Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
1.
To speak a true word is to transform the world. — Paulo Freire
Meeting Ground has, since its inception, been a “safe place.” This phrase was brought back to mind lately when Meeting Ground School was asked to send representatives to a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be part of the founding of a new “folk school” movement. What is a folk school? The material sent to us by our friend Frank Adams –who will be with us in May at the “Standing Together” conference– states:
“Folk schools provide working-class people with safe places where they can find within and among themselves their own definitions of their own social problems, and where they can decide what collective democratic action might generate solutions.”
John Akala, the chair of Homeless On Board, and Donna Barnette, of Meeting Ground School, attended the conference and brought back many wonderful reports about people working to build folk schools in diverse corners and cultures of our country.
Some people have been confused about Meeting Ground launching an “educational” program. It has seemed intangible and grandiose to some. But Meeting Ground School deepens and strengthens the original impulse which created Meeting Ground proper. A safe place is not just a roof. From the beginning, Meeting Ground was intended to give shelter to the homeless, but also –and even more– it was intended to give a forum for the voiceless.
There has been some concern that Meeting Ground School has heightened a tendency already too pronounced within Meeting Ground itself of giving a place of privilege to the marginal and downtrodden, sometimes at the cost of alienating old friends. But Meeting Ground has not tried either to grant privilege or to exclude. It has attempted –it still struggles to attempt– to provide a safe place for all. It attempts to create an environment in which critical, humble, loving, truth-telling can take place. For this to happen, the dialogue must be capable of including everyone. If it seems like undue privilege is being granted to the marginal, this is because dialogue which includes their truth is new and strange to us and hard to listen to, as well.
Some alarm has been expressed that Meeting Ground has not followed the prudent path of other organizations but has measured itself by the standard of “community,” following thereby a path which is difficult to predict and even harder to chart. But Meeting Ground has always been a laboratory for creating a safety out of which all of us can gain greater control over our lives. When this kind of permission is given to people to think and act on their own and with one another, no specific outcomes can be guaranteed; great mistakes will be made; upheaval becomes a familiar companion.
To choose to give ourselves this permission is not to take the path of least resistance, at all. Trying to create a safe place requires all our rigor and clarity. It requires choosing to challenge and to be challenged. It requires that we continually decide to renew our commitment to this path, despite the insistent murmurings of an old voice that tells us to give up on ourselves and on those around us.
Meeting Ground School is the logical extension of the Meeting Ground vision of a table where all may join in and where no one presides, a base human community, the beloved community. Meeting Ground School is a new turn in the road of struggling to speak truth to power and of struggling to hear that truth when it is spoken to us. Meeting Ground School is the effort to sow new seeds of self-determination and to sow them even wider than before.
2.
We should go back to our life, to our daily life, reorganize it so that society cannot colonize us any more. We have to be independent. We have to be real persons and not just victims of other people. — Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddhism is a non-theistic religion that teaches that each of us has the capacity to awaken, to be liberated. In Sanskrit the verb for awaken is buddh.
Each of us is a buddha, each of us has the capacity to awaken and to live an awakened life. It is our birthright to reclaim: to live life fully aware and fully engaged in the present moment with all of its sadness and suffering and with all of its joy and beauty.
A famous story of one human being awakening is the story of Kasyapa. One day the Buddha prepared to give a talk, when children appeared bringing lotus flowers to offer to him. When they placed them at his feet, he chose one and stood up, holding it by the stem between his thumb and forefinger. He did not say a word, but stood, smiling. At that moment, Kasyapa reached enlightenment. Sitting among those present, he began to smile, also, having realized by the Buddha’s gesture his inherent nature as an awakened being.
Enlightenment, our liberation, has many sources and occasions and means. The flower represents for us the beauty and the ordinariness of what is required to be free. Suddenly we see things afresh.
We live lives which encourage heedlessness and obliviousness. It seems like paying attention to our life would be too arduous and painful.” Better,” most of our environment seems to say, “to be distracted.”
But when we live heedlessly we are not happier. Because our lives our not in our control. We do not see deeply. Instead, we notice only the continual play of images. We react to them and are manipulated by them. We have given up our minds. We do not notice what is going on in the world, either in our own immediate lives or far away. We are bombarded with stimuli and information and, so, have a reduced capacity to recognize reality. We are unaware of ourselves and of the world. The present moment escapes us completely. Our ability to think for ourselves is run over on the information highway.
Since we no longer see deeply, but only on the surface, we misunderstand.
We internalize the structures of domination by which the present order of things is fixed, and then are surprised, if we even notice, that in Chiapas, humiliated and desperately poor Mayan people take up arms against the global tide of “free trade,” and do more to stall its progress than all of the efforts of “better informed,” more powerful people. Having evaluated at first hand the consequences of the new economic order upon their lives and the lives of others, they have had the independence to reject it completely.
If we do not trust people’s capacity to awaken, then we will go to them like the government of Mexico is going to the Zapatistas. “Well, you might have a point,” they say, “but it is much more complex than you can imagine. And violence is not the way, even though that is what got our attention, and even though we are using it, too. Lay down your arms, and we will talk about this. There are alot of good programs that we can help you with. We’ll help you build better houses and have cleaner water, maybe even electricity. Just listen to us.”
But what is really needed is to pay attention. “You surprised us,” we should say. “We were not noticing your suffering. When we did notice, we thought that you would continue to bear it, so we turned to other things that we thought more important. We are deeply sorry. Tell us what has been happening to you. Tell us how you think things should be arranged. We want to listen to you and to understand who you really are and how things can be improved.”
3.
I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition. — Eugene V. Debs
In May we are having a conference on economic justice, and we have not invited a single economist to attend. We have not done this because we dislike or distrust economists. Economists are allowed to come, too.
But we know that economists are people caught in the same great tide that carries the rest of us. Our conference is on the effect of the economy on all of us. It is our conference, a broad-based discussion by our community of what is happening to us and of how increasing numbers of us are becoming marginal. The people who are coming here from other countries and from other parts of our country are people who are working in their own communities to stem the tide. This is a conference for all of us who feel swept away and want to find something to hold on to.
If we start from below in thinking about how to organize a conference or how to build community, it is not out of a sense of reverse snobbery. It is because the people most directly affected are the ones with the most to contribute to a discussion of the situation and because they are the ones whose contributions are least frequently acknowledged.
It is also because only those improvements which we manage to win on our own will be lasting. Our liberation is in our own hands at every moment. There is always the opportunity to pursue it one step further, as there is the chance of turning away from the task.
But to the extent that we promote relationships that are mutually supportive, organizations that increase self-reliance, and actions that increase our self-determination, we are building that “safe place,” that meeting ground.
Let us raise the roof on many more such places. To raise the roof: it means to put a cover over our heads. It also means to raise our voices and to have a space in which to do so.
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