On… Community #2
Why does it matter?
The Pilsdon at Malling Community, where I have been staying on a two week placement is a very special place to me.
Nearly fifteen years ago when I was a teen recovering a multitude of family bereavements, I found myself here for a week of mandatory work experience. I was fragile, burned from the trauma of loss and my heart was anxious to discover what, if anything, lay beyond the monotony of life hardened by grief.
I had found little respite in school. Strict class timetables ruled my days and exam pressure closed in on my evenings. It was a less than nourishing diet for a young person in need of reminding that life could be beautiful in spite of all the loss that living involves.
Here we are on our our wedding day, standing on the bridge over Pilsdon’s stream.
At Pilsdon I spent my week baking bread and weeding with people from every walk of life imaginable. Ex-convicts, people off the streets, recovering addicts. They had all found a home somewhere that made them feel safe, and as they extended their welcome to me, I began to feel safe again too. I began to believe that nothing in life is irredeemable.
So I returned to Pilsdon as a volunteer every week until I finished school three years later and the community became so special to me that several years later my husband and I had our wedding reception in the sheep field here.
And now, after six years working in climate change and as my six month sabbatical from my role as Hope for the Future’s Director comes to a close, I have returned here again in search of some answers.
To learn more about how community serves us and saves us, and why that matters so much right now.
Competition and Community
I went to a particularly high achieving school where the pressure to succeed academically was immense.
I was grateful for the steady focus when the waves of grief first crashed in, but after a while that empty pursuit began to erode me and it wasn’t until I joined Pilsdon that I realised why; here people are valued much more for who they are than for how they perform.
Returning to Pilsdon this time, I have realised afresh how special this is because for many of us performance review is a significant part of our main experiences of structured communal life.
We are pitted against each other as we learn to compete for grades as children in school and then for promotions as working adults. That’s not to say that there isn’t teamwork within those settings- in some places more than others- but that on the larger societal level the balance of competition and collaboration seems, at the very least, a little out of balance.
It’s hard to imagine what it would be like if things were different but with democracy in crisis, a global pandemic to manage, and the looming climate emergency, survival surely depends on our ability to work together for the good of the whole.
Our individual efforts, however great, however world-changing, will not be enough for lies ahead.
We’ll need each and every one of us, and we’ll need to know how to pool our resources to maximise impact.
Leadership and Community
Even working in a charity where we each of us have a common goal, I have felt the impacts of that imbalance.
I would say, for example, that my leadership style as Director would be best characterised as ‘all singing and all dancing.’ Essentially, I love to perform.
I have relished the challenge of helping to grow Hope for the Future from an initiative of a small cluster of churches to the national charity it is today, and I pushed myself incredibly hard personally to meet the demands which were entailed in doing that.
In a lot of ways I ‘succeeded’, but there was one essential area I felt a real sense of failing; at times I felt incredibly lonely.
It’s not that I didn’t have truly great people around me. Our Deputy Director for example, in whose hands I have confidently left Hope for the Future during sabbatical, has been an enormous source of support to me and become one of my best friends.
Myself and our Deputy Director, Sarah, at a Hope for the Future BBQ fundraiser.
But still, I often had the experience of feeling isolated. Decisions that needed to be taken, funding that needed to be found, anxieties about climate change that loomed like a constant dampener on the day.
And the more strained I felt, the harder I would push myself to perform, and the more isolated I would end up feeling.
Going it Alone
At risk of exposing something unattractive about my personality, I will admit that I have been guilty of presuming I know best how to get things done more than I should.
It’s responsible for a lot of the loneliness I have felt as Director because it created that ‘all singing, all dancing’ dynamic where I found myself increasingly unable to admit my vulnerabilities; what I don’t know, what I’m scared of, where I need help.
But at Pilsdon, I am learning that needn’t have been the case.
Here, in terms of ‘power and influence’, I am the lowest in the pecking order because I am the newest and much of my role is simply to provide some extra capacity to the community members. I turn up each morning and I am assigned my jobs for the day.
Where at Hope for the Future I have been handling budgets in excess of a million pounds and overseeing a team of twenty staff and volunteers, at Pilsdon my first job was to clean windows. Then it was to pick apples. And then to feed the pigs.
I am one small component in the wider eco-system and if I choose to sing or dance it’s not because I feel I have to but because I wish to offer something special to community life; a particularly labour intensive meal or an especially well weeded plant bed for example.
And if I need help, it is an opportunity for someone else to sing and dance.
Together We Are Made Whole
In healthy community life we are not valued because of how we perform but because of our willingness to commit our whole selves to being a part of something, and that includes all our weaknesses and vulnerabilities too.
The joy of being good at something becomes the joy of being able to offer a gift to the community, and the pain that might otherwise be felt at being ‘bad’ at something becomes the joy of knowing that others have strengths we can draw on and be nourished by also.
Pilsdon is a Christian community with prayer held three times a day, but all guests are welcome regardless of religious beliefs and with no expectation to take part in prayer.
The health of a community, then, does not rest on the capabilities of each of its individual members so much as on the community’s ability to allow potential weaknesses to become strengths because they are an opportunity for collaboration and mutual problem solving.
Building community in this way requires wisdom, such as that of Pilsdon’s leader, Viv, who I interviewed for my previous post on community.
Pilsdon itself is based in a former monastery that has a history going back nearly one thousand years, so there is an immense amount of experience here. Collective mistakes, estrangements and reconciliations, tragedies and celebrations.
There is no doubt that building community is an art, but it’s probably one of the most radical steps we can take in a culture that encourages us to keep ourselves to ourselves.
Worth and Welcome
I am still making my way through ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’, a beautiful book on grief which I quoted in my blog post from a fortnight ago when my parents’ house was flooded.
The author, Francis Weller, passionately advocates for a much deeper engagement with grief in order to experience life more fully. For Weller, a life well lived inevitably involves opening ourselves to the risk and, for some sooner than others, the experience of grief.
Francis Weller’s ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’ is a beautiful book on the ‘rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief.’
Weller is an experienced psychotherapist and describes five causes, or ‘gates of’ grief, and the fourth of these is ‘what we expected and did not receive.’
This is tied up in our evolutionary wiring for deep connection with both nature and with a whole community, or ‘village’ as Weller describes it.
We were born for that communion with the whole, but modern life has caused a severing leaving us with a grief which we all carry but which we may not even be aware of because it is normal to us now.
Weller writes, ‘what was once a seamless intermingling of body, family, community, clan, ecology, and cosmos has been reduced to a narrow realm where we live as isolated cells occasionally colliding with other isolated cells.’ (p. 58)
Weller argues that the antidote to this severing is worth and welcome. To know that we are valued for who we are, and we are wanted as a part of the greater whole.
It is often not until we actually find ourselves experiencing this, perhaps in a chance encounter with strangers whilst travelling or a shared meal with friends that lingers long into the night, that we become aware of the ache of this longing to belong.
It’s an ache I have felt whilst staying here at Pilsdon.
Sustaining Community Life
This is, of course, community life at its best.
At its worst, we can suffer pain and trauma at the hands of others that can leave us limping for life.
Community is a risky endeavour because it leaves us vulnerable. We have each of us experienced harm at the hands of others.
It is also time consuming, at least initially, and there are no guarantees that the investment will reap the benefits we might hope for.
Building community requires intentional cultivation, a commitment to trying again and trying differently, resilience to the impacts of making mistakes ourselves and a willingness to allow others to do the same.
Community is, in some ways, harder than it’s ever been before because to meet in person, particularly in large groups, is a potentially life threatening act in the middle of a pandemic.
But in other ways, the virus may have provided us with an opening because there is nothing like a world-wide lockdown to remind us of how much we need each other and of how much we miss each other when we cannot meet.
In this week’s post I have described my own journey with community over the past fifteen years- whether that be in a residential setting or my place of work- but for each of us it will be, at the very least, a little different. We each have our own challenges to overcome in allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to others.
Being in community holds a mirror up to ourselves because we see the impacts of who we are and how we act reflected in the reactions of everyone around us. It’s an intensive experience! But it holds great potential for us to find wholeness in our togetherness.
A Final Announcement
Having written so much about my experience of being Hope for the Future’s Director in this blog, it seems fitting to share that I have made the decision to step down from the role.
I was due to return from my research sabbatical this month, but I have chosen to continue with researching how to build greater emotional resilience as a means of facing the challenges presented to us in climate change.
I will miss Hope for the Future hugely, the organisation has felt like something close to family for me over the years, but I feel in myself that it’s time to have a go at something new.
I’ll be offering workshops and one to one coaching in this area, so do get in touch if you are interested in finding out more.
The Hope for the Future team at our development day last year.
About Me
I’m Jo, formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.
Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.