing. Best I can tell, she’s wrong about that – which raises a question or two in my mind.
And she’s lucky. If it were a religious ritual, that’d raise hell.
But it got me to thinking:
What if we gave everyone a choice?
At the beginning of each meeting, you can either say an Acknowledgement of Country or an Our Father.
That’s more diverse, by any reasonable definition of the term.
I’d never make Our Father mandatory. I don’t want non-Christians to mutter it out of some enforced corporate ritual.
But I certainly would make that an option for people.
Folks can open meetings with the prayer that Jesus taught us, or with an Acknowledgement of Country. That sounds fair and decent to my ears, at least.
I wonder what my chances are…
Not so great, I know.
But everything becomes more likely when you understand other folks better.
That’s why I wrote Your Story Isn’t About You. That and because it’s not.
Getting this into your bones changes everything.
See what I mean: