Remembering Community

God is...

Having spent much of this past week with just my dog and daughter’s cat for company my thoughts have turned to community and the three days I spent earlier this month on retreat with other women seekers where we experienced compassion for one another and became a healing community.  In the preface to Matthew Fox’s book, “A Spirituality Named Compassion,” he writes: Compassion is not an abstraction, but an entry into our own and others’ pain.  And joy as well. … Compassion is not merely a human energy; it is integral to the universe.  ...Compassion is a mystery. …our very essence, the very best of ourselves is to practice compassion.  … Compassion is important to wounded and oppressed peoples, and to the survival of our planet.    

When I struggled with my aging parent’s care needs, the compassion of others who cared sustained me.  My pain touched others as well.  In my memoir, “God Never Hurries,” I recount words I spoke at a church reform convention’s small breakout group titled “Patriarchy to Partnership.”  I wrote:  I felt empathy for a man in that session who was struggling to understand complicity.  In response to his frustrated disbelief that we all hold some responsibility for abusive patriarchy, I said, ‘My father is a tyrant.  I suffered most of my life under his tyranny until God showed me my complicity and I started standing up to him.  I am now the only one in the family who stands up to him.  My father is still a tyrant, but I am no longer his subject.’  After I spoke those words I felt a new level of acceptance and deeper change taking hold in me.  Applause from the group surely helped along with some hugs at session’s end, but most affirming were words from one woman who said, “You really helped me.”

During that most difficult time in my life I never met some of the people in my helping community but only spoke with them on long distance phone calls.  The following is from my memoir:  Outside of alerting social services agencies that my parents now had no care, and my mother could be in serious jeopardy, there was precious little I could do except trust God had a plan and accept whatever happens, happens.  Pouring my heart out to these professionals over the past two years had not been in vain.  Now the greatest help they gave me were their respectful long distance voices.

What if the next time we are “Wherever two or more are gathered together…” we look for the mystery within us that is named Compassion, and respond to one another with respectful voices.

Disasters We Create

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When I was struggling with agonizing questions and problems surrounding my aging parents care needs I had a heightened awareness to everything around me.  I suspect that was because I felt my life was at stake.  Within that awareness, comfort and answers came to me through everyday experiences.  I found much relief in the natural world, but I also found it in a variety of other ways such as a look, a word or phrase, and often from a National Public Radio program.  One such NPR program was a sociologist’s analysis of the Challenger Disaster.  I summarized the high points of that program for me in my memoir as follows:

Events leading to the tragedy showed how historical decisions created a layered inflexible bureaucracy that compromised the integrity of the original mission.  Everyone got all tangled up in the rules.  Production concerns created debate between engineers and top managers, and engineers were not involved in policy and production decisions.  Intuition and common sense were disallowed (just look out the window and see the ice); they thought pressure would force O rings in place.  Push mute button on a conference call between managers and engineers for an aside managerial conference.  The pilot was not part of the launch decision.  And point the finger of blame away from yourself. 

That analysis was a great metaphor for the problems I had with my father over my mother’s care and also for the difficulty I was experiencing with my church.  What if we used the Challenger analysis as a template showing us what not to do?  Would respectful dialogue been seen as essential in all endeavors?  Would women have half the voice and participation in what affects their lives?  Could common sense rule and simplify life?  Would we be able to look at ourselves and see where our complicity lay?