Our Community

"When we share the sources of our pain with each other instead of hurling our convictions at 'enemies,' we have a chance to open our hearts and connect across some of our great divides." --Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, page 6

I am just entering Parker Palmer's newest book, but I know it will be wonderful.  His lifelong struggles with clinical depression and his lifelong passion for peace with hope meet once again in this book.  Palmer lifts up what we know deep inside--that real empathy is the only hope for human community.

I was at a meeting where we talked about relief efforts on the other side of town.  We were supporting those efforts with dollars and volunteers and were benefiting hundreds of people, at least in the short run.  One person at the table said, "I hope we can learn how to do something like this in our community."

My heart sank into my shoes.  Somehow, the people less than ten miles away were not part of "our community."  

It is our natural tendency to regard those closer to us, more like us, and more likely to benefit us as more important to us than other people.  But one of the disciplines of being a compassionate grown up is to resist that tendency for all we're worth.  One of the disciplines of being a compassionate grown up is to extend our empathy to those who are farther away, less like us, and unlikely to benefit us in any way.

Experiences of grief and loss, vulnerability and weakness, pain and struggle--these experiences can deepen our capacities to connect with the lives of others.  These experiences can make us more empathetic if we will allow that to happen.  Of course, such experiences can also harden us to the needs of the world.  Such experiences can lead us to shut ourselves off to any further possibilities of pain.

Hopeful people choose to have healthy boundaries rather than solid walls.  One of our meditations  at the breakfast table this morning talked about that difference.  Walls shut us in and eventually kill, cutting us off from the real life of this world that exists outside of our own skins.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to maintain that sense of who we are and to connect with people who are not us.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to have perspective--to step back a bit in order to move forward.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to have empathy--to use our imaginations to enter into the pain and promise of another's life.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to embrace difference rather than having to screen others according to sameness and how they satisfy our self-interest.

Pain and loss can be pathways to such connections, if we can have the courage to let that happen.  Pain and loss can be pathways to such connections if we are willing, as Parker Palmer says, to let our hearts be open.  We Christians worship the God who sends Jesus to be God's open heart to us and to the world.  And Jesus is then the model for how we live our lives of hope.

"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited, 

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, 

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross."

Philippians 2:5-8

All communities are our community.  Pain and loss teach us that.