I had dinner with Hanns and Marlene Skoutajan tonight here in Ottawa. Hanns was the my minister at my church when I was a teenager and he was largely responsible for supporting my call which was at one time to join the United Church of Canada as a minister. He was also responsible for introducing me to church politics and structure such that I decided not to pursue my career for that employer.
Hanns and Marlene were a particular anamoly in my upper middle class neighbourhood, where they stood out as the most visible members of the New Democratic Party I knew. They, along with another mininster at our chruch, John Lawson, were my introduction to progressive politics and it is largely to them that I owe my political consciousness raising. Here’s an Op Ed he wrote last month for the Ottawa Citizen. on alternatives to appeasement. You can see that he is unwavering in his commitment to peace.
The name of our church was – wait for it – St. James-Bond United Church, so named because it was the result of a merger between St. James Presbyterian and Bond Street Congregationalist back in the early days of the United Church. The congregation itself folded up in 2005 and the building was torn down. At the corner of Avenue Road and Willowbank in Toronto there is still a great hole where this formative structure in my life once stood. As a gift to me tonight, Hanns gave me one of three bricks that his son saved from the old church. While it seems at first glance like a whimsical gift, I told Hanns that I would receive it as a deep symbol of the foundation that he gave me in life as a spiritual teacher and a teacher of activism in the world.
The most enduring teaching I have from Hanns comes from the benediction he used to give at the end of every service on Sunday. Hanns told me tonight that the benediction actually came from another very well known progressive United Church minister Cliff Elliott by way of Marlene who brought it home one Sunday. It goes like this:
Go into the world with a daring and a tender heart. The world is waiting for you. Go in peace and may all that you do be done because of love.
That continues to stand as a deep motto for me to this day.
An unnamed source told CNN that “she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party.”
And on Saturday, Politico’s Ben Smith wrote of an emerging “Palin insurgency,” quoting four unnamed Republican insiders who said Ms. Palin blames McCain handlers for her negative image and has “gone rogue.”
When she described herself as “a maverick” what did people think that meant?
At least you couldn’t accuse her of false advertising, for this is how a maverick really behaves.
I’ve spent most of the last week in some deep practice with my close friends Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Caitlin Frost and Bob Wing. The practice we were in this week is called “Warrior of the Heart” and it’s a combination of aikido, other martial arts and art of hosting, a blend of practices and disciplines that leads to great insight about oneself and helps develop the clarity of heart required to develop our own leadership and our personal capacity to host conversations that matter and to act powerfully for good in the world.
Warrior of the Heart evolved from Toke and Monica’s practice of aikido and sword work with Bob. Bob is a remarkable teacher and sensei of aikido and related samurai arts like iaido (the art of drawing the sword). What makes Bob’s teaching so powerful is that he uses the physical work of learning martial arts techniques to raise questions about oneself with incredible clarity and immediacy. To me this is the essence of martial arts practice, but it has been lost in many lineages in the pursuit of physical domination. O Sensei, Morehei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido (the way of harmonizing energy) wrote about his style as The Art of Peace: The Way of the Warrior is based on humanity, love and sincereity, the heart of martial valour is true bravery, wisdom, love and friendship. Emphasis on the physical aspects of warriorship is futile for the power of the body is always limited,
The fastest way I know to describe Warrior of the Heart is that it is a martial art that uses physical techniques to generate questions. We work with our hands, with wooden swords and with partners to learn something about the way we wield power, the way we relate to others, the way we address our fears. You cannot lie to yourself when your body is asked to execute a technique, Those that are afraid of their own power let the sword languish in their hands and they fail to engage. Those who are aggressive and overly ambitious find themselves losing their ground an d their power carries them away. Warrior of the Heart makes these things visible to oneself and then uses the Art of Hosting to tap the wisdom of the collective sensei, the group that is training together, to make sense of the questions that are raised.
And what questions they are! What does it mean to stand in your ground while you are filled with fear? How do you find confidence with your own power when you have no idea how much you actually wield? How do you handle attacks in your life? What does real action feel like, and how do I develop the clarity necessary to act wisely? What does it take to strike decisively in a way that opens space for invitation?
Whenever Toke and I work Art of Hosting trainings together we have worked with aikido and Warrior of the Heart. This week took the practice to another level for me though. Friends and neighbours from my home island joined us as we trained on the beach, in the forest and on mountain tops, and we committed to declaring a Warrior of the Heart dojo open on Bowen Island. It is a dojo that will always be open to anyone who wants to come and train a little together. We can gather anywhere for any amount of time and dedicate ourselves to learning a little together.
Bob gifted us with some bokkens and some support to begin training together, so anyone that wants to join us is welcome. As O Sensei wrote One does not need buildings, money, power or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train
Leave me a comment if you are interested in training together some day. Come visit on Bowen and we’ll take the swords out into the forest and practice a little. And let us know if you would like to be a part of a more intensive practice retreat. We’re planning one for this year and we’ll call the teachers together on Bowen for a few days of deep learning and practice.
A request to the blogosphere…
I am organizing a large conference and part of the work we are doing as we sense into the need and purpose of the gathering is to understand the people who will be coming. The conference is a gathering for a large national movement, and although we know many of the people who will be there, the purpose of the gathering may be different this year, necessitating different participants.
We have a core team designing the gathering and we’d like to use an effective, relatively quick low tech method to map out and overview of the network of people who would be best to include in the invitation and the conference design.
Any thoughts on an exercise for 15 people to accomplish that?
Thank you in advance, blogosphere.
This post from Jack is so useful and powerful that I’m quoting it whole here:
One of my seatmates from Phili to Boston last night was Portland’s city planner, a gentle giant of an AfricanAmerican man who spent the post-war Bosnian years doing amazing work in economic development and country re-building.
He lead the first public school integration in the country, a school where Serb, Croat and Muslim children went to school at the same building in 8 hour shifts in order to prevent any inter-contact. Taking key leaders and school administrators for a month in Geneva, he asked them to start by sequestering themselves in the three segregated groups and dream of the future they wanted for their own ethnic children.
When they assembled together to share the newsprint report outs, the dreams were identical. He then asked one of the participants to lead the group in a song all knew from before the wars and the group simply melted.
When they returned to the community, the community embraced the plan for two reasons. One was their faith in their leaders. The other was that when the children were asked to dream, they dreampt of a learning community of all being together.