November 17, 2007
 

Report from the Field
 

A harvest of outcroppings (!) came from
the September community feast, and included
a visit to Kentucky and the land of
contemplative author Thomas Merton. The result?
A cornucopia of gifts rich in educational purpose…
and complexity. Here’s the field report.

 

November 17, 2007
From Jim Boushay re: 12th Festival of Potluck Foods
 

I am feeling gratitude in this Field Report, which covers a series of recent activities. They were made possible by gratefully-received financial and other support of the public community feast and related outcroppings. Thank you! Over 12 years the feast continues to generate nuanced understandings of partnership through extensive and exciting follow-up initiatives in civic engagement.

The Dialogues in Democracy project, of which the feast is a signature part, helps extend and grow our programs (e.g., Conversations That Matter, Intergenerational Mentors). It improves a decade-long random sampling research base, centered in community development education. It supports training in public testimony. And it creates post-feast opportunities for planning/convening dialogues on strategic formulations of shared leadership.

One example of an opportunity: A recent trip to Louisville and Thomas Merton land produced a few newsworthy results. The trip began on the October 31 observance of Halloween and ended November 7 after 13 separate meetings—engagements oft-filled with wonder. Some produced imaginative thinking…and occasional plausible solutions and insights into some of the most-pressing political and ethical and moral and social bedevilments.

In the car on the itinerary, we were often sensitive to Merton’s writings, reading aloud The School of Charity: Letters of Thomas Merton. His writings on (and about) cultural diversity and religious pluralism express gratitude for “spontaneous awe.” Being welcomed on arrival was a joy, often humbling. We felt encouraged and supported and were able to return the favor.

First, a modest co-incidence to acknowledge: Today 40 years ago exactly (November 17, 1967) my first published smidgen of a piece—a letter on war and peace—appeared in TIME magazine. So an obvious—and tragic—thought to share here most regrettably: We are still at war. May God have mercy on us.

At the same time we (Rickey Sain and Jim Boushay) have been living in the energy of synchronicity and coincidence, whether back at home and work in Oak Park or in travelling Metro Louisville, or elsewhere. I’m running nearly every day into people I’ve been thinking about. Simultaneously I’ve actually been sort of avoiding people because I need the rest. A smidgen of a smile. Several of the Resources Unlimited corporate strategies and documents on education, ethics, and community activism are helping inspire some of the thinking behind local and regional roundtables, symposia, conferences, and other communications forums.  

In Kentucky we conducted talks with a delegation of African priests and ministers visiting from Uganda, Zambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya. Together we’re expanding a Resources Unlimited cross-cultural and inter-national translation project in literacy and civic pedagogy. We’ll use the different cultural or sacred observances of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls to explore but not conflate distinctive concepts of civility, mutuality, partnership, community engagement. Among the translation project’s challenging and discrete languages besides English are Swahili, Luo, and Shona.

Still other “meet”-ings over several days happened at: Festival of Faiths, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Passionist Earth and Spirit Center, Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, John Judie Ministries, Inc., Bardstown Chamber of Commerce, and Gethsemani Abbey, plus at the Merton Institute’s newly opened Bethany Spring Retreat House, a mere one-mile walk from the abbey.
 

Says celebrated author and blogger James Redfield in The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure (1993): “The thought of both East and West can indeed be integrated into a higher truth. The West is correct in maintaining that life is about progress, about evolving toward something higher. Yet the East is also correct in emphasizing that we must let go of control with the ego. We can’t progress by using logic alone. We have to attain a fuller consciousness, an inner connection with God, because only then can our evolution toward something better be guided by a higher part of ourselves.”

Among many things, several of the post-feast meetings concerned re-convening a sequel—in May 2008—of an East/West dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey (called Encounter III). It intends to draw the connections between contemplative monastic life and the environment—in part a kind of “think green” conference involving Buddhist and Catholic monastics and interested lay persons of many religious faiths and humanistic belief systems. Lately there have been additional reports from South Dakota and several Rocky Mountain states of still other “re-conventions” similar to the original and pioneering conference convened in Bangkok 40 years ago in 1968, the one at which Trappist monk and prolific author Thomas Merton lost his life by electrocution (December 10). We learned as well of still other imaginative re-convention ideas getting into the system. And there is growing new excitement now that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is officially designated (wonder of wonder) as a theologian at the divinity school of Emory University in Atlanta. Some of the thinking and details concerning this extraordinary turn-about happening seem to be working themselves out, on a daily and ad-hoc basis alike. Talk about newer East/West formulations of time and place crossing boundaries!

On the trip and afterward we also asked—and are asking—for some re-energized attention to Merton’s capacious social justice thinking in his atypical (and uneven) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

In the talks we continue asking for an extension in still other thoughtful settings of the East/West exchange idea, particularly regarding forms of non-violence as an answer to environmental violence. Among prophetic social ethicists of the century past (e.g., Addams, Gandhi, Heschel, Barth, Parks, and many notable others), Thomas Merton speaks in his writings of how contemplation leads to action—and vice versa. Thus a retrospective on Merton and like-minded contemporaries might serve as a dialogical overview of what’s transpired in the last 40 years—a period from the Vietnam War in the mid-60s to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

In some ways Resources Unlimited is touching the East/West dialogue matter on the periphery. That’s okay. Omniscient God is present too in smidgens of little things. On Dorothy Day’s 110^th birthday, observed nine days ago, I remembered she said, “One brick at a time. One brick at a time.” Her life-giving approach, based on personalism, is summed up perhaps in her oft-quoted phrase, “by little and by little.”  I guesstimate: Almost any positive construction project takes some step-by-step creativity. The pitfalls and promises of patience!

Now nearly two months after bringing the September “feast of loaves and fishes” at Oak Park Library to a close, we also got done in our office the third revision of our co-written book manuscript, a work in progress. Primarily it explores the public feast as a civic and symbolic enactment of friendship and neighborliness. One among many surprises at the last of the 12 potlucks was unique, elegant: One enthusiast of unusual foods brought an exquisite dish of 100 lemon-touched, almond-sprinkled servings of baked Tilapia. In some old-world regions of Palestine, Tilapia means “God’s fish.” People without a home came and helped out. They were rich blessings, neighbors genuinely welcomed in peace.

The manuscript’s working title for now remains “Pluralism Sacred and Secular?” In his installation homily as archbishop a decade ago when he arrived in Chicago, Cardinal George said, “I am Francis, your neighbor.” Last Monday night at Loyola University Chicago we met to talk with Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former prior general worldwide of the Dominican Order. He is author of several books examining neighborliness and amity, including I Call You Friends, plus Sing a New Song. This coming Monday morning there is a face-full press conference at the office of Congressman Danny Davis, regarding the Second Chance Act: legislation passed last week in the House, awaiting a vote in the Senate.

Among the important initiatives of the Second Chance Act is making available to neighborhoods and towns new federal money to assist grandparents raising grandchildren. Their parents are or were in prison, or are otherwise in immense difficulty. The goal is a fair shot at living an improved family and community life that is more stabilized, less iffy, than before and during incarceration. Our extensive interviews continue apace with grandparents. That initiative collects and disseminates data which caring organizations—both governmental and nonprofit—have been able to use in crafting new problem-solving strategies. We have been collecting and analyzing additional research data, which is helping improve education. For example in August we recommended that school districts undertake a number of imaginative planning initiatives. These build constituent relationships by deploying any of “22 Strategic Actions to Improve Education.” The document, based on field research, helps educators think through forward-looking ways to engage in partnership a few of the complex (and complicated) issues involved in achieving higher-quality education.

In the evening of next Monday will also happen a screening at Lambda Legal Chicago of the cinematic documentary, Pursuit of Equality. It recounts controversial events in San Francisco. The events helped generate dialogues and other forms of national conversation on marriage equality and civil unions. The discourse continues, and Resources Unlimited continues to play a vital educational and advocacy role.

The next newsletter, Volume 14, will report in more detail some of the challenging matters mentioned here. For now as an education institute in civic engagement, we have broadly been asking three rhetorical questions:
 

(1) Why seemingly is there talk of “wholistic” approaches to human dignity and welfare only AFTER the enactment of solutions, but ones deemed as mere band-aid fixes?

(2) How to ensure more authentic listening done up-front? In the earlier stages of planning, listening gets more things right from the get-go.

(3) Why not “front-load” the clearer political and moral language? Only too late sometimes, citizens use the far-sighted language of transparency in registering their complaints and expressing dissatisfaction concerning why and how such-and-such a policy action goes wrong. Or didn’t work. Or won’t and can’t work. Pro-active thinking, when possible, helps diminish the sometimes seeming abundance, yes, of over-reaction.

Thus here you have practical information about how the public feast produces wide-ranging repercussions—sometimes pleasurable, frequently insightful, occasionally sober, yet often full of hope. There is inspiration, for example, in two sources worth mention: (1) Stephen L. Carter’s cultural analysis of Americans “starved for integrity,” as detailed in his book Integrity; (2) and the public theologies of play and hope, as examined in two eminent studies by Jürgen Moltmann: The Theology of Play, plus earlier The Theology of Hope. And the Kentucky trip’s activities re-validated some of the upbeat civic thinking inherent in a public community feast whose actions are, well, public.

Rickey Sain, executive director, and trustees send best wishes, plus goodwill thoughts this special season. Lately he and I have been scarce (“un-abundant”?) until we were able to finish reading correspondence from when away on the trip. The reports are of death and sickness, of travail, joy, loss, including reports of frustration, extreme division, and of things not done and done, reports of confusion and new insights…and all the mixed-up rest. A few correspondents described experiences shot through, like an arrow, with piercing hope. New injections of grace are infusing new energy and promise in an uncertain future of tough times. Crucial new hope is some of what, in humility, Resources Unlimited provides through education. Thanks for making some of that education work possible. We always hope for more support. It seeds local and wider activities of strategic advocacy, community activism, and civic education, as detailed here.

Thank you too for your eyes and ears here—your time. Trustees join in offering you thanks. We’re glad to have this opportunity to share a few of the results—the outcroppings. While this may be an atypical field report, it indicates how the outcroppings are constructive, future oriented. Clearly the practice of the civic arts and sciences leads to improved community engagement.

Happy Holidays!