Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim’s Invocation At 10/05/2022 Common Council Meeting – “Lord, help us here in this chamber and in our own neighborhoods to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and to trust that we each have the same end goals of helping this city and everyone in it to grow and thrive.”

Mayor Woodford: Tonight’s invocation will be delivered by Alderperson Hartzheim.

Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13): My dad was often famous, or maybe I mean infamous, for the phrase “I once thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken.” He also really liked the song “It’s Hard To Be Humble”, but that’s a whole different story. Anyway, Dad’s catchphrase echoed in my brain earlier this week as I watched the 2011 TED Talk called “On Being Wrong.” I stumbled on this brief talk by Katherine Schultz on the way down an internet rabbit hole brought on by reading “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

The talk, the book, and countless other resources point to what we all feel happening around us. We feel divided. Instead of trying to see other points of view, we seem to be bent on just trying to prove that we are right. Or at the very least, that we’re not wrong. It’s as much present in our neighborhoods as it is in this chamber. One of the great untruths presented by the authors of “The Coddling of the American Mind” is that the world is an us-against-them battle of good versus evil with no in betweens.

So I watched “On Being Wrong” and I heard this: We learn at a young age that the way to succeed in life is to never make mistakes, never be wrong. But trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous. Our stubborn attachments to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to, and causes us to treat each other terribly. There is this pervasive feeling that the way that I believe, the things that I want, the ways that I want to do them are good, and that any differing opinions–and indeed the people who hold them or express them–are against me or are wrong or are evil.

The talk ends with Miss Schultz advocating that we each quote, “step outside the tiny, terrified space of having to be right, and look out and around at the complexity and mystery of the world and say, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.’”

I’m going to invoke God’s help now and not because my religious beliefs are right and anyone who believes otherwise is wrong or my enemy. Lord, help us here in this chamber and in our own neighborhoods to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and to trust that we each have the same end goals of helping this city and everyone in it to grow and thrive. Help us—help us to practice intellectual humility, to question our most strongly held beliefs for the benefit of ourselves and for those we serve. Help us to see those who disagree with us not as our enemies, but rather as your way of giving us pause to reflect upon how we are often trapped in our own tiny, terrified spaces of rightness. Help us to understand that you created the complexity and mystery of this world and gave our brains the expansive ability to see beautiful nuance in all things. And most of all, help us to learn to employ a better version of my dad’s phrase “I once thought I was right. But maybe I was mistaken.”