Afterword

There is sunshine from Cardiff to Norwich, and light winds, after days of rain, so I cycle to meeting wondering if a Moon-goddess photo is possible, a little concerned about my breathlessness, and pushing myself. I thought about it a little during meeting, and during the Afterword explained what I wanted: the moon visible just above the horizon for trompe l’oeil photos while the Sun was still up for lighting: flash does not work at 25 yards, and that is the distance from a person where the person’s head appears about the size of the moon.

Afterword. After meeting, we say our names, and may if moved share something on our minds. Three of us have been to lectures in London on peace: former bishop of Oxford Lord Harries spoke of Just War theory. They disapprove. Well, it is one thing to take the perfect pacifist view, but people in politics must face their problems in their own way, and may find pacifism ignorant rather than principled. Disarmament negotiators improve things steadily, which is a moral good, but pacifist posturing and saying that we should get rid of all weapons immediately does not contribute to that end. Such thoughts run in my mind. Then I talk of moon photos-

just after Kate has shared about her friend in Homs, and how desperate he is, and how concerned she is for him. He had hoped to escape to Turkey, but this does not seem possible. From that to using the moon as a halo. Crass, or what?

From a Scott Peck Community Building perspective, I would say this indicated pseudo-community: we observed people sharing highly personal emotional things, and then these things being ignored. In Community we were together, feeling with each other. In Meeting, so much of the time, I am with myself, rather than with God or with the people there. I simply observe this, not moved just now to rail at my worthlessness or the failure of the process, or even desire it to be otherwise, though otherwise is possible. Cycling home I noticed increasing cloud cover, and then found moonrise was at 7.20, well after sunset. Liz has arranged that we may send money to Kate’s Syrian friend.

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My post Fetishes has had views almost daily since I published it. Wxhluyp is keen on “captions”, he says: apparently people share porn photos and write captions applying their own sexual fantasies to the image. Now among my search terms I find “spiritual discipline of kneeling”- polish the halo, how spiritual am I- but also “erotic spanking sissy art”, “emasculation fetish” and “forced orchiectomy humiliation captions”. This is a recondite fantasy, and if you pitched up at the Northern Concord, the Manchester transvestite club, you might not find people willing to talk about it, yet on the Net people may share it with like-minded souls, unafraid, finding a community of sorts, though nothing face to face in real life.

Seamus Heaney

I get down my copy of Station Island, and look at my inscription on the first page. Stephen Languish, 7th May 1989. I had almost completed my postgraduate diploma.

I had not read it, really. I may have forced myself to look at the words, one after another, hurriedly so I could lie to myself that I had, perhaps. I wrote in my diary on 7 May that I had got it: “One needs to read modern poetry, if only so as to drop names” but did not write about it again that month.

As I thought: this was Culture, and Culture is a good thing. But Heaney was an Irish Catholic, the Enemy, the Terrorists: at the absolute best deeply suspect. The book made no impression on me at all. I did not see the value in it. Unlike my battered copy of TS Eliot Collected Poems (Stephen Languish 2 8 86) it is only battered from being moved from house to house.

Around 2000, at the Community Building weekend- too soon for me after Good Friday 1998, the IRA had not decommissioned- I met Tom Deevy, also known as Christopher Condren (I have no idea why or when he used the different names) and said to him something like, You’re Irish Catholic, you’re the enemy, and yet- you’re not; and he said he felt something similar.

Celebrate that moment of openness. Celebrate the opportunity, and that I took it, and won, and recognised, that connection and that divide. I had been so chained up, how could I be otherwise; This has been so difficult! The pain of it! I am not chained like that, now. Why should these poems have any effect on this racist homophobe?

Then there was the BBC documentary. I videoed it, because, still, this is Culture, and Culture is a Good Thing. Kirsty Wark and Melvin Bragg and others talk of Heaney reverently, and there are extracts from his TV documentaries and interviews, and I half-watched part of it, while playing with my computer.

Then this morning I watched the rest of it, and saw- how beautiful he is! He was a voice against death, and- I must not be too harsh on that earlier I, but- I could not see it, because it was important that the Right Side win. I see it now. I am glad I see it now

So, Station Island. Much thicker than the average slim volume. The title poem is a long poem in twelve parts over thirty pages. The first part, of five-line stanzas, each line 4-7 syllables long, with clauses and sentences ending mid-line, seemingly randomly- these statistics are actually the best way I can give my impression of it-

It introduces three characters: Simon Sweeney, tinker and Sabbath-breaker; a crowd of shawled women; and a Narrator, split between self-as-child and self Now. Trapped in my ideas of clear, defined categories, Good and Bad, rather than Good and Good, of course I could not understand it.

At last, perhaps I will read it.

Community Building

“Community building” following the ideas of Scott Peck is a theory of group work. We sit in a circle and speak as moved, for a weekend. Peck’s theory is that we cycle through four stages:

Pseudo-community, where we behave to each other as we might at a party with people we know slightly. We are on our best behaviour, showing a mask to the world.

Chaos, where we explore our differences frankly and openly. We may try to “fix” another participant, making them how we know they ought to be. We argue, we express hurt which is often not heard. If we participate in this to the edge of the comfort zone, showing ourselves completely, we may proceed further. If it just gets too uncomfortable we may retreat to pseudo-community for a sense of safety.

Emptiness, the stage of shedding the parts in me which block the process. I shed my illusions and demands on myself and others. If there is more of the work to be done, we may return to chaos. If enough of us do enough of the work, we move forward to Community.

Community, in this scheme, is a sense of being in the moment together, accepting each other and ourselves, able to share deeply.

Rather than moving forward from Chaos to Emptiness, we may escape it into Organisation, where we explicitly or implicitly accept rules for working and being together. This prevents forward movement. This part of Peck’s theory directly contradicts the tag, “Storming- norming- performing” where chaos leads to rule-making, which leads to productivity. There can be wise, creative and liberating rule-making, but it is less than is possible for free human beings.

Ideally, Quaker worship, including our decision making which is done during a meeting for worship, cycles between Emptiness and Community. In decision making we may disagree, but we are attached to The Good rather than our own understanding of it, so the group uses the wisdom of all its members. Unfortunately, this is very difficult. Quakers’ deep discomfort with chaos means that if we cannot empty properly we flee to increasingly shallow pseudo-community, with all conflict swept under the carpet until it explodes.

Peck started the Foundation for Community Encouragement in the US, to organise workshops around this model. In the early 1990s, people from the US came to train people in Britain to facilitate this work. In 1999, a friend who had done one of the weekends recommended it to me, and I went to a Christian CB weekend facilitated by an Episcopalian nun, ES. I went to a further weekend over new year 2000, and the facilitation training in May 2000. I then joined the Facilitator Training Group, which met for weekends three times a year, and which merged with the “Holding Group” to form the “Core Group” a few years later.

Here, I feel, the difficulty of making decisions using this model caused it to collapse. We got stuck in old patterns of conflict, no-one “emptying” enough to resolve them. Knowing and liking each other, we made decisions from what I call deep pseudo-community: we have the friendship, we can make a decision good enough to get by, rather than the decision from the basis of our wisdom and love.

If you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself. I just did not. Each time the core group came round, I would assess whether I could contribute anything to it in the state I was in, and regularly concluded that I could not. When I was nominated to facilitate it the first time, I and my co-facilitator did not do the work to get into community together beforehand. We established a very shallow working relationship which broke into chaos in the middle of the weekend. Later he phoned me and told me that he had found me attractive, and that he had found this a threat to his masculinity. When, later, I had my operation he sent an email to the whole group including the words, “Ah, Clare. Welcome back- what’s left of you.” He left the group.

I finally left the group over irreconcilable differences with Mike, perhaps our most creative and hard-working member. He organised the first week-long “Facilitating Ourselves” gatherings, where thirty of us would have a CB circle each morning and evening, hang out together in the evening after, and spend the day in Open Space. Open Space is a format where any person may propose a topic for a sub-group, the whole group then negotiates whether any of these can be amalgamated and which will go ahead, and “butterflies” can move between the sub-groups.

Mike also came up with a model for conflict resolution, where two people could state a position on their conflict, and then go away with supporters to discuss what the other had said, and decide what they wanted to say next. His latest idea for circle work involves a group who seek to get to Community, and discuss how they are trying to get there and where they get instead.