Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
June 2, 2002
The Price of Community
It will probably not come as astonishing information to anyone here that I am an oldest child. One of the deepest and most formative fantasies of my early years was the wish to be able to protect my little sister and brother from the arbitrary pain of the world. Together in our own childish fashion, we coped with difficult family dynamics, and helped each other to arrive at adulthood as much in one piece as possible. Today, each of them is a person I like, respect, and enjoy; someone I know that I could count on to give me anything they had that I truly needed. All this is true, and yet, when we were young, we were impossible to each other. We bickered regularly - especially if adults were present, but on our own if we had to. As the oldest, I complained that both Bonnie and Jimmy got to do things younger than I had, because I had paved the way. Jimmy complained that he never got to do any of the things his two older sisters did. Bonnie complained because she was always in the middle and ignored. We competed for the window seats in the station wagon; we protested the inequity of the chores we were assigned, the amount of our allowances, whose room was more of a mess than whose. We made fun of each other, tried to out-do each other, whined about each other. We were entirely typical siblings. I am confident that had anything happened to one of us, the others would have been inconsolable, but we had no concept of such a possibility in our safe, suburban, middle class American world. Our being as a family was a given, a connection that we had no power to sunder, and no responsibility to maintain.
These memories come to mind when I contemplate the notion of human kinship, or as the language of my childhood church had it, brotherhood. There must be some other way that most people felt about their brothers, I would think as we sang those hymns in our UU church when I was growing up, for I was quite convinced that the world would not necessarily be a better place, nor would the adults be likely to approve, if everybody treated everybody else the way Jimmy and I treated each other most of the time. Nor did I know of any other sibling pairs among my own acquaintance whose relationship was significantly different from ours. The grown up notion of brotherhood, I decided, must be a very different thing. Today, I wonder. Today, as so much of the world stands poised upon the brink of fratricidal chaos - India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, with the memories of Kandahar, Kosovo, Rwanda like an ominous litany in our ears - what comes to mind is an image of nastily squabbling siblings, and my mother's voice from the next room, admonishing, "You two cut it out, before someone really gets hurt!" I suspect that the US would like to see itself in this scenario as the macho teenage brother who walks into the room, boxes both participants' ears, and commands "Stop annoying your mother!" - loftily ignoring the fact that he is perfectly capable of being drawn into the scuffle in his own behalf. I am inclined to think that we are at the point where brotherhood will no longer help us. If we are to survive as a human race on this globe, we are going to have to adopt the much more difficult and intentional disciplines of community. We are going to have to grow up.
Community is one of those over-used words that has had almost all the specific meaning chewed out of it, and so it may be worthwhile to say something about the way in which I intend to use it in the context of this morning. We often speak of 'the larger community' when we mean the geographic or civic environment in which a particular institution is located, and the word may also be used to designate a given group of people who share some characteristic, as in 'the Hispanic community' or 'the University community'. But I would like to use it, as it is often used in religious discourse, to refer to a particular kind of function within groups; a type of connection among participants that has certain identifiable qualities. A genuine community is a group of people who relate to each other in such a way that its members are recognized, affirmed and encouraged to grow as individuals, diversity is honored, and work gets done. What that work is may be trivial or profound; it may be as simple as playing bridge, or as significant as deciding government policy, but it requires that the members of the group cooperate and depend upon each other in order to accomplish their purpose.
It is a commonplace of the last several decades that the philosophy of rugged individualism has gotten us all into trouble. The vision of the independent hero, triumphing over the odds because of his strength, skill and determination, has made people in our culture isolated and overly competitive, when we really need to be willing to depend upon one another, to recognize our own imperfections and needs, and to build a common good. There is probably some truth to this view, but I'm not convinced that it is individualism that is entirely to blame for all our problems. Whatever else may have been said of the heroic individual, he was understood to be responsible for himself and the consequences of his actions; he didn't whine. Our current national and international culture of quarrelling siblings noticeably lacks that quality of maturity; all over the globe echoes the ubiquitous childhood complaint "He hit me first!", and our military and diplomatic crises have the flavor of dealing with schoolyard bullies.
The achievement of genuine community acts an antidote to both of these unfulfilling modes of relationship. It lets us off the isolating hook of perpetual individual heroism, and calls us to move beyond the self-absorbed pouting of sibling rivalry. That is why the price of community includes maturity. It is not that we all have to be seasoned sages in order to experience the gift of community, but I think we need to be headed towards greater maturity, and be prepared to learn and grow in that direction. Specifically, I think we need to develop the willingness and the ability to take our own behavior in groups and our impact on others as an object of reflection. This means having the ability to step back from our personal needs and agendas to get a perspective on how the group as a whole is functioning; is it working well? Is it stuck? Is it sad? Is it giddy? Is it avoiding something? Is it anxious, or in pain? And then, when we have assessed the spirit of the group, we need to be able to ask, what role am I playing in making or keeping the group this way? What is the impact on others of what I myself am doing? Am I telling a truth that no one else in the group can bear to tell? Am I being sad on behalf of the group, so that others don't have to recognize their pain? Am I changing the subject so that we don't have to deal with something that makes me especially anxious? Am I keeping us from moving forward in our work because I'm not getting my way in some decision? Do I need something that I haven't told the group I need? This capacity for self-awareness and reflection is the responsibility of every member in a genuine community. A skilled leader may be able to ask questions that help the community members reflect on and recognize the impacts of their participation, but no one leader is as insightful as the group itself in seeing the realities of its own behavior and their meanings.
In his book on the nature and building of communities, Scott Peck suggests that this capacity for reflective awareness can be facilitated by what he calls 'emptying'. We are so full of ourselves, he says - and it's true, we are; I am - so full of our plans and agendas, our opinions and beliefs, our expectations and grievances, that there is no room left for us to really see anything that is actually in the world in front of us. We are so full of ideas and projections that we cannot touch the earth beneath us, or hear the person before us, or discern the spirit of the group we are in. We must let it go, he says; we must set down our burdens and our conceits, empty ourselves at least a little in order to make room for community to function. There are a variety of ways to do this; Peck suggests that silence is one of the more effective. Our world and our lives are full of noise; how often to we actually cease the inner and outer chatter in order to come to a point of stillness?
One of the reasons that many people find the idea of stillness appealing, but never quite bring themselves to the practice of it, is that if we were to empty ourselves of the noise and the busy-ness, the anger and the confusion, we might find ourselves in touch with a seemingly enormous pool of unresolved grief. This is where the model of the rugged individualist really does do us all damage; it counsels a stoic acceptance of all the loss and pain that life may have handed us, to be stuffed away and never looked at, because if we were to confront it, it might altogether overwhelm us. But until we have looked this sadness in the face - and it is never as crushing as we imagine it to be - it is all but impossible for any of us to enter into genuine community, for we will inevitably be responding out of our fears rather than out of our hopes and convictions.
What might happen - oh, my friends, what might happen if the bruised and broken peoples of the Middle East could empty themselves of hatred and the lust for power and vengeance long enough to be still, and touch the wells of each others' unfathomable grief? What might happen if all the generals and all the suicide bombers and all the frightened little boys at the Taliban schools and all the exploitative priests and everyone, could be quiet long enough to let the sadness come, and walk through it, and not be afraid of what was inside themselves any more? Maybe the world might go a little bit sane. That's the word I'm using for it anyway; part of the price of community is sanity, the health and wholeness that comes from confronting the deepest wounds that shape us, and making peace with them. Who is it, in this squabbling family of nations, who actually reflects upon how the work of the world as a whole is progressing? What would it mean for some country to have the maturity to discern the spirit of the globe, and how its own role might be affecting that dynamic?
Community works when the people in it are helping each other to become mature and sane, and one more thing - humble. Humility in this context does not mean the inability to accept a compliment gracefully, or even to take legitimate pride in our accomplishments. Rather, it means the fundamental recognition of our individual limitedness; that no one of us can be wise enough or strong enough or gifted enough to be and do everything. Right down to the core of our existence as human beings, we need each other; we need each other because even people we don't like, and those who disagree with us and those who make us profoundly uncomfortable, have something to offer that the community we are trying to build needs. It is by learning to be humble that we become able to honor and embrace genuine diversity; not just to tolerate it with gritted teeth and the wish that it was otherwise, but to know assuredly that we would be impoverished without it.
This quality of humility serves to discourage us from trying to build community through creating common enemies or celebrating our collective superiority. These are ancient and ever-popular techniques to enable people to feel a sense of connection with each other, but they are ultimately destructive of our sanity, maturity, and humility, and thus of the community that can actually nurture lives and potentially redeem the world. Looking down upon those who are different, considering them to be by definition primitive or evil or silly, and not worth listening to, is another way of being so full of ourselves that there is no room for actual community to happen. None of us is immune to the lure of the feeling of shared superiority; when we find this happening, in ourselves or in others, it is time to stop, and empty out our preconceptions, so that we can connect with what really is in the world. It is time to remember, for instance, that being a humanist in itself is not any kind of accomplishment. It doesn't mean that we are smarter or more rational or more honest or superior in any way to people whose beliefs are different. It is nothing to brag about. On the other hand, if, because of our humanism, we are growing into kinder, more generous, more curious and vital, more authentic and joyous human beings, then we have something to be proud of. If, and only if, our humanist convictions help us to build community in our lives and in the world, and to become increasingly the kind of sane, mature, connected and humble people who can sustain community, only then have we any cause to point to our humanism and gloat.
For this is the place, right here, where we have the opportunity to do this significant work. We are doing a vitally necessary thing when we model the disciplines and the rewards of genuine community. Making ourselves sane, mature and humble helps to make the world be that way; and we know that it does not work to go about it the other way around, for we can never transform the world to sanity and maturity if we are not deeply engaged in transforming ourselves. As Scott Peck observes, this work has its difficult moments; the price of community is the willingness to encounter our irritation with others and our own unresolved grief, to hang in there through pain and boredom, to exercise our capacity for self-reflection and discernment in the service of the group's real needs. These are precisely the disciplines that brotherhood does not require, that my siblings and I had yet to learn in our bickering, that the nations of the world today seem not to know. It is a great pity, and a dangerous ignorance that they do not; our urgent work here is to build this community, and then, transformed and sustained by that experience, to go forth as leaders and builders and teachers of community to the world around us. Into this effort I welcome our new members; I hope that you are ready for the adventure, and for its price, because there is no time to lose.
The genetic and anthropological evidence suggests that we are, in fact, all brothers and sisters - descendants of a mere handful of primal parents, our family trees crossed and crossed again, inextricably interwoven - but that in itself will not save us. Maybe nothing will, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel yet. What could save us, finally, are the communities that we construct, in spite of our pain, our neediness, our incompleteness, in spite of being so full of ourselves sometimes that there is little room for anything else. Whether they are brief or long-standing, whether they are small and intimate or large and formal, whether they are intense or laid back, as long as we can embrace diversity, get some work done, and nurture each other into humility, sanity and growing maturity, communities like this are the best hope we have. It doesn't happen automatically, and it comes at a price that at times can feel like a sacrifice. But the truth is that we will never be whole alone; the evolution that shaped us into homo sapiens made us creatures of connection, whose destiny will be achieved together or not at all.
I owe a great deal to my brother and sister; they put up with a lot from me, and they taught me some things about how to be in relationship - they still do. But you are the ones, dearly beloved; you, my chosen covenant community, have given me the opportunity to unfold my fuller humanity with and among you. May it be so for those new friends who unite with us today; may it be so for a long time to come, for us all.