Integrity & Imagination: Facing What We Fear with Anton Flores-Maisonet

How do we align our everyday decisions with our ideals to create the world we want to see?

Anton breaks down the distinction between morality and integrity, discussing the mystery, fear, and unknowns that arise when our values don’t align with “dominant arbiters of morality.” Drawing on learnings from Walter Brueggemann, Thich Nhat Hanh, and his own work in community with asylum seekers at Casa Alterna, Anton shares his understandings of prophetic imagination, experimentation in loving community, and the importance of self-compassion when striving to live a life of integrity.

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Anton Flores-Maisonet is the founding director of Casa Alterna, a ministry offering hospitality, accompaniment, and assistance to individuals and families from over 50 countries seeking asylum in the United States. Anton also serves as the Friend-in-Residence at the Atlanta Friends Meeting and is a spiritual director, writer, speaker, husband, and father.

To learn more about Casa Alterna, visit https://casaalterna.org/

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Anton shared the following quote: 

“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”  Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

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Find the transcript for this episode here.

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/

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The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people.

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Transcript

Anton Flores-Maisonet  0:08  
The more that we can confront and unmask our fears, we find on the other side of that mask is actually an invitation to love.

Dwight Dunston  0:26 
You're listening to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world that is growing up through the cracks of our broken systems. I'm your host, Dwight Dunston. This season, we're creating a space to explore the Quaker testimony of integrity. Together with our guests, we'll talk through the challenges and possibilities of aligning our intentions and actions, in embodying our values with authenticity and grace.

Our guest today is Anton Flores Maisonet. Anton is the founding director of Casa Alterna, a ministry offering hospitality, accompaniment, and assistance to individuals and families from over 50 countries seeking asylum in the United States. Anton also serves as the Friend-in-Residence at the Atlanta Friends Meeting and is a spiritual director, writer, speaker, husband, and father.

Well welcome, Anton to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. It is such an honor to meet you to be connected with you. I've gotten the chance to read about your work, hear about your passions and the way your compassion manifests, is actualized, is lived out. And I've got lots of curiosities as we sit together today. And I want to pace myself and just begin with the question that we ask all of our guests as they as they land in the space. And that is if you can just share a little bit about what it's like to be Anton today. What is it like being you today?

Anton Flores-Maisonet  2:08  
Well, thanks, right, it is great to be here. And it's wonderful to see The Seed grow and now be in its second season. And so what it's like to be me today is to be honored to be here in this presence. But also to be a person who is finding contentment in the midst of what is always, I think, will be a life of transition and of transformation.

Dwight Dunston  2:35  
I appreciate you bringing us in. And I know conversations that I've been having with people who have been in my life for a long time, people I'm just meeting, you know, it feels like a season of transitions for lots of folks. What supports you as as you discern, callings, discern decisions that might impact you, or your family, or communities that you're a part of? What helps you to discern from a place of groundedness, of hopefulness, of possibility? And yeah,  just want to hear any learnings.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  3:11 
Yeah, well, I'm also a spiritual director, or spiritual companion. And I would say that discernment isn't about making a decision. I mean, that is a significant part of discernment, right, is being at those crossroads when a decision needs to be made, as much as it is a habit of paying attention, paying attention to what Spirit might be saying to us. Paying attention to what our own bodies are saying to us and having that growing sense of self awareness, while also lessening our self consciousness, if that makes sense. And that's actually one of my, one of the paradoxes that I'm living into right now: trying to grow in my self awareness while also decreasing my self consciousness. And so, and community. Community is another place where we get to pay attention community is a wonderful gift where we get to cultivate and discover, or uncover our gifts, but also sometimes where we're confronted with a mirror that reminds us of how we're still invited to grow into wholeness. And so all of that, I think, is discernment. Discernment is when we can align our spirits, and our minds, and our bodies, and our communities in a direction that leads us into that mystery that King called the beloved community or what Charles Eisenstein calls 'that more beautiful world that our hearts know as possible.'

Dwight Dunston  4:47  
As you know, Anton, in the second season we are exploring this theme of integrity, one of the foundational testimonies of Quakerism. And I'm so curious to hear from you, what you have come to understand as the meaning of integrity to be? You know, what have been some of your different teachings, or teachers, or experiences that have helped to shape your definition of integrity? And yeah, how has how has integrity shaped your life? So it's a few different questions but would love to hear reflections on any or all of those things.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  5:28 
When I was a child, there was a series of books that I loved, that were called Choose Your Own Adventure. I don't know if you're familiar with these books, but they weren't very thick, but they had like 30 possible different endings. And so it would invite you know, the child mind to be really creative. And you would read a few pages. And then it might say, 'if you enter the dark, mysterious cave, turn to page, whatever,' 'if you decide to go around the mountain, go to this page.' And, and so as you're taking this journey, you're invited to choose your own adventure, to collaborate with the unknown author, in figuring out what the ending might be. I have viewed that my life is an adventure where I get the opportunity, whether it's at the, again, the major crossroads in life, or even just right now, in this very moment, I can decide, you know, which path I want to take. And that integrity is then saying: How do I align my highest ideals with my everyday decisions? And so that when I'm at that, turn the page and discerning you know, do I go through the dark, mysterious cave or do I go around the mountain? The invitation is to say, which of these options will lead me closer towards my ideal values? And the closer I walk towards my ideal values, that feels like integrity, because that feels like I'm living a life of wholeness.

Dwight Dunston  7:23 
Every time I talk to a guest, my definition of integrity is enriched. And I'm so curious, how does one begin to focus in on the values that are most important to them, and live into those values? We've talked a number of times about the head and the heart. Connecting something in your head, you know, I value community I value, love--but it's one thing to have that up in your mind and then there's another thing to root that in your heart. And then we've taken it a step further: there's one thing to have it in your heart and another thing to manifest it in the hands and the work you actually do in the world. So I'm curious how it has worked for you, going for you, to integrate the value of integrity of just not living up as an idea in your head, but really rooting it in your heart, and then how that informed are now informs the work that you do with your hands the work you do in the world?

Anton Flores-Maisonet  8:24 
Well, let me first say that a life of integrity isn't without contradictions. So, you know, I am filled with contradictions, right? So it is the journey to what Carrie Newcomer calls the 'beautiful, not yet,' integrity. And so that even means my life is a journey towards that 'beautiful not yet.' So I think that some of the key ingredients that it requires is the naming of what we fear, the confronting of what we fear, so that it disarms that fear. So again, for me, one of my central charisms is hospitality. Many people would be afraid of inviting a stranger into their home, much less into their heart. I have found that confronting that fear has been one of the greatest gifts. We live in a culture where its rhetorics, its politics, are all undergirded by fear. And so the more that we can confront our fears--I love Nina Simone's, quote, you know, "Freedom is living without fear." And so the more that we can confront and unmask our fears, we find on the other side of that mask is actually an invitation to love. And so my life motto, and the motto of our Casa Alterna, is that love crosses borders. And so it's embedded in that, is that borders are those places, whether they're politically constructed, socially constructed, or psychologically constructed, there are those places where we're told to fear whatever is on the other side of that border. And so the idea that it is love that crosses borders, to me, that's kind of the encapsulation of how one then can live with an integrity in an empire in a culture in a time, when what we are often taught is fear erects borders, and so protection is paramount. And what I'm saying is, no, the pursuit of Beloved Community is what is paramount. And the only way that happens is that when is when love crosses borders.

Dwight Dunston  10:42 
Mm hmm. Just hearing you talk, Anton, it's, it's so grounding for me, because I know what's hard for me to always name what fears I have, to bring others into that, to bring community into that, and to actually have to look at it and face it. And I hear you saying that naming our fears is a big piece of being able to live a life of integrity. And what you're offering out, it feels so much in alignment with your work, too. You talked about, right, your work of inviting strangers in and radical hospitality, right? What you're actually doing is turning that idea of 'stranger' on its head, like, this person is me, is a part of me, is in my community, my well-being, wholeness, liberation is wrapped up in in this interaction with, you know, in this person that's in front of me who needs support. So yeah, maybe you want to share a little bit more about the work you all do. And I also know that you brought a quote, and so maybe tying your work with the quote, if it feels available to you to do so.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  11:53  
It's interesting that this conversation, we're talking a lot about integrity. And yet, you know, what I'm hearing us say is actually, that at the center of integrity is mystery! So almost at the center of trying to live a whole life, all of a sudden, we disintegrate into, whether it's the mystery of being interconnected with one another, or whether it's, you know, becomes what some mystics call the 'cloud of unknowing.' It's interesting that the closer we get to integrity, all of a sudden, you know, we enter into kind of a new mystery. And I say that because it reminds me when I was a child, and I was in a pretty elite boy choir, and we were on tour in Mexico City. And while the 70 some odd boys in our very elite attire were standing outside of a restaurant, I was approached by a little boy who was panhandling on the streets of Mexico City. And, you know, to make a long story short, I learned in our very brief encounter--I say 'brief' because one of the chaperones immediately, you know, made the boy just, you know, leave and then chastises me for doing something reckless and dangerous. And again, that's that kind of cultural fear that was kind of imposed upon me, although I never understood why I should have been afraid. But in that very brief encounter, what I did learn is that the little boy in Mexico City shared the same name, and was the same age, as my younger brother. And so in that moment, like, I felt as though that was my brother, that there was there was nothing, you know--yes, there was everything that separated us and everything that was different from him and my brother, but yet in another mystical way, there was nothing different and nothing that would separate him and my brother.

Dwight Dunston  13:48 
Yeah.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  13:49 
So with our current work with asylum seekers, when they first arrive at the Atlanta Friends Meeting, after being released from immigration detention, I genuinely want to then hear their story of migration. And I mean, and this is the first minute in which they've met me, and oftentimes they are exhibiting tremendous vulnerability themselves as they talk about the the treacherous journey that they made maybe through the Darien Gap, the jungle region between Colombia and Panama, that so many of our guests have had to you know, journey through for over a week, in really inhumane conditions to then arrive at at the US -Mexico border to then be held in multiple detention facilities without due process. I mean, the fact that they are already sharing those stories with me, much less if even in our short encounters with with most of our guests, if they actually disclose to us the reasons why they felt forced to leave their homes, why they were displaced, what violence, what fears, what persecutions led them to leave. I mean, when we can engage the other with curiosity and with compassion, which is, right, so different than what we're seeing on the media--when we're seeing what's happening at the border and the way that it's being described--but when we can listen with compassion, and curiosity, and with non-judgment, it is holy ground. And it is a beautiful, beautiful place to be.

The quote that I bring to this conversation is a quote that has stuck with me for many years. It's a bit heady, in that it has lots of adjectives, but it's the reason why we call our ministry Casa Alterna. 'Alterna' being a great word, or prefix for a word, in English or Spanish for 'alternative,' in Spanish it would be 'alternativa.' You know, that is our hope, that again, in our small, faithful acts of radical hospitality, that in the shadow of these Goliath policies and these behemoth immigration detention centers, that we are showing a more loving and humane alternative. And so the quote from Brueggemann from his seminal book, The Prophetic Imagination, is this: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." I'll say that again: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us."

Dwight Dunston  17:05  
Yeah.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  17:06 
That's a very powerful way mark for me.

Dwight Dunston  17:09 
Mhmm.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  17:10 
To just remind myself that I am not here to single-handedly dismantle oppression and injustice that is so pervasive in the dominant culture. That I can recognize that its mindset like white supremacy and unbridled capitalism is so seeped into our consciousness and our perception that even it's a part of the way I see the world, and I'm continually trying to see the world through different lens--but that the invitation for me is to just say, knowing that, how do I nurture and nourish and evoke a more hopeful alternative?

Dwight Dunston  17:52 
Yeah. To me, what Casa Alterna is doing, what you're doing with your, your work, your calling, your vocation, is nourishing, nurturing, evoking, yeah, this alternative, this alternative perception, perspective, than the ones we are socialized to have about stranger, the other. It's activating a different way of being and being in a relationship. And to me, it is just aligning with so much of what we've covered today around, right, that living into the integrity, that value, being called to actually live out and practice a different way of being, a different and alternate perception, is that value of integrity being lived out, in all of its fullness.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  18:47 
I believe that integrity is not about social conformity, but it's about the pursuit of that "more beautiful world that our hearts know as possible." And that's a quote from Charles Eisenstein. So if it is that pursuit towards a more beautiful world, than that means sometimes we have roadmaps, our ancestors can point the ways, folks who have inspired us along the way. But inevitably, to live it out in our one finite life and in our unique context, it does require experimentation.

Dwight Dunston  19:23 
Anton, it really struck me this idea of, you know, integrity is not necessarily following the right hashtag, that it has something deeper, a deeper presence, a deeper manifestation of our ideal values, as you named. And I'm just curious if you can just share a little bit more about the contradictions or the distance between one, thinking about integrity as just you know, connected to our morals, and this deeper definition of integrity that you're actually calling into being that is maybe even on just a different plane than just thinking about morals or morality.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  20:00 
You know, so morality is imprinted upon us as children as being doing what an authority figure says is right. It's reinforced in, you know, in our growing up as children, that our parents are that authority figure. It's then you know, further layered with school settings telling what's right or wrong and we get, you know, reinforcement around that with different types of awards like citizenship awards, those types of things that tell us this is what is right and what is wrong. But at some point, morality must give way to an integrity that says, there are even values that that can't be codified by law, or that even our laws disagree with right now. I mean, there are such things as unjust laws! At some point, it was totally acceptable to own slaves here in Georgia. And so I would imagine there were a lot of slave owners who were seen as morally good people, by the status quo, by the powers that be. And yet integrity calls us to greater values of justice, of peace, of cooperation, of diversity, of inclusion, all of those things. And so for an individual seeking to live a life of integrity, they will oftentimes find themselves having to wrestle against the very arbiters of morality. And so, so that will mean that their quote, unquote, civil disobedience, is actually what I often call a divine obedience in pursuit of that integrity of ideals with their one and only finite life.

Dwight Dunston  21:56  
Thank you, Anton. I'm going to be thinking about civil disobedience and divine obedience a lot. And so much of what you shared. To close, then, I'm wondering if there's one practice or one offering for our listeners, as they leave this conversation, perhaps inspired, and energized, and more hopeful, but still unsure of what that first step towards living a life that's more committed to integrity. What would you offer to to our listeners as the last takeaway from this conversation today?

Anton Flores-Maisonet  22:42 
Well, if I start with the most simplest of steps, I think the most radical step we can take towards living with integrity is to live with self compassion. So I go back to that Thich Nhat Hanh preaching, or teaching rather, where Thich Nhat Hanh invites us to name whatever it is within ourselves, that feels to be a contradiction to our ideal values, and to lovingly name that contradiction, to view it with the same compassion as we would to a stranger, and to say, to that loving stranger that dwells within us, love will care for us both. I think that's a beautiful first step. And then beyond that, it's experimenting with the community of people who--I live, I live most fully when I live in community. I do not ascribe to the concept of individualism. And so the danger, even in doing, you know, an interview like this is to say, like I am standing on the shoulders of, of so many folks who have nurtured and nourished and evoked me, and who have been alongside me as we've tried to embody these, these alternatives. And so do these experimentations in community, insofar as it's possible.

Dwight Dunston  24:12 
Well, thank you so much, Anton, for being here and present, and bring us into your own journey. And I want to honor you, and all of the various individuals and experiences and the more-than-human kin, that you know, that have supported you to be uniquely who you are. Because we're blessed by you. I hear you saying, we don't want to forget the people who got you here, or the moments that got you here. So we are blessed by them. Just so grateful for the conversation that we were able to have today in the ways we were able to build, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Anton Flores-Maisonet  24:53 
Well, thank you. You've been a wonderful host. I've been enjoying listening to the way in which you display empathy, and curiosity, and engagement with prior guests. And it's an honor to now have spent this time with you.

Dwight Dunston  25:26 
Pendle Hill is a Quaker center, open to all, for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We’re located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people.  Visit us at PendleHill.org. Many of our guests are teachers, leaders, and speakers at Pendle Hill. For a full list of these upcoming education opportunities, visit our events page at pendlehill.org/learn.
 
This podcast was produced and edited by Ariel Goodman, with editorial support by Pendle Hill education associate Anna Hill, and advising from education director Frances Kreimer. Our episodes were mixed by Leah Shaw Dameron. Our theme music is the I Rise Project by Reverend Rhetta Morgan and Bennett Kuhn, produced by Astro Nautico Records. 

This project was made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund.
 

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