Without Vision, We Wither…
If you didn’t know, I curate this dope-ass community called “The Crowded Table.” Each week I post new material for folks to engage with to build their spiritual practice. This past month we’ve been on Experience, and how it can be believed. Today I posted this newsletter that I wanted to share with you too. It contains some juicy ideas on healing from our pain and building the communities that we really want.
"For decades, we have consistently been using the wrong definition of 'community' to build our spaces and it's led to this phenomenon: we always define community as people who share our experiences and not people who are working towards a similar goal. That will only lead to exclusionary, reactionary communities that replicate whiteness over and over again.
"This is the central identity politics. There's nothing wrong with relating to people. The problem becomes when you build your entire liberation movement off of it. The moment you arbitrarily decide that someone is too weird to. be a part of your community and doesn't share enough of your experiences, you create a direct line of attack from your oppressors to you. It happens literally every time."
–@Arguablysomaya on TikTok
The above text is from a TikTok that I came across recently and it really helped me articulate somoething I've been mulling over for what feels like a season or two. Why is the exvangelical and many post-faith spaces so white? Why does it seem that the same bullshit keeps coming up in these spaces from time to time? Why does it seem just as brutal as the spaces we left?... Why are people so mean? And can we do anything about it?
This quote here... filled in the gaps.
The biggest issue for those of us who leave toxic Christian spaces and try to make community with only folks who left that space is that our bonds are just over the shit that hurt us. We have a common past that was definitely bad, and it is so good for us to talk about it, and process it. However, if in our desire to deeply understand our pain we lose sight of the goal of releasing it, we are left in a mere echo chamber of traumatized individuals who, very likely unbeknownst to their own damn self, perpetuate the shit they left.
Richard Rohr has said in a few places that if you do not transform your pain you transmit your pain. If you do not work through it, and learn to let it go, learn new healthy practices of living life, you inevitably pass on the pain.
It is a fixation on the pain of what happened to us without a vision for what we are capable of that keeps many of us divided. It is a desire to control our safety by overanalyzing our past and projecting those fears into the future which keep us from enjoying the Present, that keeps us from an awareness of Love's Presence. It is a longing for justice that looks like revenge. It is a harsh punishment for those who get out of line with a new fundamentalism, leaving little room for mistake or error or apology or healing. It is an obsession with other people's lives instead of an obsession with our own...
This is what has led to SO. MANY. BLOW-UPS. In our little communities and circles around us and adjacent to us. And also... this isn't exactly our fault. We live in this wild world which has traumatized us, and left us mostly under-resourced. It's no wonder we have such a hard time organizing our selves. We can barely organize our own thoughts and feelings sometimes.
Then the dust settles from whatever huge social explosion, and we trudge on trying to... just keep going I guess? Once again, ending with people ultimately picking "sides" and splitting up like we did our church split yesterday.
I am not wanting to do this anymore. And I do not want that to be the way this community exists.
I do not want The Crowded Table to be a place to merely lick our wounds but to heal them. I do not want this space to be a place of wallowing in sorrow, but a place to meet our sorrows with deep compassion so it may be transformed into joy and acceptance. I want this to be a space, even if it is mostly online, for us to learn how to be whole people, where we learn how to forgive ourselves and the world, where we find better ways to be spiritual people.
Proverbs 29:18 says that where there is a lack of vision, people languish. People wither.
Too often then, that idea, that verse, in particular, is taken to mean that EVERYONE MUST BE OF ONE MIND! It was used at my church to tell us what we should live up to, how we should behave, and that descent and protest was not welcome. But that's not what I take from it now.
If I were to articulate a vision, a common goal that we are all working towards, for The Crowded Table, it would be that we seek to heal ourselves through spiritual practice, and from there we change our lives for the better. I don't espouse any belief system or dogma. I don't think you need salvation from anything except maybe the incredibly small life you've been living.
And yeah, I wanna have fun while we do it because what's the point if you are not enjoying yourself? But over all, if our common goal is to heal, to find new ideas about God, to explore the vastness of the Divine, to practice a better way of living, to encourage one another as best we can... if those are our common goals then I'm not worried about this space.
My hope is that you would rediscover you connection to what we call God, and that you would experience more peace in your life through the cultivation of a practice. And it is my promise to you that if you begin to build your life in such a way that you care about how you feel, and practice thoughts that brings you back to Peace as often as possible which lead you to actions that bring you joy... you start with this one thing, of taking a little time for yourself each day, you will improve the quality of your life.
This is a "participate as much as you'd like" kind of space. There will be things offered, but you're under no obligation ever to participate. But you're missing out on some possibly rich experiences and connections. My hope is the things I help curate in here are things that are going to be helpful in your spiritual journey and to remind you that you are God's Wonder, fully made.
If that sounds like something you want, stick around. :)
