During the 1980s, the legendary Frances Crowe and I were co-chairs of the Peace Committee of the New England office of the American Friends Service Committee, based in Cambridge. Three times a year, we got into Frances’ red Datsun and drove to Cambridge to co-facilitate lengthy meetings with peace activists from all over New England.
Frances and I felt strongly that each meeting should begin with a “check-in” during which we would go around the circle — no matter how large — so each person could speak about something they were struggling with, something that gave them hope, or something they wanted to share.
Somehow, it always fell to me to introduce these go-arounds. We started with these “check-ins” for years and years. And at every single meeting, over all those years, an activist from Maine derided me in front of the entire group saying that we had important work to do and these check-ins were a waste of time. That woman scolded me for starting the meetings with this “nonsense,” and repeatedly threatened to come late to the next meeting to avoid the sharing.
Frances always defended the practice, and I stuck with our agenda and started the go-around over that woman’s objections. When we came to her turn in the circle, she would pass, while glaring at me.
It was uncomfortable. Meeting after meeting, this woman’s objections made for a tense beginning to our time together. But on some intuitive level, Frances and I knew that it was important that people share a few words about how they were doing before jumping head-long into peace movement strategies and tactics. We knew these check-ins would influence our work and strengthen our bonds with one another in positive and significant ways.
Decades after these Peace Committee meetings and those opening check-ins around the circle, I received a strong, unexpected affirmation of the practice that Frances and I instituted and stuck with despite the unpleasantness voiced by this one woman.
This affirmation came in the form of an article in The New York Times titled “To Take on Trump, Think Like a Lion” (May 30, 2025). The author, Carl Safina, an ecologist and a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, recounts the story of being with a group of birders at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania when they spotted a pride of sleeping lions.
Safina writes that as evening approached the ten lions slowly aroused. Although it was time for them to hunt, the lions first engaged in a ritual during which they licked one another, pressed their bodies onto one another, and indulged in much face rubbing. Safina writes: “They reaffirmed: ‘Yes, we are together. We remain as one.’ Only then did they set off.”
Safina then recounted how he and the other birders observed as the lions divided into clearly assigned roles: some kept watch, others slowly walked toward a herd of zebras while hiding in tall grass, and one lion charged the zebras from behind spooking them and forcing them to run directly towards the lions hiding in the grass.
“Rubbing noses does not catch a zebra,” Safina writes, “But only after the lions rubbed noses and reaffirmed a shared identity were the zebras in any danger.” He added, “Those lions showed me that a sense of community is a prerequisite for coordinated strategy.”
As we work to resist Trump’s undisguised authoritarianism, corrupt practices, humanity-wounding decisions, and narcissistic approach to governing, we must remember to “think like a lion.”
Our equivalent to the lions’ rubbing noses is to show caring for one another, to pause before charging out into the fight to listen to one another, to verbalize our unity in this struggle, and to express our solidarity with one another.
From coast to coast, people in this country are rousing themselves from sleep, just as the lions did. People are rousing and rising. Our checking in with one another regularly before and between actions reminds us that we belong to each other, and that we belong together.
Unlike the fidgety and scolding activist from Maine who criticized Frances and me for starting a hard-nosed peace movement strategy meeting with something as soft and irrelevant as “check-ins,” we know that caring for each other is part of our power and that demonstrating our connection to each other contributes to our strength. So let’s keep rubbing noses. Metaphorically.
The Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, Ministerial Team, Alden Baptist Church, Springfield, is also founder and director of the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership.