Resources Unlimited Foundation



In service to the connections between thought and action

Smidgens
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In This Issue

·    Intergenerational Mentoring Education
Project

Trustees

____________

Jim Boushay
    Stanley L. Davis, Jr.

Stacey Flint

Laurie Fried

James J. McClure, Jr.

Brooke McMillin

Calvin S. Morris, Ph.D.

Allison Purdie

Rickey Sain, Sr.

Chet Stewart

Dwight Stewart
Edward W. Bergstraesser

(in memoriam)

____________

Case Hoogendoorn, J.D.
Of Counsel

Programs

____________

Dialogues in Democracy

Supper & Conversation

Intergenerational Mentors

Festival of Potluck Foods

Faces of Community

Conversations That Matter
Grandparents Raising
Grandchildren

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Report from New Orleans
Intergenerational Mentoring Education Project

March 2010

Ways of Learning to Ask Contemplative Questions

Here in New Orleans, Resources Unlimited is struck by the remarkable, ever-increasing number of contemplative organizations setting up shop in the post-Katrina renaissance, even given the renewal's reported fits and uneven starts, its human bumbles and stumbles; indeed they are legion.

Yet much reasonable good is happening and deserves wider sharing:

The organizations are both sectarian and faith-based alike; more than several and less than many are decidedly and avowedly (publicly) contemplative. It's worth explaining some more about the many good things happening. Off and on many of us struggle earnestly to propound and celebrate unique manifestations of contemplative life, within and outside "monastic" and "new monasticism" settings, including those somewhat innovative and those more orthodox, those within as well as outside the church, those within and outside university walls.

Opportunities abound in this troubled city here for engaging the spiritual, social, political, and economic rebuilding effort, at so many different levels of involvement. We report that Resources Unlimited is now working as an organization with youth in NOLA to give them an opportunity here in the not so “Big Easy” these days for impacting and changing Louisiana's well-documented history of accepted corruption in the political and social welfare systems.

A long haul to overcome! Illinois and Louisiana are, arguably, among the most corrupt states in the U.S., say some luminaries in political ethics. They indicate that there is a near-constant insinuation of arbitrariness into the political and social and religious systems. In Louisiana, it's "Who You Know." In Illinois, it's the proverbial "Don't Send Me Nobody That Nobody Sent." Thus the transformation and rebuilding work is, in one word, demanding.

Following  the establishment of a satellite office, we're helping students in two separate after-school programs not to engage the all-too-usual (and regularly ineffective) scapegoating. Oh, how we love to blame. Doing that gets the school kids nowhere, really. There's enough "blame" to go around. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger (The Vital Balance, Man Against Himself) talks of the collective accumulation of individual lapses of responsibility in Whatever Became of Sin? We are instead training in how to ask direct, forthright, and even pointed questions. We then go further by educating in how to measure the answers they get from adult leaders against the existing policies and regulations and laws. We train youth in how not to attack, in ways that resist the human tendency to adopt "them-vs.-us" thinking.

We train young people in ways to unearth violations of policy and accepted ethical practice, so that their questions of adults can then plausibly grow more direct and focused, based on what students learn from the precise answers they ask for and which they sometimes get. The discernment process of inquiry is contemplative. . .and cumulative.

Perhaps not surprisingly with this method, eventually the school kids often, though not always, create a level of necessary discomfort among the adult community leaders and religious elders, who can then take the information which the students provide and then go further with it to get good things done. (This is a prototype of youth involvement that our organization helped create in partnership in the Chicago Public Schools system, before the CEO went on to become President Obama's present Secretary of Education.) The adult leaders, including more than a few pastors and a few respected theologians, usually keep the kids informed generally of the progress being made.

Typically it's a slow struggle to right a wrong, especially from within a non-challenging status quo system overwhelmed these days of brokenness by corruption, dysfunction, and conflict. The strategic plan for this method is based on Intergenerational Mentoring.

Some cultural ethicists and historians, local and national, say that New Orleans operates in an ethos that, historically, is a little bit like the eerie, wicked environment portrayed in the 1997 movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and in the earlier movie All the King's Men (which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949). Among other themes, each movie uniquely reveals that human actions (good, evil, mixed) have consequences.

We try to help demystify that ethos, making it practical as a principle of lived everydayness. In fact, last week 16 of us sat to watch both movies in succession, and then talked afterwards for several hours of the movies' portrayed realities, respectively, in Savannah (Georgia) and New Orleans (and State of Louisiana in general). We do provide the Chicago side of things as best we know it, of course, as but one convenient yet telling “glocal” reference point among other possible points of reference from around the world.

Through this method of less-hurried and more-constructive engagement, some of the students have come to see that their own education is more than sometimes out of touch with the complexities and ironies of our times. They are reading and discussing social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History and Templeton Prize winner Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.

The mentoring project is, in one word, challenging. Much remains to happen still in the time remaining before completion of project Phase One at Easter. We'll take things a step at a time, while helping students to look deeper and more hopefully into the nature of things and, as well, into the possibilities of some "redemption"—meaning, some saving and practical ways to make things better on behalf of common good at work and in their neighborhoods.

The entire project works mightily to emphasize the benefits to self and to community of deeper contemplation and engagement with critical urban issues of peace and justice in tumultuous times. We posted a sign in the room where we meet twice a week, a sign containing a reasonably well-known and "accepted" dictum: "If you want peace, work for justice." Please lift up the project in your thoughts. Thank you.

Separate yet related, here is the link to a contemplative, somewhat prayerful war and peace text/photo presentation. Resources Unlimited felt privileged to be able to do it at a house of worship nearly a month ago. One of several goals of the adult education experience was to provoke deeper thought leading to improved dialogue, greater understanding.

http://www.photoworks.com/slideshow/album/AB6CA83394A6?source=pw980

Many thanks for giving the opportunity here for providing this update you on a kind of "untried" formulation and practice in contemplative living. We are  deeply grateful for your time and attention.

All the best, Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain

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Five photos of New Orleans courtesy Hey Neighbor Project

The New Orleans Saints finished strong in defeating the Indianapolis Colts, 31-17, in Super Bowl XLIV

Education institute in social justice and civic engagement
PO Box 1176, Oak Park, IL  60304-0176
708-524-8387
www.ResourcesUnlimited.org