The nine asks

LOUISVILLE — Kimberly Danielle, whose Westminster John Knox Press book “The Nine Asks: Creating Safer and More Courageous Spaces” was published on Monday, stopped by the virtual studios of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” for a helpful conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe. Listen to their 57-minute talk here.

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The nine asks, according to Danielle, are:

• Be as honest and vulnerable as possible
• Respect boundaries and thresholds
• Practice no judgment
• Honor confidentiality
• Come back to me
• Respect the process of learning the “right” language
• Take the time to listen first
• Grant permission to go deeper or decline
• Stay in your seat.

Catoe and Doong asked Danielle this question at the top of their broadcast: “It is harder than people realize to create a culture and environment of a safe space in an organization or a church. How can it be done when people bring their own experiences, traumas and feelings to these settings? How can organizations avoid perpetuating past harms on their members, staff or volunteers?”

“I’ve been in the practice of the nine asks for several years now. The short answer to the question is that it’s difficult to do,” Danielle said. “I tell people I don’t believe that any space is purely safe. There is a difference between safety and felt safety.” Safety is person-specific, she said, while felt safety is “abstract and ambiguous.”

“When we think about how we have created the idea of safety in our minds, it usually comes from our personal experiences and memories and the interactions we’ve had with people, places, things and ideas,” she said. On top of that, “trauma is definitely a deeply distressing experience,” and it’s experienced differently by different people.

Her work centers on trauma-informed and healing-centered social justice work. “It looks at centering storytelling — how we exchange our stories as a way of establishing humanity,” she said. Of the nine asks, the one about honesty and vulnerability is the most important. “If you don’t have that one, the other asks don’t matter,” Danielle said. What’s interesting is that people can “typically get themselves to be honest, but there’s a way to be honest and not vulnerable. If I ask you to be transparent and bleed out your story a little bit and I bleed nothing, then you’re in a space of fragility and I’m not, and that doesn’t feel safe for people.”

Think about a time you’ve truly been able to help somebody, she said. “It was almost impossible to deeply show up for somebody — really be a refuge and sanctuary for someone — and for them not to tell you their business. It’s almost not possible to do it. You have to bare your soul a little bit.”

“But if I bare my soul to someone whose help I need and then I don’t return the favor, I’m in a relationship of disempowerment,” Danielle said. “It doesn’t feel safe. How will I know if I will be harmed or not? Now you have information against me.” Danielle has seen this “used against people in corporate spaces, in faith-based spaces and in family spaces. People are harmed,” she said, “when I share something and you don’t.”

Doong asked her about “this relationship between belonging and safety and inclusion, and what that would mean for someone working in an organization or a church community.”

Danielle said she asks people to delineate between being welcomed, included and belonging. “The truth is, I’m sure we can all think of times we were welcomed into a space, and that was it,” she said. “The warmth stopped after the welcome.” In the job that caused her the most stress and trauma, Danielle experienced “the most powerful and gracious welcome into the workspace.” Then “everything fell off after the welcome.”

“Just because I include you doesn’t mean I included you warmly or because I want you there,” she said. “Sometimes I’m forced to include you. Isn’t that what integration looked like for some people? My mother was included in schools, but not warmly.”

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Belonging is “closest to what we mean,” she said. “Do you feel there is affinity between us? Do you seek to be vulnerable with me? Do you trust me? Do I trust you? That’s getting closer to what belonging is … If I can’t make it better for you, what practices can I put in place so I’m not making it worse for you? We forget sometimes that belonging is an ongoing everyday moment-to-moment kind of thing.”

“It’s not a policies, practices and procedures thing. It’s a human being thing,” she said. “You have to get to know me to find out how I belong.”

While working with a congregation, Danielle once tried this approach: “If someone showed up in the sanctuary and asked you to pray with them, to hold hands with them and to go before the God of their understanding with them with all the things that are heavy on them — in that moment, would you question their gender pronouns? Would you ask them what their body looks like or who they’re married to? Or are you sitting there with another sentient being who is asking to go before the God of their understanding and be in relationship with you in that moment? What is your ask as a faith-based person in that moment? What is your boundary? Is that something you can’t do? Is that something they should not have brought to the church?”

“I’m asking you to know for yourself so you know how to position yourself so you’ll know if you are or are not capable of truly welcoming someone, truly including someone and helping them know that they belong,” Danielle said. “From there, it’s choose your own adventure. You get to decide.”

“That’s really powerful,” Catoe said.

“You don’t have to agree with everything this person thinks to sit there and pray with them,” Doong said. “If you’re able to sit there and pray with them, y’all might find more commonality than you initially thought.”

Danielle remembers having this conversation with church members “and seeing the room almost divide,” she said. “Do the people you profess to love know that you love them by the way you treat them?”

Danielle now works for herself, “but when I worked for other people, I knew there was a cost,” she said. “The workspace may want me to code-switch, and cultural code-switching was the cost. I decided I would rather pay the prices of telling the truth and getting pulled into someone’s office than not.”

“I can’t tell you how many times dealing with clients and communities that boundaries comes up,” she said. “What I have come to learn is boundary work doesn’t begin with setting the boundary. Boundary work begins with accepting something you don’t want to accept, something you’ve been in denial about. You have to accept the thing first and then modify your expectations, or at least be clear about what your expectations are.”

Many church members and friends aren’t “in full agreement with everything the church practices. You need to decide if this is something you can live with or not.” That could require setting some additional boundaries. “Otherwise,” Danielle said, “you’re going to find yourself in a space of cognitive dissonance” because “living this way and believing that way, it’s just going to get messy.”

Doong said most of us want to “walk into a space and feel all the good things all the time in every space, whether it’s the church, our family, our place of employment — wherever it is. When those expectations aren’t met, we get mad.”

“We have to acknowledge there is some work to be done on our own end,” he said, “but we often just expect it of everyone else, or for the organization to provide it.”

New episodes of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” drop every Thursday. Listen to previous editions here.