The turning

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.”