“Who do you love?” Wisdom Christianity and Community Organizing
by Liz Graves
I recently returned from a week at a retreat center in Louisiana where I attended a training with almost a hundred professional and volunteer community organizers from around the country. Each of us is part of a network called PICO, People Improving Communities through Organizing. The network is made up of local federations which organize from within religious congregations. I was struck over the course of the training at how the model I was learning fit in with our ideas about wisdom Christianity.
Wisdom Christianity, as I understand it, is the idea that practices of contemplation and the work of God's justice are two sides of the same coin, that each inspires and indeed requires the other. The PICO organizing model sits at the gravitational center of that coin, drawing its power from the interplay between the faces. From PICO's mission statement: “When people of faith learn how to participate effectively in public life they become makers of history, transforming our communities and transforming themselves.” It's faith formation con democratic formation.
In Bishop Marc's Jan 21 post here he mentioned three spheres of our lives: global community, local community, and individual consciousness. I believe it's in our work in the world that we get the lesson plan for our life of prayer, so I'll work from the outside in.
On the global scale, we're thinking about how to best enter into companion diocese relationships. Bishop Marc wrote that to live in our companion diocese relationships “without taking offense, being afraid, without acting from within white privilege, and. . .without giving up on the relationships. . . will require the virtue of stability to be something for which we pray.” Even the global work is inner work! The PICO principle at work here is that power rests in relationships; the power to address global human suffering and injustice, but first and last and along the way to learn from each other how to treat each other well.
The local community is the heart of PICO's work. Our practice is one-to-one conversations with folks to uncover individual self-interest and the collective voice, the community's self-interest. My goal when I do these “1-1s” is the same as my goal when I sit in meditation: to see past assumptions and illusions, to discover where God is working, to discover connectedness and rejoice in it. Getting up from the conversation, or from the meditaion cushion, we start to think about how to act in light of that connection.
The best PICO principle, I think, for inner work is, “there are no permanent allies and no permanent enemies.” We recognize that our relationships are more stable than one good or bad day, whether the relationship is with the mayor or with an inner child. The other is not going anywhere (neither is God), so we have the time and space to do the work of reconciliation.
Not surprisingly, the inner work points back out. We find the strength in relationship, with our brothers and sisters and with God, to reach out and do the hard and scary things. The more courage an action requires, the more clearly we feel divine energy flowing through us as we do it. Our hearts have to be broken to push past our fear of failure; Mother Theresa prayed, “may God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” Living eucharistically is about coming together to be broken and shared so we can be ever more courageous. As Rev. Bob Honeychurch says, God doesn't ask us to be successful, God asks us to be faithful. The world needs saving; what are we waiting for?
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Liz Graves is an intern at St. Mark's in Palo Alto, leader with PICO through Peninsula Interfaith Action, and member of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Diocese of California.
