Human to Human: Blog and Podcast

I am preparing for my 18 year-old son to leave in ten days. He will be living in another city for 2 years, doing missionary service. We will not have the same access to each other that we have had. Few phone calls. Limited email. No simple, “hey, what are you doing, want to go _____ together?” I’m supportive of the experience that he is about to have. I can also feel every heart string that I have being tugged.

The preparation is for both him and me. For him, trying to help him be grounded in what will be quite a life-style change. His days will be very full. Teaching. Studying. Taking care of himself. Learning to live with others. This is an initiatory time, which my good friend reminds me is a time for three things to happen, as path to more spiritual, emotional, and physical maturity. One is separation — from community (and into another). Yes, this really tugs. Two is an ordeal — challenge, the working of his soul, the circumstances that will likely throw him into a spin of identity. Tug again. Hope, hope, hope he will come through. Three is a return — to the community from which he left. A return as a changed being.

The experience is not uncommon. He’s not the first. Nor the last. Families go through this. People go through this. I’m just trying to help it be a bit more conscious.

In times like these, it is parting words that I find myself stretching to find and to share. And to hope help. It’s the heart of one person reaching out to the heart of another. Dad to son. “You’ll never be alone” comes to mind. “I’m proud of you” is another. “The journey is for others. The journey is also for you.” “Be kind to yourself; be kind to others.” “Remember the prayer that is 15 minutes of simple silence.” “Figure out the moment in front of you. Most of the time you don’t need to figure out anything more than that.”

It is times like these, when these bits of advice and remembering, are really close to the surface. When the tears well in eyes, and leak down my cheeks. Perhaps that is the gift of times like these — the words and emotions that pull us into the deepest parts of our relationships.

I’ve started reading a book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown. It’s one that I found recommended through Amazon after purchasing another book that I was looking for. I couldn’t help myself.

It’s that subtitle that catches my attention.

Here’s an opening chapter quote by Lin Yutang, a Chinese writer:

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

I’m looking forward to reading this book. No, I’m not on a hunt for utter efficiency. White space matters. But to be stirred by writings on the practice of essence, yes, this is something I’m looking forward too.

Last week I worked with Chris Corrigan, Caitlin Frost, Charles LaFond, Rae Denman, Mark Queirolo, and a really insightful team at the Saint John’s Cathedral in Denver, Colorado. Chris, Caitlin, and I are longtime friends and colleagues. I trust them for their big hearts and really mad skills. Charles, Rae, and Mark are from the Cathedral. They too, are big in heart and very skilled. They are leaders helping to invite a legitimacy of dreaming together — how crazy — as a parish and cathedral community. It is work that is on the front edge, impressively so.

Last week I both remembered something central to me, and learned something new from Chris and Caitlin about sense-making within the methodology of The World Cafe. The remembering is found in the title of this post. Chris spoke it, and a bit more. “You don’t build bridges for cars with stories, and you don’t build communities of people with data.”

It’s catchy, right. In this reference, Chris was pointing to the fact that if building a physical bridge, it’s not enough to say, “well, when I was a kid, I once used a plank to get across a creek — maybe that will work.” It may have been good as a kid but that’s not enough engineering for tons of cars. Similarly, when building community, like we were doing at Saint John’s, it’s not enough to report, “34% of our parish members attend only one Sunday service per month.” Community building requires sharing stories — what do you love about this place? When have you experienced deep caring here? — that go beyond analyzing data.

The “learned new” part for me was in what we did with the stories. We had people write a headline from the stories told at small table conversations on individual post-it notes. Then, mixed them up completely. Randomly. Each person took one quarter of the table post-its, whether they were theirs or not, and went to a new table. With new table mates, they shared the new stack of post-it insights, and were invited to make sense of them. “What do these tell us about Saint John’s?” The invitation was to create categories from the stories.

In this picture, that is what people are doing. Moving around hundreds of post-it notes to be in the fundamental act of sense-making together. It takes some intuition. It takes some letting go. It takes some, what-if questioning together.

In this instance, they came up with 6-8 categories. Good categories that have legs. And, no, the categorizing was not perfect. There could be some important things left out. No different group would organize it the exact same way. That such precision and replication is possible is a seductive myth that has long needed interrupting.

What the categories do, however, is give them areas to be further curious about. You see, part of their work as a cathedral (in this case, a profile committee) is to create a snapshot of who they are (so that they can invite prospective deans to join an ongoing, dynamic inquiry with them, over the course of 10 or so years). It also gives them areas to test — eventually they will put it into a document to see it it accurately represents enough of what they are. Not perfect again, but that isn’t the point. The profile committees work may be to point to some of the visible, but it is also to welcome someone to journey with them in the invisible.

The ability to make sense of experience is fundamental to any community. That means doing things imperfectly, recognizing the subjective in what many of us regard as the objective. That means paying attention to relationships together. That means letting go. Or, dare I say, relaxing ourselves into more stories, not as distraction, but as the way we get things done.

The same friend that sent me the quote from yesterday’s post also sent me the poem below. It is by Diane Ackerman, American essayist, poet, and naturalist.

Honoring life is a rather ongoing learning isn’t it. There’s the seemingly easier things — honoring the rising sun in the start of a day, the friend that does something nice for us during the day, the meal that we get to have together at the end of the day.

There’s also honoring the more challenging things — the sorrow from loss of loved one that bites in each quiet moment, the punishing exclusion created by someone’s bitterness or blame, the struggle of a group of people trying to wade through together what they can’t wade through alone, the simple annoyance of a fly buzzing round my head because I accidentally left the window open.

In the easy, honoring seems, well, easier to find. In the challenge, it often requires a stretch. In both the easy and the challenge, life, inside and outside of us, is unfolding. Not always, but often enough, grace appears in a way that let’s me glimpse this.

Enjoy this poem, a commitment to honoring life, called School Prayer.

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School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
— wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell — on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.