Waking up beloved community

March 2, 2012 By

Last night in Vancouver listening to Le Vent du Nord, a terrific traditional band from Quebec. They put on one of the best live shows I have seen in a long time with outstanding musicianship combined with incredible energy. Listening to them and watching people dancing I had a deep experience of why we humans need art. It brings us into a joyful relationship which each other that we seem built to need – a kind of belonging that transcends each of our individual reservations, a sort of shared ecstasy. The cynic might say that such an attitude is decadent in a world of suffering, but I think it is clear that without these experiences of ourselves as joyful collectives, the serious work of living in our time is compromised by our own personal and private fears.

Lately I have been working with mainline Protestant churches and Christian communities a lot and I have appreciated being able to bring deep cultural and spiritual stories to our work together. The times they are all in are times n which the traditional forms of Church are dying and the new forms havent yet arrived. And while the leaders i have been with welcome the shift, many congregations are in grieving about the loss of an old way of doing things,

Last weekend in Atlanta, the group I was with picked the story of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones to explore together. In that story, Ezekiel, who is a shaman, is carried into the spirit world where is comes across a valley of bones. Turns out that these are the bones of an army and God says to him “can these bones live?” Ezekiel does what all good shamans do when confronted with the awesome power of mystery and gives up any pretense of knowing the outcome. So together, God gives Ezekiel instructions and wakes up an army.

The armies of the old testament stories have always troubled me, because they are forever slaughtering and committing genocide because of God’s commands. But read as an allegory, suddenly this stuff becomes very powerful. For example, most spiritual paths have you confronting archetypal enemies on your pathway, such as greed or anger or the ego. To achieve enlightenment, to get to the promised land, means overcoming these enemies. And an army then seen in this context is a group of people that are greater than any one person’s fear.

So here is Ezekiel in the valley into which an army has been led and slaughtered, and he is being engaged in the work of waking up an army. Why? Well, once they have been woken up, God tells Ezekiel that they can go home. Home is the promised land, a place of freedom and kindness and relaxation and fearlessness. Coming home to oneself, finding home as a community.

To illustrate, another story I heard yesterday. One of the congregations I have been working with has been waking up to themselves in the work we have been doing together. When a group of people wakes up like that one has, all the dust and cobwebs come off them, and all of their beauty and warts are revealed. While we have designed and implemented many little projects in the Church, we have also awoken a little power struggle over a small but important issue. Typical of these kinds of issues, a small group has dug its heels in and doesn’t see its impact or connection to the larger community. Last night they all met and with some deliberate hosting, quickly discovered a common consensus on moving forward, one which I am led to believe takes each person outside of themselves and into a common centre of action.

In short, they had a different experience of themselves and each other, an experience that awakens the centre that Le Vent du Nord awakened last night. It is an experience that Christians can understand fully from their traditional teachings – Jesus constantly talks about love at the centre of the work of the world, and that community is the experience we are after. In the best forms of Christianity – including the form in which I was brought up! – the spiritual path is one of discovering kindness and a shared centre. From that place, transformation of community, family, organizations, and the world can be experienced and pursued. The hard work of dealing with power is made more human by acting from love and the beautiful work of cultivating relationship is put us to use by transforming power.

Last week I took an afternoon in Atlanta and went to visit Martin Luther King Jr’s Church where love and power awoke together in what King called “beloved community.”. These past months and years, I realize that this is what I am working for everywhere – in First Nations, organizations, communities, companies, churches and elsewhere. The beloved community draws us back home to our own humble humanity. It tempers the world’s harsh edges and it enables powerful structures to create beautiful outcomes.

And that experience is worth waking up for. Even an army.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, Being, CoHo, Collaboration, Community, Facilitation, Invitation, Leadership, Music, Practice Tagged With:

The principle of non-contradiction

October 17, 2011 By

Lawrence Lessig has noticed a very important practice that is emerging from the #occupy movement. It is the principle and the practice of non-contradiction:

In this movement, we need a similar strategy. Of course a commitment to non-violence. But also a commitment to non-contradiction: We need to build and define this movement not by contradicting the loudest and clearest anger on the Right, but instead, by finding the common ground in our demands for reform.

This is a a very useful contribution to the tools that are emerging from the #occupy movement. It is edgy because in traditional social activism you are defined by what you stand against, and opposing things is the means to ending them.

But one of the implications of “we are the 99%” is that no one is more 99% than anyone else. That is a big tent, and it is powerful as long as we can practice true diversity within it. This is a massive challenge. The 99% contains every kind of person, friend and ally and loathsome enemy. That is the nature of a huge complex human community. So practicing non-contradiction is like practicing non-violence in that it requires us to be in relationship with those we do not like.

Even though I practice non violence as much as I can I bet there is a limit to that. My job as a peaceful human being is to stretch myself beyond my own limits in practicing peace. Sometimes non-violence gets tagged as “compliance” but it isn’t that really. It is a commitment to a new world and a new way of being.

It is similar with non-contradiction. There are things in the world that probably need contradicting, and I am sure there are limits to this principle in my own practice and capabilities. But for this movement, and for this new world, we need conversational space and space is opened by engagement and being non-contradictory. If you believe that we truly interdependent, then we have to work to see that one person’s racism is my problem too. That I participate in the conditions that perpetuate those things that I would otherwise stand in contradiction to.

Let’s track this modality. Election seasons, protests and events can all benefit from this practice. It is a high calling to call yourself a practitioner of non-contradiction, but is it essential to a world of interconnection, interdependence and mutual benefit.

Filed Under: Art of Hosting, BC, CoHo, Collaboration, Conversation, Facilitation, Leadership, Practice Tagged With:

Insights on shifting systems

September 27, 2010 By

Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton.  We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.

Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems.  We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.

For me, lots of good insights are coming up.  A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:

  1. The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW.  How can we deliver services differently?  How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate?  How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us?  These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up.  Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
  2. New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place.  But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old.  Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies.  While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old.  Ignoring power is naive.
  3. A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.

Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur.  That alone is not innovation.  The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level.  The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families.  Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues.  Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.

Filed Under: BC, CoHo, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, emergence, Facilitation, Leadership, Organization Tagged With: