Relationship and community - indigenous and ancient wisdom

Now couldn't that be what we all need in the world today?

I spotted this in the Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery, spread over two levels, in the South Australian Museum Adelaide North Terrace. This is said to be the most comprehensive Aboriginal Cultural Gallery in the world, and I found it a wonderfully fascinating experience.

I explore the issue of relationship and indeed relatedness in the context of community in my book Healing This Wounded Earth, devoting a whole chapter to this very important healing influence...explaining why it is so important and what we can do to promote real healing community.

So often I find evidence that the world's indigenous tribes carry much wisdom that we would do well to heed. We ignore the ancient wisdoms at our peril. We may think we know best but we surely do not. 
And by one of those happy coincidences which are surely meant to happen, I just heard news of "The  Global Indigenous Wisdom Summit being organised by the Shift Network. Here is a free online gathering of some of the best the world can offer of indigenous wisdom - running from 18th to 20th November 2014. Please follow the link to see what will be covered and to sign up if you are interested.

“No one knows what the “big society” is, say MPs

I just cannot help feeling people are being naïve about UK Prime Minister Cameron’s “The Big Society.” I think I call it Real Community, and that is a term more readily understood across the world.
“No one knows what the “big society” is, say MPs.” That is the headline in today’s newspaper.

In the same paper I read that “Paris bans beggars from top tourist and shopping spots,” as these vagrants upset and offend the shoppers. The poor and homeless begging in shop doorways and at entrances to the metro or underground whether in Paris or London are not part of a “big society.”And the only offence we should feel is that in 21st Century Europe there is any need at all for begging.
Kids roaming the streets out of boredom, getting involved in gangs and drugs; that’s not part of a “big society.” Over 1 million unemployed youngsters in the UK; that’s not “big society.” The filth and litter all over our streets; that’s not part of a “big society.” The elderly who are lonely and isolated at home, or abused and bullied in care homes; that’s not “big society.” The young family struggling to bring up their disabled children on insufficient income who don’t even know their neighbors, who wouldn’t know where they could knock on a door to get help or support in an emergency. The rogues stealing metal plaques from gravestones and war memorials because scrap metal dealers will pay good prices now for them; that most certainly is not “big society.”
Perhaps it is easier to say what a “big society” is NOT than what it is.

The people selling the Big Issue on the streets – now that IS part of a bigger society! At least they are aspiring for a better life and doing something about it. But they receive support, both from the Big Issue operation itself, and from those of us who stop and talk to them, get to know them, buy their magazine (fantastic value and cheaper than that hyper- caloried drink you have just bought), even on occasions buy them a hot drink (OK call me a softie). But little things like that, being nice to other people, helping them on their way, all help to make the world a little bit better and ARE one step towards a “big society”.

Real community starts in the streets where we live. It starts with our own families, with our neighbors and friends, and extends to friends at work, in our church, in our club or society. But it should never ever exclude others around us who share our “space.” We are all human beings, with the same needs and vulnerabilities, and even finding just a little time to help others is time very well spent in the huge scheme of things.
Of course we cannot personally solve all the seamier problems of our broken society. We will sometimes need help and support from local and national government, and from other agencies, whether this comes through regulation or from practical resources. Of course we cannot solve housing problems on our own, for example, or the gangs on “sink” estates. But Gandhi did say: “YOU must be the change you want to see in the world.” And for that change to come about we all have to start small. Start in our own back yard. And that way we WILL start to build a “Big Society.”

Jonathan Sacks wrote somewhere that  

‘A community is where they know your name and where they miss you if you are not there [Sacks’ italics] Community is society with a human face.’ 

In other words, Big Society.

Treasures of Heaven - and the Education of our Children

What first struck me as I entered the Great Court was the huge crowd of pilgrims, noisy and colourful, jostling into each other, gossiping, carrying bundles of clothes, food, drink; the barest essentials for a long journey on foot. They were on a pilgrim trail, taking in the important Christian pilgrim sites in Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Cologne and Canterbury before making for the final destination of Jerusalem. One was even seen to be uttering that well known children’s travel mantra: “When shall we be there!” Yes, you have guessed, these were not real people, but were paper people, being cut out and coloured by children as one of the many great activities laid on for them in the school holidays by the British Museum, in London.
We had gone to the Museum to see the current exhibition on “Treasures of heaven: Saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe.” And it was wonderful! If you are anywhere near London this side of 9 October do go and see it.
“Relics featured in the exhibition include three thorns thought to be from the Crown of Thorns, fragments of the True Cross, the foot of St Blaise, the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, the hair of St John the Evangelist, and the Mandylion of Edessa (one of the earliest known likenesses of Jesus).” Some of the reliquaries made by skilled craftsmen to house such religious relics were incredibly ornate and beautifully crafted, from the finest materials. And these would often attract vast numbers of pilgrims hoping to be miraculously cured or absolved from sin.
Such pilgrimages were central to medieval life; hence the children’s contributions in the Great Court.

But what saddened me was the realization that all these children, obviously having such fun, were privileged to be there, with their parents and guardians who recognize the value of such experiences for their youngsters, as part of their education for life. As with many of our great museums and art galleries, entrance is free, (although a donation is appreciated) and so in theory these spaces are available to all. But sadly many children are never given the opportunity to enjoy these facilities; are denied access to their heritage, their culture. Even sadder, the number of youngsters in the museum on any one day is far exceeded by those being driven to the many pre-packaged bogus “experiences” up and down the country – you know what I mean - that offer seemingly non-stop “fun” and over inflated prices; for what purpose? Yes children deserve to have fun - but let's be constructive about at least some of that fun!

Because I believe that an understanding of our history, our heritage, our culture, and the influence of faith in our past is all part of the essential education of our children. And it would seem that at the moment schools simply do not provide such valuable experiences, in the time available to them in their curriculum, and shackled as they are by league tables etc.
I was alarmed to read that apparently formal schooling contributes at most 10-20% of what makes a “good professional person” effective.* The best learning is informal, outside the school day, from peers, family, reading, travel etc. And for many children this extracurricular activity is poor, to say the least. It is clearly important that we consider what is going on in our schools. Because the quality of the education offered has a significant impact on how our children and youth will approach and address the global crises in their lives. Will they be able to see the overall picture or be shackled by knowledge fragmentation; will they act out of self-interest or learn to see the wider social dimension of their actions? How do we teach them how to engage responsibly with their communities, to behave as decent citizens? How can we improve the educational experience for ALL our children? This question seems particularly pertinent as I listen to the debates rolling on and on about the causes of the current unrest in our English cities and towns.

*From an essay by Ian Cunningham, at chapter 25 of A New Renaissance: Transforming Science, Spirit and Society

Kick a Puppy, get a Mean Dog. More on looting and rioting

"Kick a puppy and you get a mean dog," the expression goes. Sure. What we need more than anything else in the aftermath of these latest lootings and riots on the streets of English cities is to ask ourselves why the puppies feel kicked - why they are growing up to be mean dogs.
And, somewhat controversially, David Cameron UK Prime Minister has now asked for advice from Bill Bratton former head of the New York Police Department. In Bratton's first two years at that post, reports of serious crime dropped 27%. And Mr Bratton is no stranger to UK policing, having teamed up with British officers at other times over the past 20 years.
According to Sky News, "In 2009, the Queen awarded him the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Mr Bratton, who is now a security expert, left the Los Angeles police force in 2009 after significantly lowering the crime rate." So he clearly has wide ranging and valuable experience. Yes our UK police are wonderful, but what is wrong with having the humility to also ask others for advice.

In his ‘Call to Renewal’ Keynote Address to a Sojourners conference in 2006, Barack Obama reminded the audience ‘the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness - in the imperfections of man. Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require changes in hearts and minds.’

Simone Weil once said: ‘A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.’ Or as Barack Obama has described this in our twenty first century world, in an address to a Sojourners conference in 2006: ‘When a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality; there's a hole in that young man's heart; a hole that government programs alone cannot fix.’

So we need to dig deep into all our resources to try to understand this current crisis.

For anyone who wants to explore this further, and wants to make their own contribution to help society heal what is wrong at its roots, I now unashamedly recommend my own book - the result of much research into this and other contemporary world issues. There is a whole chapter on Community, how it is formed and why it becomes broken, how we are failing our youth, the need for education and healing, etc. all brought together with the wisdom of renowned thinkers and leaders past and present and with lots of suggested resources for further action on both sides of The Pond.

‘There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,’ wrote Henry David Thoreau. We all have to start striking at those roots.

The Wounded Healer in the Community?

“In and through community lies the salvation of the world.” M S Peck













This is an expansion of a blog on community I published not so long ago. It is such an important subject for today's world.
M. Scott Peck became well known in the 1970s and 1980s for his best selling books on personal spiritual growth. He is probably best remembered for The Road Less Traveled and Further Along the Road Less Traveled. He also made a study of community building and its role in achieving world peace, and he wrote this up for the popular market in his book The Different Drum. His books continue to sell well and are just as relevant in today’s world.
In his book Peck defined the basic community as “a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.”This definition emphasizes the need for vulnerability amongst the members of a community. It sets up the conditions for healing and wholeness in an atmosphere of mutual trust.
A participant in one of M Scott Peck’s community building workshops observed that ‘the greatest gift we can give each other is our own woundedness.’ Only the wounded, says Peck, can heal community.This story is obviously quite old, but some ideas are timeless, hence we talk of the need in today's world for Ancient Wisdom.
Real honesty and openness, two of his community-making principles, require us to be vulnerable, to have a willingness to be wounded. In The Different Drum, he writes at length on vulnerability in community building. The danger of invulnerability, he warns, of acting as a ‘cool cat,’ is that psychological defences are put up between the two parties, and the relationship between them becomes nothing more than ‘ two empty tanks bumping against each other in the night.’ He talks of a ‘peace through weakness’ strategy to build community, at all levels. ‘For the reality is that …. there can be no community without vulnerability; and there can be no peace – ultimately no life – without community.’ And this involves taking the risk of showing our vulnerability.
Alastair McIntosh is a Scottish human ecologist, writer and campaigner. If “humankind is to have any hope of changing the world,” he writes in his wonderful book Soil and Soul, “we must constantly work to strengthen community.”We will achieve this only by “coming alive to community with one another, with the place where we live, and with soul.” This, he says, recognizes “a Celtic truth about identity, which is actually a deep human truth: a person belongs only inasmuch as they are willing to cherish and be cherished by a place and its peoples.”
A lovely thought.
The photo is of the Chestnut Festival in Nuns Valley in Madeira.It was raining, as we say, "cats and dogs" but the community spirit there was palpable - you could feel it in spite of the discomforts of the heaviest rain they had seen for years.

more about community

A participant in one of M Scott Peck’s community building workshops observed that ‘the greatest gift we can give each other is our own woundedness.’ Only the wounded, says Peck, can heal community.
Real honesty and openness, two of his community-making principles, require us to be vulnerable, to have a willingness to be wounded. In his book on community, The Different Drum, he writes at length on vulnerability in community building. The danger of invulnerability, he warns, of acting as a ‘cool cat,’ is that psychological defences are put up between the two parties, and the relationship between them becomes nothing more than ‘ two empty tanks bumping against each other in the night.’ He talks of a ‘peace through weakness’ strategy to build community, at all levels. ‘For the reality is that …. there can be no community without vulnerability; and there can be no peace – ultimately no life – without community.’ And this involves taking the risk of showing our vulnerability.

community

M Scott Peck warned: ‘We cannot make real communities happen, we cannot heal the mess we have made of the world…(without ourselves)… undergoing some kind of spiritual healing.’
In our semi-rural village, population c. 4000 and not far beyond the creeping urban sprawl that is Greater London, we have a thriving general store and post office. This store, together with the flourishing parish church at the bottom of the hill, forms the dynamic core of our community life. It is not Utopian, we have our problems of petty vandalism and graffiti, of speeding through the High Street, and the occasional more serious crime, but on the whole it is a good place to live.
But post offices are under threat as they become uneconomical to run. Emails, Internet banking and on-line shopping have no need for the post office. Even postage can now be bought on the Royal Mail web page and stamps printed directly onto envelope, labels or paper. These threats of closure always bring in their wake much anguished debate and protest. The fact is that local post offices and stores are not simply economic units and profit centres. They offer a place where people can meet and greet, gossip, find help and companionship, as well as buy the occasional stamp and greetings card. They are part of the soul of a healthy village and a community life. The good news is that there is a solution, a solution that many communities have already discovered when faced with closure of their own stores. A growing number of small and local shops and post offices that otherwise faced closure are now run very successfully by and for the people of those communities. What is more, such stores become a vibrant and vital part of the social network of those communities. I know; our store is one of them!

Community - Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century

I came in from the garden the other morning in time to hear the last few intriguing minutes of a discussion on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Host Jenni Murray and her guests were talking about gated roads and the importance of belonging to community and the current fear culture that seems so prevalent in our neighbourhoods.

On following up the programme on the Radio 4 website I found one of the guests to be Anna Minton, and discovered that she has written a book around this theme, Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city (Paperback Penguin Books - 25 Jun 2009)

This attracted my attention as a subject dear to my own heart.

If we sense that our boundaries are being threatened, it is a natural human reaction to feel insecure or suspicious. We are afraid that our identities may be lost. Fear can breed violence and aggression, which then becomes a real obstacle to any attempts at community building. And this applies as much to the inclusive faith group or the national culture as it does on the faceless and impersonal track housing or housing estate we have created, or in the inner cities.

When barriers are in any way dissolved, it is important to ensure that individual and group identities continue to be preserved and respected in their overall unity. The one great melting pot that we dreamed of in the “swinging sixties” where all differences would be watered down and identities lost will never work. And why should we want to bring all colors and cultures and faiths and backgrounds into one homogeneous mush anyway? We have to learn to celebrate all our differences of faith and creed and culture in a spirit of respect and understanding and indeed joy. Judaism has a set of principles known as Darkhei Shalom, meaning “how to live graciously with people whose beliefs and way of life are incompatible (with the Jewish faith). Despite profound differences, we must engage in common citizenship, contributing to the welfare of other communities as well as our own,” writes Jonathan Sacks in To Heal a Fractured World.

This needs real community. It needs community at all levels, local, national and international, if we are all to learn to live together in perfect harmony. “Beware above all of everything that isolates, that refuses to accept and that divides,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin warns. “Each along your own line, let your thought and action be ‘universal’ which is to say ‘total’. And tomorrow may be you will find to your surprise that all opposition has disappeared and you can love one another.” (Activation of Energy 1970 p.95)

We should perhaps remember that most of the war and conflict in the world today is defensive rather than aggressive. Much of the violence and pain we see around us has been interpreted in the context of Teilhard’s theories, as being the result of our failures to adapt and evolve alongside the move we have so rapidly made towards global convergence. This suffering has been likened to the pathological birth pangs of a new world order, a world in need of healing. Man has to learn, he says, not to give up security, which is psychologically impossible, but to trade in the old security of fences, boundaries, guns and bombs, for the new security of openness and trust in bonds of relationship, mutual support, brotherhood and love. And that means real community.

Of course the worth or otherwise of a visionary’s words can only be tested by the passage of time, but Teilhard’s visions seem to be attracting ever more followers as we struggle to understand our seemingly precarious future in this twenty first century.

Bonds of mutual support, brotherhood and love seem far removed from the gated private roads, the houses surrounded by overtly secure and impenetrable security gates, the intercom devices to gain entry. Such exclusiveness continues to isolate and divide. I believe strongly that it is misguided and harmful to achieving any real community. It removes us from being a part of the spirit and soul of a place.

We have the first responsibility to make change in our societies and communities. Governments with their laws and regulations can only provide the supportive framework within which we make these changes. Governments can fight the injustices of low minimum wages, non-existent healthcare for so many, lack of security in sickness and retirement, and the huge divide between the richest and the poorest of our society. They can make the tax codes which support the status of marriage and family, that either help parents stay at home with children or force them back into the workplace.

But most of all I believe we need spiritual politicians who are compassionate, indeed empathic to the needs of the populace. In fact we need spirituality, compassion, empathy, and good old-fashioned moral responsibility all round. And we need changes of heart and mind in us all.

And the picture? It is of the Chestnut Festival in the Nun's Valley in Madeira - during a tremendous rain storm which threatened to totally close down the event. But community spirit and neighbourliness prevailed against all the odds!

The Wounded Healer in the Community

A participant in one of M Scott Peck’s community building workshops observed that ‘the greatest gift we can give each other is our own woundedness.’ Only the wounded, says Peck, can heal community.
Real honesty and openness, two of his community-making principles, require us to be vulnerable, to have a willingness to be wounded. In his book on community, The Different Drum, he writes at length on vulnerability in community building. The danger of invulnerability, he warns, of acting as a ‘cool cat,’ is that psychological defences are put up between the two parties, and the relationship between them becomes nothing more than ‘ two empty tanks bumping against each other in the night.’ He talks of a ‘peace through weakness’ strategy to build community, at all levels. ‘For the reality is that …. there can be no community without vulnerability; and there can be no peace – ultimately no life – without community.’ And this involves taking the risk of showing our vulnerability.