Community: Dragon Boat Style

I think I should write a book and call it, "Everything I Learned about Community, I Learned on a Dragon Boat."  "What?" you say, "What is a dragon boat?" followed, I am sure, by the exclamation, "Sarah, you get yourself into the craziest things!"  This, I readily admit, is true.

I'll start at the beginning.  Several years ago I saw a display of a dragon boat at a local festival called "The World Beat".  I was intrigued and I was told you could check out a practice with the team for free.  However, I never got around to it and I didn't realize they practiced year round.  Then this last fall, my friend Emily posted on facebook to see if anyone wanted to try out dragon boat racing.  (Yes, this is the same Emily who got me into Kung Fu. I have since asked her to warn me before she posts anything else.)

To answer your question, a dragon boat is rather like a cross between a canoe and a row boat.  Now take that image and elongate it, painting dragon scales on the side while you're at it, and make it long enough to fit twenty people, ten rows of people sitting two by two.  Now add a caller in the front and a tiller in the back and you have it- a dragon boat.  Now, while keeping that picture in your mind, imagine a group of 12-22 people (we have to have at least ten paddlers to manage the boat plus the caller and tiller) of assorted ages and sizes from young to older adults, all wearing life jackets with a paddle in one hand.  They are grinning and they are laughing.  They love to paddle.  Depending on the time of year, you can also add a very odd assortment of hats on their heads.  Imagine the oddest one, and weirdest, for Emily. 

When we have enough paddlers, we start by stretching out and warming up our bodies at the top of the stairs at Riverfront Park and we jabber about how we need to recruit more people so we can go out more often.  You see, we are the die hard winter paddlers.  It's not actually that cold.  And it is really fun to paddle on the river in the dark (scaring the geese!). At six, we walk down to the dock, hand out paddles and life jackets for anyone who didn't bring them, and then line up by the boat.  Our coach looks us over and decides how she wants to torture us for the night.  She starts with the lead paddlers, the ones whose rhythm we watch for the rest of practice.  They are in the front.  Our middle lead paddlers are, that's right, in the middle.  She partners the rest of us up in teams and tells us where to sit. 

With our partner, one person gets in the boat and the other stands on the dock holding the paddles.  The paddles are then handed over and the second person takes their seat.  Once everyone is seated, we take in the bumpers (rubber floats that protect the boat against the dock and our other boat), then close our mouths and listen up.

Guiding this large boat is a big job.  That person is called the tiller.  Our coach is up in front.  You do whatever they say because if you don't, the water is very cold with a strong current and you don't want to know that intimately well.  Your default it to listen to the coach but the tiller is the ultimate authority and if they speak, you pay attention only to them.  The rest of us?  We are a team.  We do everything together in one rhythm, ideally anyway, each paddling on our place in the boat.

One of the things I have learned about community is you stick together.  One group or people or even an individual does not move out of sync with the others.  If you are not paddling and moving your body in rhythm with the others, paddles are going to hit each other and you are going to be pushed up against by the others around you.  Unity is the name of the game.  You HAVE to stick together if you want to get anywhere.

Another thing I have learned is that while we are all pulling equal weight in the boat, we have our lead paddlers and they set the pace.  You watch when their hands move up and down and you make sure you are moving at the same time as they are.  It is good to have leaders in the boat.  We need them.  We need mentors and teachers and pastors and people who will guide. 

Don't forget to laugh.  That's the next lesson I learned.  Whether our coach is reveling in the delight of torturing our team making us do sit-ups in the boat or we're taking a moment to simply enjoy the beautiful surroundings, we love to laugh. One of our current sources of mirth is coming up with a name for our team.  We did take a vote but as our coach didn't like any of the choices, she nixed the whole thing.  So now we have fun coming up with all kinds of silly names during our practices, "I'd Rather be in the Slough" being one of my recent favorites.  We like our team.  We like joking around together.  It makes practices a lot of fun and between that and being out on the water, these times have quickly become some of my favorite of the week.  It reminds me we have to have laughter in our lives.  We have to have fun, to delight in the gifts God has given.  This is important.

God has given us the gift of the people around us.  They are the ones with which we share the boat, the ones we "paddle" with.  These are the people who make our "practices" so much more fun. You simply can not make it back to the dock alone. And I learned all that in a boat.

Holy Communion

My breath is still taken away into the Divine after watching communion tonight. It was beautiful. We usually leave the bread and juice on a table in the middle of our circle and we go and partake during a song or two. But tonight was a little different. Turner handed the elements to two people in the circle sitting next to each other. One person held the juice while the other tore a piece of bread from the loaf and dipped it in the juice. Then the plate and cup were each passed on to the next individuals so the person who was holding the juice then takes a piece of bread as the person next in the circle holds the cup. Watching them passed along, people helping each other take communion, a community joining together in God hand in hand, was an extraordinarily holy moment to witness and of which to be a part. Communion and community are so closely related, they can even be one in the same. One loaf, one cup, one people, one family.

Kevin, I am naming you here by name. You are so cool!

An Experience for Thought

This is one of those posts where I share an experience and ask the questions without really giving much in the way of answers.

I was at church tonight, (imagine youngish adults sitting in a large circle), when we were discussing Matthew 18 and forgiveness. I was intrigued, Jordan had pointed out how the parable related to the conversation right before and how the meaning is found by considering the two parts together, that it doesn't matter what someone else does to us or how many times they sin, we still need to forgive them because God has already forgiven us so much more.

Then at one point during the discussion, we got onto a side path of theology talking about the controversy between once saved, always saved or that you can loose your salvation if you turn away. We were struggling with this when two of the guys starting going back and forth with each other, each talking over the person in louder and louder voices, not stopping to listen to what the other had to say. I jumped in and asked them to stop talking for one minute and cool down. Immediately, one of the guys, who generally takes up a lot of space in a room, jumps in to continue the argument when the pastor, Jordan, interrupts him and says, "Wait, Sarah asked you to be quiet." Jordan affirmed my power and decision to stop the conversation. He shared his power with me. This took me by surprise more than anything else. The guy in question didn't say anything else for the rest of the discussion. The guy he had been arguing with joined in at times but didn't say a lot. Other people shared their opinions and the talk went on, it was a really good time.

The guy who didn't say anything else left the room shortly before the discussion ended and I didn't see him for the rest of the time. Before we started the music, the one who had still talked a little told us he felt like an idiot for raising his voice like that, asked for our forgiveness, and shared with us how in his family, raising your voice above the other person's is how to get heard. Before he picked up his guitar for the closing song, I leaned over to him and told him I didn't think he was an idiot nor did I think there was anything to forgive.

My reflections: I now would have rather asked them, instead of being quiet for a moment and calming down, to really listen to one another and speak one at a time. I would have encouraged their voices as well, not only asking them to be quiet for a moment. What I don't think they understood, was I only wanted them to be quiet for a moment and then they could resume the conversation, not quit it all together.

I also think that perhaps they were doing something wrong by not respecting other people's voices and perhaps forgiveness was needed for him to feel an accepted part of the group again. What I find very interesting, is they both took being reigned back in very personally, as if I just cut their self-esteem to zero or worse. When I stopped them from arguing like that, I wasn't thinking less of their value, it was simply an inappropriate way to discuss the issue. An observation, not a value statement. Remember that post? It was an excellent reminder to me that many of those who appear to have the toughest skin, actually can be wounded quite easily without me having meant to do it.

So that is what happened. I am hoping Jordan got to talk afterwards with the one who left. I am going to try to talk to them each within the next week. If anything, I need to talk with Jordan about what happened to help me process it and I want to reconnect with the quiet one. It will be good practice to put what we JUST talked about concerning reconcilliation into practice.

After reading MaryKate Morse's book, Making Room for Leadership: Power, Space and Influence, tonight was particularly interesting in experiencing what she talked about after being made more aware of the space and influence in group dynamics. Thanks MaryKate!

365-09 #248

Community

This morning we met before church to talk about community. This is one of the quotes we looked at:

Parker Palmer – "In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motive. Instead our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled notion of self and world. In fact, we might define community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives!" (Pendle Hill Pamphlet #212, 1977 pg 20)

As much as I like this quote, I think we do choose our community, at least our deeper community. We do have the community we interact with every day or even every week and in places like where we work or go to school, Parker Palmer is right, those companions are given to us by grace. They are not the ones we would have chosen, but were chosen for us to make us grow. Then there is our deeper community we do choose, the ones who are there for us, with whom we share those close bonds.

This afternoon I attended a benefit concert given by my friends Christine and Rob. As I sat there and listened to Christine sing, (she has an exquisite voice), I was remembering all the times I've spent with her in rehearsals of one kind or another. I was in both the bell choir and adult choir for years. I learned so much about music, singing, and coming together under her teaching but more than that, was her heart. I loved her heart. I still do. I started house sitting for her not long after we met. Sasha, her dog, and I became buds. She is a dog after my own heart and has been there for me through my darkest moments. The day I fell to the floor and truly entered the dark night, Sasha was at my side letting me hug her. Then when my family cut way back on celebrating holidays together to accommodate my siblings other family obligations, or postponed them altogether, Christine, Rob, and the Hellers, have always been there with open arms welcoming me to spend holidays with them.

I remember the first time when I realized what a "community" we had become when Christine's dad was visiting and shared his concern about leaving Sasha behind as they went on vacation. Non-chalantly, Christine reassured him that Sasha considered me a part of the family and that she would be fine. Since that time, I know that Christine too, considers me like family, and that touches me deeply. I really appreciate them and the friendship we've shared. Some of my best memories of my 20's has her in them.

So what is community? I think it is those we choose to walk with and who we find walking alongside us. It is grace and it is a choice. My community is much like the quilts I make. Some people from here, some people from there. They are the people I have met in my life and who stayed, who touch me so deeply, my community is not the same without them.

365-09 #123

Thanks be to God

When God knows you need something, he does not withhold it from your hands. Yesterday I was at Eugene Friends Church to speak about the Quaker Youth Book Project which went well. After the service, a woman I recognized approached me with a smile. Her name is Barbara and we were friends at seminary. Since we all went to school in Portland, we were never great about keeping track of where everyone drove in from. It turns out she has been checking out that church for several weeks and to find each other there was quite a surprise as neither of us were Quaker for most of our time at school. I, in fact, decided to join the Quakers two months before I graduated from seminary so many people never realized the choice I made.

It was SO GOOD to see her, unspeakably so and this post is about why. For that though, I'll tell you how she put it when we were both speaking to the pastor. In our classes there at the seminary, we went so deep with each other, we were more intimate with our souls then we are ever with anyone else, that even though you may not know another person well, you are family just the same and share a strong bond that goes beyond day to day relationships. You can feel it when we meet and you know it's there. Together, we were on an incredible and amazing journey, the hardest one many of us faced and we did it side by side. To this day, years later, when I think of community, I think of them and my time there at George Fox with my friends.

The hard part comes when we graduate and we lose those relationships. There is now this whole part of your soul, places you've been, things you know, worlds you walked in, that is not shared with the world around you. I liken it to a scene near the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy when Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Frodo are back at the Green Dragon in Hobbiton. Around them, life goes on oblivious to what they've seen and been through. The four know this and share it together and they all have to find a way to live with that. They have to find a way to go on and live their lives with what they know now about the wider world around them. That scene strongly reminds me of my seminary friends and I.

When my time there was winding down, I had an idea of what I would face afterwards so I went to a trusted professor and I asked him, "What do you do? How do I live in a Christian world with it's ideas and theology when I've come to see things from a more aerial point of view?" He told me to find the other people around me who are also on the fringes and to keep in touch with the friends I made at school. So I have tried to do that to some extent but it's been rather dry lately and I've longed for more. So seeing Barbara was a gift from1 God. We're having lunch next week when I'm back down in Eugene.

This last Sunday in Eugene, I had lunch with my friend, Lou. Spike, Lou, and I were a kind of very odd trio through our years together and I love those guys dearly, they are my brothers. Lou and I can be very open with each other, really honest with our hearts and that felt good. It never surprises him that I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut as I never did very well at that in seminary either. He has stories on me, I'll admit. It's very important to have people like that in our lives-people we can share our burdens with and with whom we help carry each other's loads.

So tonight I sit here extremely grateful for my brothers and sisters. You are immensely precious to me. And I'm even more grateful to God who gave you to me and who brings us together when we all need it so very much.

I don't mean to make this sound like an exclusive club, but we all have these experiences in our lives we can only truly share with the people who were there. I think the seminary should gather up upcoming graduates and give a talk about what they are going to face in the coming years, maybe have a panel of alumni who can give them some practical advice. I think this is an extremely good idea, or at least have the alumni write it out so the graduates can at least be forewarned. Through many talks with friends, I know we've all been dealing with similar feelings since graduation and I wish someone had talked to us. Maybe I should write the article. I've heard these things expressed again and again from many people, I think we need to start helping those who come behind us.

This post, and maybe an article, is for you guys- though we are scattered, God still holds and keeps alive our bonds of community. Thanks be to God.

Community Part 2

These are the questions I'm going to ask.

• What do you think of when you hear "community"?
  
• Describe a good community.
  
• What does it take to build community?
• How can it be hard to be in community?
• Why do you think God created us to be in community?
• In your own words, what is Paul saying in Romans 12? (Verse will be read.)

I wrote the below paragraph as a part of my paper for the Quaker Women's Theology Conference. I think it is very applicable here.

To form community we as individuals and as a group have to stop drawing lines in our hearts of who is wrong and who is right. Whether that line is drawn around issues of age, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality, race, religion, personality, or ability, it doesn’t matter. For until we stop drawing lines in our hearts of us and them, we will never fully trust each other. While any lines exist, there will always be something we could become where we will no longer be accepted in our community, and fear of one line of non-acceptance breeds fear of many. The question of lines will always be in the back of everyone’s minds whether they are the ones who drew the lines or discovered them. We are all human with faults and foibles, how can we judge the life of another? How can we tell them they are wrong when we ourselves have such a limited view of what is right? When we let go of these judgments, an amazing thing then happens: we feel released, free to be ourselves. Without a fear of being rejected for who we are, without those lines where we could cross into condemnation, we can let ourselves be honest and vulnerable in community.

Now I just need a good ice breaker. Any ideas?

Community Part 1

So I'm at it again. I'm speaking tomorrow to a group of 40-50 junior highers and high schoolers from two churches. Talk about Daniel facing the lions. Subject? Romans 12, Community, more or less. I could also easily revamp and respeak my will of God talk, which I may do yet. It would fit for the high schoolers but I'm not so sure about the junior highers. Finding the will of God for their lives isn't exactly what I think is on their minds.

I'm not sure what to say. The church I go to has a high value on acceptance no matter who you are. I got teased a lot when I was in junior high and high school so that is something I also value. Todd, the pastor, told me questions work well. I like the idea of making this more into a discussion than a talk, a guided forum if you will. So the trick is finding questions junior highers and high schoolers will respond to instead of looking at me with a blank face. My preaching professor taught me to find the one point you want them to take away and then build on that.

The point I want them to take away is unity in diversity, that our differences is what can make us a community.

My wallpaper on my laptop is a great example. It's a photo of ten people, including me at Haw River State Park in North Carolina. What you can't easily tell from the photo is we come from five different countries, four continents and nearly all of us had never met before. But there we were, flown in from all over the world to start work on a project that would unite us for several years. How well the project comes out depends partly on well we got along together, then and in the future. Besides country, we also had differences of culture, language, gender, family, and personalities. Though we all spoke English, we often had to stop and explain the meaning of a word or phrase we were used to using in one country that someone else didn't understand. I and many of the other members of this group were also a little nervous about meeting as we later confessed to one another for we were a little intimidated by each others bio's. But that soon disapeared as we laughed, enjoying each others company, and found a common passion for writing and encouraging the voices of young adults all around the world. Our gifts and talents complimented each other, we each were a piece of the larger picture and we came to appreciate our unity in diversity. I am hoping the book we're producing will be an expression of what we found together, that voices seas apart can be different, perhaps in agreement, perhaps with opposing views, but that they can come together and find strength in their diversity to speak to those who need to hear and be encouraged.

My own church is based on the idea of unity in diversity, that diversity can be a gift to build up and be a light of God's love beautifully illustrated here on earth including all our faults and gifts. We as a group, are about as different as the editorial board. We span the spectrum of culture, economic status, education, gender, background, health, sexuality, age, and theology. By all reckoning and most people's judgement, this should not work. We should not be able to sit down Sunday after Sunday together and worship God. But I have learned through this group that our difference don't have to divide us but can instead bring us what we're missing in our need to live a fuller life. Our Faith and Practice, what we believe and what we do, is what we call our campfire, as individuals, we don't all agree on it but we do agree to sit around it, some people sit farther away, some people sit closer, and certainly we are on all sides. I think the thing that does unite is our belief that whatever theological hairs we split doesn't really matter. We can no sooner have a perfect theology than we can count the stars in the sky. So what does it really matter? We may not all be walking the exact same path but we are walking together.

More when I get bacl from tap class...