Community has the power to shape or destroy us.The above thought was taken from a May 17, 2007 blog post by Lilian Calles Barger (author, speaker and founder of The Damaris Project - an ongoing dialog for women on 'how spirituality informs our daily lives and work.') entitled No Name Woman. In the post she was referring to a story set in rural China by the same title that appeared in a larger work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts written by Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston. This thought of community having the power to shape or destroy us struck a sharp chord with me when I read it because it is a truth I have known for most all of my life seeing in practice communities both shaping and destroying the lives of their members. It has long been my hope and mission to help create communities that uplift their members and immediately upon reading it, I added the above thought to my collection of quotations and have returned to it time and again in the past six months. Never more intimately in my own life have I known one community to so strongly and passionately do both - shape and destroy - than from what I have experienced and witnessed in the community from which I have now chosen to leave being an active part.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
- Virginia Wolfe
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today. - Lyndon B. Johnson
Community. Merriam-Webster defines it as follows:
com·mu·ni·ty Pronunciation: \kə-ˈmyü-nə-tē\ Function: noun 1 : a unified body of individuals: as a: state, commonwealth b: the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly: the area itself [the problem of a large community] c: an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d: a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society [a community of retired persons] e: a group linked by a common policy f: a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests [the international community] g: a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society [the academic community] 2: society at large 3 a: joint ownership or participation [community of goods] b: common character : likeness c: social activity : fellowship d: a social state or condition
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth. -- Mitsugi Saotome
Once upon a time in a college English class I was assigned to write a position paper on John Donne's Meditation XVII, No Man is an Island, arguing either that one could or could not function without being an integral part of our larger humanity. For the most part, I fancy myself a fairly strong-willed, independent, non-conformist that marches to the beat of her own drum. I wanted to argue with every fiber of my being that a man (or woman) could indeed be 'an island,' standing alone. At nineteen I had already been witness to communities doing their shaping and destroying, "I could be a hermit (and a darn good one at that!)," I thought. I was so self-assured at the time! Still today the prospect of a hermitage is my escape fantasy when the world around me goes bad. Then, however, I think of the caring, loving, compassionate people who have in a positive way helped to shape me into the person I've become, the people who have added great value to my life...I couldn't be who I am without their influence. I would most definitely want to take some of them with me - GRRR! Darn, There goes the hermitage! As far as my college English paper, I ended up so conflicted between my desire to believe that I could indeed be an island and that inner nagging that told me I could not, that I elected to take a zero and simply not write the paper. If I can't do something well (or at the very least the way I would like to, on my own terms) I sometimes refrain from doing it all.
"There is no such thing as a "self-made" man.
We are made up of thousands of others.
Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us,
or spoken one word of encouragement to us,
has entered into the make-up of our character
and of our thoughts, as well as our success."
- George Matthew Adams
“Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared is doubled.” - Swedish Proverb
My passion and my life work has been to contribute to the building of powerful, positive, good, life-changing communities (the kind that can proudly say they make a difference) in whatever form that may manifest itself. Sometimes it has been for pay, many times it has not. Sometimes it has been focused on taking care of the minute details that others take for granted which help to create the whole experience, doing the grunt work; sometimes it has been in envisioning, creating and executing large plans and programs. Most of the time it has been some combination of the two. Making copies or taking out the trash can have equal value to brainstorming and executing program ideas when one sees them all as a part of the 'Big Picture.'
My husband of fifteen years and I live a fairly modest lifestyle (just as an example: we were a one-car family for over 12 years) and were fortunate enough for the fourteen years he was a director of bands for that to be our primary income and for my income (when it existed) to be 'a bonus.' In that I have never had to compromise my integrity for the purpose of making money. I realize that this is a grand luxury many people do not afford themselves. It makes you look at the world differently; it changes the way you think. I still believe in the cliche, "Do what you love and the money will come." So far it has served me well.
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free. - Starhawk
When I reflect on the past year of my life, it has been one of great turmoil and change instigated by the hands of 'community,' communities that I had grown to love. "Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do." - Virginia Wolfe At the same time though, there have been small sub-groups, individuals of those communities, who have uplifted and sustained me in my journey. While my husband was a band director, we shared the vision of creating a community in which young people could flourish and grow, teaching leadership skills and team building...the musical contests and competitions were all secondary to the building of better people. The teaching of music and performance skills was simply a tool and venue through which to achieve the end goal of building better people. A small, very negative and very vocal group of people took away his passion and wanted to compromise his vision. He chose instead to step away from his career only half-way through.
Also in this past year, I had been working for a church under the title of "Membership Coordinator" but really doing a job which encompassed many aspects of community building. This was most definitely an example of "do what you love and the money will come," as I had begun doing a lot of volunteer work there before being offered a position of employment. This community had transformed my own life for the better in the previous three years by embodying a spirit of Christ-like love. Then, I watched from the sidelines in horror and despair as another very negative, hurting and hurtful group of six people destroyed the life and ministry of their leader, all in the name of doing good. I did the things that I could along the way to attempt to change or stop the snowballing process, but I did not have the power to alter the course of their actions. Now I can only reflect and attempt to learn something valuable from what transpired. My husband was discussing the two parallel situations with one of his current co-workers the other day, to which his co-worker replied, 'the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians supposedly know better, but act poorly towards their fellow man anyway.' The sad thing is the truth in that statement. Because I have experienced them at their best, belonging to a community of faith has long been a part of my identity, but at times I have been ashamed for the association.
If men would consider not so much where they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling in the world. - Joseph Addison
The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt. -- Frederick Buechner
In her blog post cited above Lilian Calles Barger communicated, "The ability to just get up and leave, or to determine the course of their lives, is one few women in the world know." I realize that to have that ability and not take advantage of it would be criminal as I am blessed with living in a nation of relative freedom. The questions I often ask myself when deciding to take leave of a community are 1. Would I any longer invite and encourage another person to become a part of this community? We often tolerate much more in the way of bad behavior ourselves than we are willing to expose others to. and 2. Can I support the message about what it means to be human that the behavior of this community is sending to it's young people or simply the next generation in general? Children are sponges. When the answer to one of those questions comes up "No," I begin a process of serious evaluation. When I get the second "No," I make plans to disengage and leave.
The difficulty in working with and for communities of people is the ability to keep one's sanity by knowing what one has the ability to change and what one does not. The other difficulty lies in not becoming jaded or callused by the inherent sinful nature of humanity and maintaining a knowledge that good will ultimately prevail over evil. Then, having the ability move onward to find the good.
But the life that no longer trusts another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community in not a human life any longer. - Martha Nussbaum
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers. - Galatians 6:9-10
My mind wanders now to the stories of community from classic literature that most of my generation of Americans were required to read in their public school junior high or high school English courses. Most of them are stories of communities gone bad. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Nathaniel Hawthorn's The Scarlet Letter, and many, many others. I have to wonder did we as a society (or at least a generation) really embrace the lessons we were supposed to be learning from those great works? Isn't that at least one of the reasons they were chosen for "The Required Reading List?" I love the commonality of the human experience, somehow there is comfort in knowing that we are repeatedly experiencing the same the things throughout history, just each generation in our own way and thinking it's new to us. Sometimes though it is frustrating to be a part of it. In pondering these questions of community my husband was quick to recommend William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which he tells me embodies both the good and bad of community at it's best and worst, both shaping and destroying. The English teachers I had never put this one on my "To Read" list, even though some of the others in my school did have it on theirs. Somehow it never made it up to the top of the 'Waiting to Be Read' list on my own either. Anxious to share it with me, he immediately went to our bookshelves to retrieve his copy and now it sits on my bedside table awaiting my reading.
My husband is also a huge fan of Stephen King's work so needless to say over the Thanksgiving holiday we were at the theater watching The Mist. I am just not a big fan of the horror genre of literature as I can find enough "horrors" in everyday situations without looking too terribly long and hard, but I was game for the experience and actually enjoyed it. If you take away the mist itself and the horrifying creatures that come with it, it too is really just a case study of community and how bodies of people react within crisis situations. I highly recommend watching it from that analytical perspective, if nothing else.
We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something. - Sandra Day O'Connor
An African proverb says, "It takes a village to raise a child." I have to close with one final thought that has been weighing on my heart. It is the story of thirteen year-old Megan Meier who committed suicide in October 2006, but whose story has recently been brought into the media spotlights again. In a nut shell (or my best attempts at synopsis), Meagan was a fairly typical teenage girl who had a falling out with her friends from down the street. As a result she said some hurtful things about those friends to others at school. Her friends then ostracized her. She went on My Space and met a supposed 16-year old home schooled boy from the same town and developed a growing friendship with him, both her parents were well aware of the friendship. However, it was not really a 16-year old boy, as she had thought, that she was corresponding with, but rather the mothers (Yes - not children, but adult women, mothers) of some of her former friends. The women, obviously not emotionally mature themselves, made up the fictitious boy to "teach Megan a lesson." After the 'two' became close friends, the boy then started to turn on Megan saying hurtful things to her and he began to spread rumors and say bad things about her to all of her other school mates and friends online. 'He' destroyed her self image so much that she hung herself.
Now here's the really sad part-- others in the community, her friends, people who lived on her street and went to her school all knew about the situation with the fictitious boy through the rumor and gossip mill and no one attempted to stop the adult women from behaving like school children. No one befriended the girl in her time of greatest need. The police of the community said that no crime had been committed, no laws had been broken, therefore there was nothing they could do in the situation. You can learn more about this story here on CNN or here on ABC News.
It leaves me speechless. Communities behaving badly. Again.
Children Learn What They Live - by Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.
If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security,
they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness,
they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.
What are our communities teaching their children?
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