Well I've had an amazing month! Along with receiving Torah right here at Mount Sinai on Shavuot, I participated in two gatherings that will each change my life I ways yet to see. I'm still swimming with thoughts and impressions of both, and of how they relate to each other and to our community. So I'll just say a bit about the experiences themselves, and I'll leave it to the future to see the deeper meaning of it all.
First was the training in Compassionate Listening led by the remarkable Leah Green. Twenty-five of us, almost all local, more than half Jewish, spent an evening and two (very!) full days working on both a philosophical framework and practical skills for listening to people we don't agree with. Leah's own work began with bringing delegations to Israel and Palestine to meet with people all across the spectrum of that conflict. As she led more and more of these delegations (I believe she is about to take her nineteenth group -- but I may be way off on that number) she started to focus on the practice of listening itself. She continues to lead trips to the Middle East; but she has also begun teaching these listening skills to groups who may want to use them in all sorts of ways, in their personal lives, in addressing local conflicts and in other parts of the world.
Obviously all of us have opinions, passions, experiences and judgments that affect us whenever we hear anyone else speak -- especially someone whose opinions, passions, experiences and judgments oppose our own. We don't have to -- indeed shouldn't -- agree with everyone about everything. But we can (often with difficulty!) recognize that every person has a right to their own story and to their own interpretation of reality. We can recognize that we are all hurt in various ways in life, that we all yearn for safety and connection with others. When a person is simply listened to with attention and without judgment, several things can happen. The listener will learn -- often about how much deeper and more complex the speaker is than the listener would have anticipated. The listener's mind and heart may be opened to other perspectives on the problem, to new information. Sometimes the speaker, too, is changed by being listened to thoughtfully and warmly. Sometimes a speaker with quite a rigid position on an issue may begin to trust the listener enough to reveal complexities and contradictions. Sometimes the speaker will begin to recognize that, just as she has a point, so too her opponents may also have a point. Sometimes things soften and open up, just from non-judgmental listening.
Now and then throughout our training, we would become frustrated and say, "What next?" "They open up and then what?" And Leah would smile and say that she didn't know, that you just have to follow your mind and heart to the next steps. Compassionate Listening is a practice, not a strategy. For me, Leah's teaching has been like a time-release capsule -- it has been about three weeks now since our training, and every day I have some new idea of a way to "cross the street" and open my mind and ear to someone whose point of view I had avoided.
So a week or so later I was on a plane en route to New York for that Ford Foundation-sponsored "Innovative Women Leaders of Religious Communities" consultation that I mentioned in last month's Megillah. This was a day and a half-long conversation between twenty women religious leaders and executives of the Foundation. Constance Buchanan, the Senior Program Officer for the "Education, Knowledge and Religion" desk at Ford, started the meeting out by saying, "Foundations don't usually use this language, but we are trying to figure out how to change the world…" She and other leaders of the meeting posed questions all day, and we took turns presenting and discussing and asking more and more questions ourselves.
The extraordinary part of this meeting was the women who were there. They, individually and collectively, took my breath away! If I had space, I would tell you about all twenty. Here's a little taste: Rev. Debora Grant is an African Methodist Episcopal minister in Atlanta, working on connecting the pursuit of spiritual and physical health among the poor people of her community. One sweet little anecdote: as part of her health education work, she created a "SALT (the acronym of her organization) Spirit Spa" and brought massage practitioners, acupressurists and so on to give treatments to women who had never been touched this way in their lives.
Malika Lahmam is a Moslem from Morocco, now living in Denver. She has gotten a federal grant to do domestic violence work in the Moslem community, which is a first both in her community and also the first time a Moslem community has gotten involved with the Federal government in this way. Malika, in her presentations, talked a lot about Moslem teachings about withholding judgment, giving the benefit of the doubt and listening. She said at one point that her most important tool in ministry is patience. She spoke about her work in a way that sounded very Jewish to me. I have written since to Malika suggesting that we figure out a way to share and compare Jewish and Moslem texts and teachings in this area.
Marya Grawohl is a Franciscan nun who has lived for 22 years on a Cheyenne reservation in Montana. With Native women she created Prayer Lodge, a place where women gather to learn and to participate in both Catholic and Native rituals. Prayer Lodge is open to any of us who would like to visit.
Patty Hayes is a young (just turned thirty last week) Catholic chaplain to the gay and lesbian communities in Rochester NY. In this role she not only counsels and organizes but also leads Mass.
Mary Ramerman is herself a Catholic priest (!) She was a lay pastor in a church that grew and grew until the Vatican decided to close them down. They decided to keep going and to keep Mary as their spiritual leader. She has since been ordained a priest outside the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
I finally got to meet one of the mothers of my whole generation of women rabbis -- the wild, amazing Lynn Gottleib from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who does all sorts of peace and diversity work connecting Jews and Native people and others locally and is also very active in the Israeli peace movement.
Debbie Little is an Episcopal priest who runs the "Common Cathedral" in downtown Boston -- a completely outdoor church accessible to both homeless and housed people. She spoke very movingly about creating a liturgical framework which welcomes any true expression (including, she said, weeping, shouting, having a seizure or saying you are hungry…) as the content of the prayer service. And on and on I could go with each remarkable participant.
What was I doing in this crowd??? The common denominator was strongly felt and surprisingly hard to put into words. It has something to do with an effort to be permeable in our work, to be open to difference, to search for ways to build community that honors the fact that people are different from each other. It had something to do with not walling the spiritual aspect of people's lives off from their material fates. It had something to do with certain kinds of challenges we try to offer: challenges to hierarchy and privilege, challenges to the various -isms and -phobias. It had something to do simply with being marginal, working at the edges of our various traditions and not in the centers of power. It has to do with something we all feel that the world needs more of, that we all try to do in unique ways and diverse settings.
What will come from here? Like Compassionate Listening, what comes next will develop from what has already begun. It was an open-ended conversation. Ford will think about what they want to do. Meanwhile we all felt a powerful sense of connection and desire to keep the conversation going. Patty Hayes offered to make us a listserve. I've already written a bunch of brainstorms to the other women who were there. We're all thinking, churning, imagining. It feels alive.
For my part, I talked about all of you -- about how I feel like part of a community and not just its leader. I talked about working with others to build community and then allowing myself to be part of it, drawing strength and meaning from those relationships. People seemed to feel like I'm pretty lucky, and I wouldn't disagree!
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 05/02/2002 (rge)