Coffee
Klatch
“We
need trustworthy relationships, tenacious communities of support, if we are to
sustain the journey toward an undivided life.”
Parker
J. Palmer
The
Center for Courage and Renewal uses process they call the Clearness Committee.
It is a group of people who are trained to listen and respond in a way that
assists a member in discerning their own best direction. “It helps us listen
to our own inner wisdom while drawing on the wisdom of other people…The Clearness
Committee can help you to learn the value of asking open, honest questions, to
experience how everyone has an inner teacher, and to see what happens when we
commit to the ideas of neither fixing, advising, saving, or correcting one
another.” (Center for Courage & Renewal)
For the
last few months, I have used the members of my coffee klatch as a Clearness
Committee, and they have been unfailing in their support, unflagging in their
patience and in short, have enabled me to get through a series of major changes
in my living conditions that I had struggled with for years. I can’t thank them
enough, and I can’t recommend this process enough. We have not been to the
Center for Courage and Renewal, though it looks like an intriguing place and
one that takes seriously the spiritual needs of those who come. What we are is
simply a group of friends, seekers all, who have been coming together for more
than a year—since before the pandemic began—for a couple of hours in one member’s
courtyard and talking about life and survival, age and activity, beliefs and
distortions and our individual and collective responses to the pandemic. We
talk about the things we love, and the things we fear, and we respond to one
another with gentle honesty.
All humans
need this kind of community. One in which we can be authentic, express our
honest thoughts, even when they are ugly, and know that no one is going to criticize
or belittle. There are no passive-aggressive barbs, and no left-handed
compliments—just occasional gentle ribbing and lots of laughter. I am most
fortunate to have more than one such group of people who love me enough to put
up with all my neurotic notions.
I listened to an
interview yesterday that Krista Tippet did with author, Luis Alberto Urrea,
called “Borders Are Liminal Spaces,” in which he speaks about our border wall
and how different it is side-to-side. On the Southern side, in Mexico, the wall
is decorated with art, posters, flowers—in short, they have made it beautiful and
people are joyful. On the Northern side, in America, there are trucks and grim
border patrol agents. He says that “laughter is the virus that infects you
with humanity,” and that you can’t openly reject people you have laughed
with. He got to know folks on both sides of that border wall and in the
interview talks poignantly about a border agent who told him of the difficulties
and heartbreaking scenes he had personally witnessed, and of how he had to go
home at night and flip that switch so that he could rock his own babies to
sleep.
I encourage you to listen
to that On Being interview and then decide how you feel about the people who
are desperate enough to make that trek and to risk their lives and the lives of
their children to come to America. Luis Alberto Urrea’s humor and humanity act as a Clearness Committee for us to use our inner wisdom about who we are when it comes to others on this planet, and how we want to relate to them.
If you don’t have a
coffee klatch, I hope you will start one. I don’t know what I would do without
mine.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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