Back in 2001 I wrote a song about the end of summer here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island that contains the lines “The winds have turned southeast again/And the Sound is full of cloud.”
Today is that day, right on time. Blustery winds in the channel in front of my house, a steady blow in the tree tops and a sprinkling of rain. What has been a fairly normal summer is turning to a fairly typical autumn. What happens next is anyone guess, as an unusually strong El Niño is predicted to arrive in the next few months.
On the subject of turning, this morning as I was sitting in the spot pictured at the top of this post, I was reading an address by Joan Chichester from 2001 where she addressed the urgent condition of women in the Catholic Church. If you’re in mind for a dose of fierce prophetic voice this morning, this will raise your dander. And it’s twenty-five years old, and structurally speaking, nothing has changed.
It is true that theological debates are raging everywhere; but it is also true that everywhere the Holy Spirit is breaking through – as the Holy Spirit did in Rome in the 60’s. In Asia, Buddhist women are demanding ordination and the right to make the sacred mandalas. In India, women are beginning to do the sacred dances and light the sacred fires. In Judaism, women study Torah and now carry the scrolls and read the scriptures and lead the congregations. Only in the most backward, most legalistic, most primitive of cultures are women made invisible, made useless, made less than fully human, less than fully spiritual. The humanization of the human race is upon us. The only question for the church is whether the humanization of the human race will lead as well to the Christianization of the Christian church. Otherwise, discipleship will die and the integrity of the church with it.
A tip of the hat to the daily email from the Centre for Action and Contemplation.
Turning and churning. In Participatory Narrative Inquiry we talk about “churning” as a way to let stories and meaning and people work each other through different kinds of connections. Today Ron Donaldson has a beautifully rich field note in which he looks at how a single piece of knowledge entered into a field of expertise because of exactly this phenomenon.
A good story doesn’t necessarily give us the answer. It changes what questions we are capable of asking.
Different narrative ecologies (living, evolving, adaptive patterns of knowing distributed through people, practices, stories, environments and relationships) can preserve different parts of a phenomenon for very long periods, even when one community has developed sophisticated explanatory knowledge that never reaches another.
Expertise is often deep knowledge of a domain. But phenomena don’t necessarily respect our domains…
Perhaps that is one of the things we mean by expertise. Not knowing everything within a domain but knowing when the answer might live somewhere outside the domain.
“The knowledge wasn’t lost. The connection was lost.”
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
The story of six Tongan boys who were stranded on a desert island and thrived for more than a year. No, it wasn’t a real life version of Lord of the Flies. The complete opposite, in fact. This is hopeful.
Here in Canada, populist provincial governments are using the notwithstanding clause in our Constitution on a regular basis to suspend the rights of their citizens. Recently it has been used to de y the rights of children and youth freedom of expression and to deny workers their right to practice their freedom of association. These are the same governments that champion individual rights when it suits them. As a result, for the better part of the next five years some citizens in these provinces will have fewer rights than others. Don’t take your eyes off of it and be sure to understand what the use of this clause means. Yes it’s a (shitty) legal mechanism. And yes it suspends Charter protected rights.
Don Schafer provides some context for the vote in BC Legislature denying the introduction of a bill to repeal the BC Human Rights Code Act.
And if shit like this makes you angry, Peter Rukavina is willing to provide you with a creative container – The Books of Anger – in which you can explore the emotions of resentment, irritation, exasperation, frustration, and fury.
Good labour policy supports a vibrant business sector. Today rabble.ca reports on a bunch of good ideas that could easily be implemented to support the massive sector of the economy that are self-employed entrepreneurs. Government tends to define “entrepreneur” as a person who creates employment, but 80 percent of women in business are self-employed. It’s time we recognized this sector of the labour market and provided equitable supports and security for these workers.
I don’t quite know what it will take to unhook politics from polling and money. In this week’s New Yorker, the editorialist dissects the Democratic Party’s election strategy and it all sounds like how to do things that will shift numbers. The cynics will tell me that’s how you win elections and there is nothing more important than winning. But my brain and heart tells me that current electoral politics is more about who has the saviest consulting firm than whether the electeds can a) actually understand what needs to happen in our societies and b) have the capability to govern with the courage and smarts to do it. We’re failing. Badly. This is not hopeful.
Also from the current New Yorker issue from a profile of composer Stephen Spencer:
You’re in the sandbox playing,” he said. “Let’s postpone the judgment or appraisal and feel free to make music joyfully and in an unfiltered way. My students make fun of me, because they’ll say something like ‘How do I practice this?’ And I’ll be, like, ‘You have to love yourself.’
The man is not wrong.
Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
Yesterday was Transfiguration Sunday in the United Church of Canada and it was my turn, as it is once a month, to lead worship at our little church on Bowen Island. This is the sermon I gave. Tl;dr this is about seeing and listening and honouring people, especially trans people, queer people and those in recovery who are living examples to us all and teachers of how to see.
The Transfiguration
17 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Eli?jah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli?jah.” 5 He was still speaking, when lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces, and were filled with awe. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” 8 And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.
9 And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead.”
I was once working in South Africa. We were hosting a workshop on participatory leadership on a small safari west of Johannesburg and the participants were a mix of community organizers from Midvaal, a township south of the city, and mostly white, middle class professors from the University of South Africa who were working together to put together online programs. This was back in 2010.
It was Ian interesting mix of people and we had initially thought of doing to separate workshops with them, but decided that the learning and conversations would be richer if we did the work together.
The safari was more set up for leisure and relaxation – these are resorts basically – and it had decent meeting spaces for us but they didn’t have great audio visual support. We were a group of 40 or so people and some people had quiet voices which made it hard for everyone to hear. At one point one of the University professors called out impatiently “Can you PLEASE speak up?” To a Black woman who was trying to find her thoughts on a sensitive topic.
Now of course it can be kind to ask a person to speak up, or it could be the kind of thing that is delivered with a little frustration and perhaps some passive aggressiveness, and that was definitely the tenor of this exchange. And there were layers upon layers of context to that little outburst. It was delivered by a white man with no physical hearing issue sitting very far away from the speaker to a black woman who was in an incredibly vulnerable moment. One of the Midvaal organizers immediately stood up and very kindly said something like this “Hello. I would like to make a suggestion. I would like to suggest that instead of asking our sister to speak more loudly, that we make the effort to listen lmore oudly. Come a little closer and let’s make our ears bigger so that she can continue her thought and we can open her heart to her.” Those weren’t his exact words, but that was the feeling and the expression “Listen Loudly” has stayed with me ever since.
Today we are given the story of the Transfiguration. What do we know about this story? I want to suggest that this story is not about Jesus changing in any way, but rather it is a story about the disciples seeing Jesus in a different way. Like that sister in Midvaal, Jesus is just doing his thing, being himself, and he had something he wanted to tell these disciples, specifically these ones, the ones who would witness his suffering and carry his story afterwards. He was revealing what was going to happen to him, in a space that required trust and vulnerability and privacy. And so this year I am reading this story as a story about how to act in this moment. Imagine if you were one of the three chose to go with Jesus to the top of the mountain. You might think you were privileged, or about to be told something special. You might think that the experience will validate a story you have about yourself being the MOST trusted disciples.
In other words, probably all of us would initially make it about ourselves. Or, let me be most honest, I would probably first make it about myself. I know I would. I would be like Peter trying to figure how I could help, what could I do? And then God interrupts and says “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Just listen. Just be a loving witness. Shut up and listen loudly to this humble carpenter who is sharing something incredible about his brilliance. It’s not about me at all. In fact, making about me means that it is no longer about Jesus.
I want to call us to witness today. I have a theory that the angels in Bible who are revealed are just regular people who are made into angels by how they are received. The angels that appear all through the Bible whether they appear to Lot or Mary or Abraham and Sarah or Gideon, they all come as regular people. And it only through an act of hospitality or an act of being open to reciprocity and relationship do they suddenly become revealed as angels. Paul – who is not always my friend! – has my back here as he writes in the letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” That was probably the quote that turned my on to this theory. Host strangers, and let them be their brilliant selves. On their terms. In their own way.
This is not easy. It requires us to de-centre our own experience first and to centre the person we are with. It requires us to be calm and collected and hold space for what is happening. The angels always say “Do not be afraid.” God says it in this transfiguration story. It’s an invitation and a request. If you are afraid when someone is revealing themselves to you, the air is charged with anxiety. You will not be able to receive them with compassion and joy and support. You will still be the centre of the situation, deflecting your honest feelings of confusion and worry and channelling them into busy work. As Peter does. As Martha does. As we all do.
Sitting with the strange-to-us and the stranger-to-us is not easy work. And sitting with a person in the midst of change, of complete transfiguration, when their brilliance is coming to the front and their form is changing, when they are shedding our images of who we think they are, when they are living in truth ever more deeply, this can be unsettling. And yet, there is no greater gift than the love and friendship of a person who has changed to reveal more of their deepest and honest self and who has trusted you with that transformation and invited you to witness and stay in relationship with them.
When I realized last week that this was Transfiguration Sunday and I got to share some reflections, I got excited because I wanted to honour my friends who are gay and lesbian, who are in recovery from drugs and alcohol and especially those who are trans. My trans friends are like superheroes. As they move through their journey, as we stay in relationship, I get to see people who are more of who they really are. They are beautiful, loving, brilliant, aware, alive and full of care for a world that inflicts pain and cruelty indiscriminately. I feel the deepest honour to know these friends, to love them and be loved by them. They humble me, they lift me up, they enrich my world, they make our communities a better place to be. I know some bad-ass warriors of joy and courage and I am proud to call them my friends.
And I get it. It’s hard. I have friends who are parents of trans kids who grieve the little girl or boy they raised. Who love their children with all their hearts and still get their pronouns wrong. Who worry for the journey their child is going on. But those friends are the example, because they love unconditionally and their love is returned to them reciprocally. You can make mistakes. You can be worried for a person’s future. You can be uncomfortable with change. That’s fine. That’s natural;
We few who are gathered here, we call ourselves Christians. We follow the teachings and the example of a divine man of deep spiritual power, who took three of his closest friends into his most intimate confidence and STILL needed a safe space to reveal himself. When we sign on to this religion I believe we are called to love, witness, and support others as deeply as we can. Not perfectly, not as an example to others, but as best we can. To meet our friends and neighbours and strangers with love and curiosity and respect and most of all to “not be afraid.”
And I think we need to declare that this is a Christian thing to do. This is what we train for, because there are also people who call themselves Christians who use this religion as cover – or even a justification – for their fear. Xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia. To me, the fear of the other is a direct violation of the invitation of angels, and the most sacred teaching about how to love our neighbours. God says “Do not be afraid.” Jesus says “Rise and have no fear.”
If you know a person in recovery you know that it is a blessing for them to tell you not to be afraid. If you know a person who is coming out to you, or who is transitioning in this world and in this time, where they will face persecution and hatred and cruel generalizations and contempt, and THAT person tells YOU not to be afraid, you are receiving a blessing. These are people who should anchor your idea of what courage looks like..
Friends, I don’t think I don’t get to have a relationship with the teachings of Christ if I am not making progress on listening loudly to the cries of suffering and pain in this world; if we are not witnessing the cracking of eggs as people we love become even MORE of the people we love. We are the ones who host the stranger because we know every stranger is just an angel that we haven’t met yet.
Our job is to be authentically ourselves and then act not out of fear, but out of love. Out of togetherness. Out of knowing that each of us is a beloved child of God, doing our best and needing our friends and family to hold us up and love us in our transitions through life. None of us leave the world the way we came. We are all transfigured at some point. How do we want to be witnessed in those moments of deep transformation? How should we witness and love the other?
Listen loudly. Witness deeply. Do not be afraid. Rise and have no fear.