Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper,
lover of leaving…
Where do we “belong”? To Whom? And what comes of
knowing that?
I lost the one place I considered “home” this past
year, and at about the same time, I watched a Netflix show called I Don’t
Feel at Home in this World Anymore. It was a dark comedy, sort of like my
life, and near the end a gospel song plays:
This World is not my home,
I can’t feel at home in this world
anymore.
I found myself singing it for days in my head. The
singer is anticipating Heaven and angels: The angels beckon me from Heaven’s
open door. And I fixed it up with Jesus a long, long time ago. The
theology was a bit off, but the emotion so real.
The existential angst it expresses suits well this
disorienting, disturbing time in our history. “Losing” home just underscored my
sadness.
For me, the sale of our family home in rural Southern
New Jersey was devastating. I should have expected it, but I was deeply distressed
when it happened. It caused rifts in my family of origin that just exacerbated
the ones that already exist. The house is an 18th century farmhouse,
and to me, it was still "my dad" even though Dad had been gone for over twenty
years. His loves and passions were everywhere, from his shop (“man-shed”) connected
to the freestanding garage, to the screened in porch where I sat during
thunderstorms. Where I loved to sleep in summer. I still see him at the kitchen
stove, making baked apples or stew or pop-overs and beaten biscuits. How would
I go on without home?
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| Photos of the renovation! |
My Buddhist studies had already taught me about impermanence.
It’s the only thing we can count upon. I would have to change or let go of
my notion of home.
Last spring I broke conventional rules and sent a
letter to the new owners. I offered to share the dozens of old photos and
slides taken during our family’s 75 year stewardship of it. Cris, the new owner,
emailed me enthusiastically, and in July, I visited them. In 6 short months
they had completely redone the house and yard. I was astonished, and
disoriented! My dad’s shop was transformed in a she-shed, with a screened porch
added to it. The living room where we’d sat in the same chairs, staring at the
same painting, being lectured or scolded, was now a combination kitchen-family
room. The old kitchen was a laundry/office, and the former dining room, where
nothing had been moved for decades, was a TV room/parlor.
Seeing such an alteration in something I had counted
on for sixty years was a revolution in my heart and mind. It was a conversion. My
overall feeling was joy; I still felt grief, but I understood that a complete
upheaval was what had made it possible for this old place to survive and thrive. Had
I not been a student of Appreciative Inquiry, and Buddhist teachings, I may
have responded very differently. The feeling of disorientation expressed in “I
can’t feel at home in this world anymore” can be a lament, or an invitation to
an entirely new way of seeing and being.
Where Do We Belong? NATURE is one answer.
Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term
‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast
array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic. As he proved, fractal
patterns were often found in nature’s roughness—in clouds, coastlines, plant
leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering
of galaxies.
“Pollock painted nature’s fractals 25 years ahead
of their scientific discovery!” He published the finding in the
journal Nature in
1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics
As it turns out, chaos is one
necessary stage in the activities of the Universe, and consequently in our
organizations and in our own selves. What we once called depression or the “dark
night of the Soul,” besides being problematic for equating darkness with
negativity, can be what opens one human or one organization to order, beauty,
and growth.
This is why nature is soothing
and why people need more nature and less Euclidean structures. It is why we
feel connected, why we feel we “belong,” why we feel at home in Nature. We are.
“It is ironic that in
the midst of this proliferation of specialty islands, we live surrounded by
communities that know how to connect to others through their diversity,
communities that succeed in creating sustainable relationships over long
periods of time. These communities are the webs of relationships called
ecosystems."
All of our attempts to organize ourselves out of chaos are
ultimately fruitless. But embracing the chaos that necessarily emerges when
humans come together is a key to a new way of understanding order.
Margaret
Wheatley tells us that humans act out of two paradoxical needs: the need to
belong and the need for self-expression. Too often, we sacrifice one for
another. It can result in stifling conformity or isolation.
The
price that communities pay for this conformity is exhausting and, for its
members, it is literally deadly. Life requires the honoring of its two great
needs, not one. In seeking to be a community member, we cannot truly abandon
our need for self-expression
Particularly
in the West, and in response to this too-demanding price of belonging, we move
toward isolationism in order to defend our individual freedom. We choose a life
lived alone in order for it to be our life. We give up the meaningful
life that can only be discovered in relationship with others for a meaningless
life that at least we think is ours. An African proverb says "Alone, I
have seen many marvelous things, none of which are true."
(For much more on & by Wheatley, click here.
(For much more on & by Wheatley, click here.
The core
of AI is that systems are self-organizing. We can observe this in
Nature, and in places where human nature is allowed to flourish. Think of the
way humans responded after Katrina, Sandy, Paradise. Self-organization trumped
official efforts which compounded the tragedies. Our religious organizations
should be examples of this.
The
reasons they are not is that they try to hard to impose order. They become cesspools
of conformity and/or conflict at worst and at best, islands of specialization,
rather than islands of sanity.
One of
the biggest tragedies of organizations is that, in their efforts to “grow, be
successful, be relevant” they fail to see that they are not welcoming to those
who may join us or whom we may help.
Come, Come
whoever you are.
The beauty of this “new”
science and new way of understanding organizations is that once we begin to
accept our own belonging in the scheme of things and stop trying to
organize our way out of chaos, we begin to see the “other” as equally a part of
the universe, as equally belonging (or maybe even more at home) as we.
We become open to the “other.”
Immigrants, persons of color, trans and gender non-conforming persons, old
people, mentally “ill” people, even Conservatives.
We see the world and
our relationships in an I/thou lens rather than an I/it. (Buber)
What can we do now? What
ought we do?
Love yourself.
Love others.
Love the world.
This is the question of
sustainability.
Now, I hope you will
leap with me from science and fractals to the questions of small farms, small
places, and small churches. The key word is sustainability. If the past
century has proven anything, it is that bigger is not better. In fact it is the
proliferation of bigness that has created a society that can neglect, delude
and profit from the destruction of the planet.
Wendell Berry has always
made this argument; it has fallen mostly on closed ears as regards the people
of power, influence, and money. But it has planted seeds in places and people
everywhere.
The problem
of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility
cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—should turn continuously in
place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to
happen in the stewardship of humans, there must be a cultural cycle, in harmony
with the fertility cycle, also continuously turning in place. The cultural
cycle is an unending conversation between old people and young people, assuring
the survival of local memory, which has, as long as it remains local, the
greatest practical urgency and value. This is what is meant, and is all that is
meant, by “sustainability.” The fertility cycle turns by the law of nature. The
cultural cycle turns on affection.
(from the Jefferson Lecture, 2012)
When Berry writes “affection,”
he means not only emotion but its effects: small places, families, businesses,
stories, music, human relationships that are genuine. All of those are actions
you can still do. Each of those is a form of resistance.
I’ve been to his
Baptist church in rural Henry County. He also means small churches.
Small churches matter
for the same reason small farms, local food, and small communities matter.
My internship
advisor spoke at my Ordination almost 25 years ago. He had composed a sermon
titled, The Dream of the Lost Sermon. Interestingly, on his way from
Rockville to the small church in VA that ordained me, he had a flat tire and
rushed in moments before he was to preach. The dream pretty nearly became a reality,
his sermon illustration all too real! But the sermon was a beautiful expression
of how we can trust in ministry that we will have the right thing to say, know
what to do. Later he told me how much he enjoyed his time there: “I was wrong
in my thinking about small congregations. They aren’t small people; they’re
just small churches.”
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| UU Church of the Shenandoah Valley, 1993 |
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| My brother Jeffrey, cousins Kurt and Taryn, me, twin Sister Suzanne & a neighbor c. 1958 in our living room |
Berry writes:
No doubt
there always will be some people willing to do anything at all that is
economically or technologically possible, who look upon the world and its creatures
without affection and therefore as exploitable without limit. Against that
limitlessness, in which we foresee assuredly our ruin, we have only our ancient
effort to define ourselves as human and humane.
Of the
land-community much has been consumed, much has been wasted, almost nothing has
flourished.
But this has
not been inevitable. We do not have to live as if we are alone.
I belong to KY, to my
farm Innisfree, Nashville for this time, to the world of birds and trees and water,
to people, my family, my children, and now to you. I belong to the forces that
have shaped this old world, mystery and wonder and curiosity. Where do you
belong? To whom? And what will you do once you realize that is your life?
House around 1900.
House late 1800s
