Education, Organization, People, Three Rivers

The value of abundant simplicity

With Lehman’s catalogs on the center of the table (“simple products for a simpler life”), we embarked on this week’s core values conversation around “abundant simplicity.”  Our first exercise was to picture and do a bit of writing about someone we know whom we admire as living “the good life.”  After sharing about some of the people we chose and why, we entered the next level of questioning: how does that vision of life compare with the vision we were raised with?  All of this was to help us remember that our vision of the good life — what kind of home, shared with whom, what kind of food, how we spend our time and money, and so on — comes from somewhere.  It’s culturally formed (see the Ched Meyers’ article we read in preparation).  And a desire for “simplicity” can easily become as materialistic and stressful as a life of unfettered consumerism (see one of the articles we read for today, “Beware of toilet envy”).  Simplicity is about stuff in some ways, but it’s more about the purity of our hearts and the values that anchor all of our choices.  Meister Eckhart provided a good reminder of this, as we read the following quote that appeared in a back issue of Geez Magazine:

Asceticism is of no great importance. There is a better way to treat ones passions than pile on oneself ascetic practices which so often reveal a great ego and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness. If you wish to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more subject, then place on it the bridle of love.

*cino’s core values expression of abundant simplicity is this: “The good life is characterized by sharing, resourcefulness and eating together often.” Basically: we need each other, we are better together and we reject the myth of scarcity that is so often used to manipulate us into acting out of fear for the sake of our own self-preservation.  There is much abundance in living simply in order to live generously, in finding creative ways to connect and thrive that don’t involve excessive amounts of money.

But the good life, we we’ve come to experience it, is about more than just abundant simplicity; it’s about all of the core values we’ve been studying together — experiential learning, compassionate listening, radical hospitality — and about being part of a community of people who wrestle with these ideas and practices together, in the midst of brokenness, around a kitchen table.

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*cino Work, Organization, People, Three Rivers

Welcome 2014 *cino summer interns!

They started rolling in in May.  First, Seth arrived to begin working at a local farm and help get the community garden started.  Then, Alexandra moved in and promptly began pitching in on our Farmers Market table.  Nate was the next to arrive and it wasn’t long before we were briefing him on Community Fun Night and handing him a paint scraper.  And finally, after driving 30 hours straight, Kate joined us, willingly diving in to the many tasks that need to happen here at the Huss Project before special events.

This summer, we welcome four interns who have agreed to add their talents, stories, creativity, humor and heavy lifting power to the *cino team for a season.  Interns volunteer 20+ hours per week to help out with whatever tasks need to be done.  This work includes plenty of physical labor — mowing, weeding, cleaning, deconstructing — but it also includes responsibilities coordinated specifically around each intern’s skills and interests.  Seth, a student at Grand Valley, will be serving as our agriculture intern, overseeing the community garden and the Farmers Market.  Alexandra comes to us from Spring Arbor and will put her editing and design skills to work on our communications and promotions team.  Kate, who attends College of the Atlantic, and Nate, who just graduated from Calvin College, will be helping out with our special events, including summer lunches, Community Fun Nights and Huss Future Festival.

Each summer group has a unique dynamic, and we are already thoroughly enjoying this particular group’s playfulness, curiosity and easy-going willingness to pitch in and help.  We look forward to continuing to get to know each other as we work side by side in partnership with our neighbors toward the flourishing of Three Rivers and the self-fulfillment of serving and learning in community.

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Education, People

The value of radical hospitality

For our weekly Garden of Your Mind session today with *cino volunteer staff, we explored our core value of radical hospitality — a timely conversation as we begin summer lunches and Community Fun Night this week.  A past catapult editorial served as pre-reading, along with some relevant daily asterisk quotes about hospitality:

And finally this one from Henri Nouwen, worth quoting in full here because of its deep impact on the wording we chose for the *cino core values:

Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.  Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.  It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.

To frame our discussion, we read part of the chapter on welcome from Community and Growth by Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities.  As we read the selection paragraph by paragraph, we used a large sheet of paper to record the qualities of radical hospitality, as we were hearing them in this text, as well as the qualities of its opposite, which got summarized as “exclusion,” whether intentional or unintentional.

The conversation allowed us to visit some important themes as we get into gear for summer programming, including the hospitality of setting good boundaries, the need to balance identity and belonging, and how to cultivate relationships of mutual teaching and learning with each other and our neighbors.  Enjoy these images of our brainstorm, and come experience and share radical hospitality in person this summer at the Huss Project!

 

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Education, Organization, People

The value of compassionate listening

(Father Greg Boyle, Director of Homeboy Industries)

This summer, our volunteer staff is spending one hour each week exploring each of *cino’s ten core values in turn.  Last week, we talked about “experiential learning,” with reference to the article “The play deficit” by Peter Gray.  This week, in anticipation of summer lunches and Community Fun Nights beginning next week, we explored “compassionate listening,” which is also important to consider as we all get to know each other and prepare to give one another grace during a very busy season of activities.

There was no homework in advance this week, though Rob pointed out the relevance of the recent article on reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Instead, after reiterating the importance of inclusive conversation even as we explore *cino’s roots in the Christian tradition, we began with a quote from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe:

It was the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man’s table; and he sat down, at first, with some constraint, and awkwardness; but they all exhaled and went off like fog, in the genial morning rays of this simple overflowing kindness.
This indeed, was a home, — home, — a word that George had never yet known a meaning for; and a belief in God, and trust in His providence, began to encircle his heart, as, with a golden cloud of protection and confidence, dark, misanthropic, pining, atheistic doubts, and fierce despair, melted away before the light of a living Gospel, breathed in living faces, preached by a thousand unconscious acts of love and good-will, which, like the cup of cold water given in the name of a disciple, shall never lose their reward.

Next, we participated in an exercise to articulate our own interpretations of “compassionate listening.”  Without a cheat sheet to know what the “official” *cino statement is, the task was to write one to two sentences that elaborate on what compassionate listening has meant in our experience.  The group came up with such beautiful interpretations, I wanted to share them here:

  • Loving well by honoring the stories, struggles and suffering of those around us; hearing not just words but meaning.  Sharing in the experiences of good, bad and in-between of another in some mysterious way joins us together and removes “the other,” replacing it with “us.”Equalizing the plane between storyteller and story listener, being open to the story that each individual has to share.
  • We rely on our ears before our mouths, to discover what we share in suffering before daring a word of hope.
  • Listening deeply to the stories of our neighbors to step out of our own experience and into theirs.  Learning together with our neighbors how our stories are connected.  “We’re one, but we’re not the same.”
  • Take in the words of another person without judgment, giving them your full attention.  Respond when needed, but keep the conversation focused on their needs, not your own.
  • Compassionate listening is active and present. You should acknowledge your
    own privilege and let others tell their stories without interruptions, cast
    aspersions, or judgement. There is no such thing as a complete truth; even
    if you’re being as honest as you know how to be you can still tell a truth
    that I don’t recognize as truth. I can’t know your truth because I am not
    you and you cannot know my truth because you are not me.
  • Silence even when the companion is silent.
  • Sitting in the ashes alongside.
  • Attention without response planning.
  • Listening with a conscious ear to disregard social, mental, belief, and racial barriers.
  • Recognizing the crucial difference between a time for advice and a time for understanding.
  • Recognizing the protagonist of each life.
  • Giving one’s attention without expectation or agenda.
  • Creating space for empathy and understanding to grow within one’s own heart and mind.
  • Actively pursuing empathy and understanding.
  • Temporary submission of one’s voice to another’s.
  • Being present and still so one may become vulnerable to the words and stories of another; opening oneself up to the possibility of being changed by another’s words/stories.

It was fascinating to hear the intersections and complementary differences in our various interpretations — a concrete experience of why we need each other.  In the midst of the conversation, we looked at the actual wording included in the core values — “We seek humble kinship with those who are suffering” — and then watched a video of a talk by Father Greg Boyle, who has been a major influence on our notions of kinship (or friendship) as the basis for authentic relationship at the margins.

As both new interns and veteran volunteer staff members, it was wonderful to have this time of reflection as we head into the summer’s activities, imagining a circle of compassion, and then imagining that no one is standing outside of that circle.

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