Letting Go and Reaching Out

I gave this talk last Saturday at the Leadership Forum at Silver Bay.

It is a bit presumptuous to arrive on Saturday morning to offer reflections on the life of a community that has been intimately engaged with this year’s work for three days already. I am grateful for this privilege and the access that a 25 year history with the Forum affords me. I would like to open with a poem by Mary Oliver.*

Some of you know that I am currently in the middle of a radiation regimen for prostate cancer, sharing the fate of an estimated one third of my fellow males in our lifetime. No great consequence; not something one would willingly choose, but hardly worthy of the frame of fate; but how much of our lives do we live, willingly chosen? Few of us are so brave and free. But few of us would label this life as fated either. For there are choices we made and those we did not make. Letting go of the choices we didn’t make is part of growing up (growing old?). Letting go.

Some of you will also know that I had the privilege to live eighteen years of my professional life on this campus; Camelot, Brigadoon, Heaven on Earth. Pure privilege. So as in the cycle of maturation, (thematically, culturally, economically), when the conscious articulation of some was that they looked to a few days or weeks at Silver Bay each year as a source of toxic cleansing, I nodded in appreciation, but really didn’t know just what was being referenced. I lived in the cleansing so to speak. Letting go.

Now as I lie beneath the computer driven beam of an x-ray knife each afternoon for a few minutes, one of the thoughts that goes through my mind is toxic cleansing. So this is what we meant. Something not right in the world has gotten in to me, but there is somewhere I can go to have it excised. Pure privilege. When this is all over, I will be clean. Letting go.

But then, I have recently read a small pamphlet by a Rochester, New York physician, Peter Mott, titled Cancer in the Body Politic. He persuasively describes what I increasingly feel to be the fragility of the world as a pathological condition; the result of cancer like behavior – or what our mutual friend Ian Mitroff calls the work of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The hardest part of my work today, as is probably true of yours at work and at home, is to sustain hope in the face of seemingly intractable complexities grounded in ignorance, greed and power. What Paul Farmer calls the pathology of power. Oh, how much we need to learn letting go.

When I left Silver Bay seven summers ago I did not know that I would come back one morning as the servant leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s oldest interfaith, multicultural peace community. Ours is a membership of women and men who recognize the essential unity of all creation and have joined together to explore the power of love and truth for resolving human conflict. Not so far removed from the core issues and purpose of this community is it? The way of love and truth…letting go of power and conflict to resolve differences. Letting go. [You are welcome to become a member!]

Those who have come back to this place for a few days each summer for a few years, a few decades, or a few generations have sometimes called this an intentional community. It is actually the intersection of a number of intentional communities, each an enrichment of our identity as we reference our faith traditions, our economic values, our political philosophies, our life shaping beliefs. Intentional communities survive profound disruptions in amazing and organic ways. We can move from childhood to near senility, from east coast to west, from Spartan existence to blessed abundance, and still feel related, still celebrate the communitas. Intentional communities survive by letting go.

Over the past six years, it has been harder to get back to Silver Bay to be a part of this community than I expected. But that has been somewhat easier to bear because every day I live out in some way something I learned in this community; I model some behavior, or analyze a situation through some lens I learned here over the past 25 years, or I reach out to some member of the community to get through the present challenge. Letting go by reaching out.

I am here today, and so are you, in no small part because of Walt Jacoby, who with his colleague Harry Brunger, saw opportunities for me that the YMCA could provide, first in Lebanon (as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam) and then on Lake George as part of the Silver Bay team. Walt Jacoby, who saw the inherent value of this conference, already 70 years old then, when the National YMCA began to loose it’s vision of the power of an intentional community and servant leadership impregnating corporate life to mitigate the forces of power and greed with love and truth. Walt Jacoby who recognized that someone’s letting go could mean someone else’s reaching out.

There is no question in my mind that the fundamental question of our future, of the survival of our species, rests most importantly in just that: impregnating corporate life with the values of intentional community and servant leadership, to mitigate the forces of power and greed with love and truth. Martin Luther King Jr. and others have said it more powerfully (e.g. see also Daniel Berrigan**), it is the triple threats of militarism, materialism and racism that we are called to finally confront if we are to build a world house that will hold the beloved community. Religion and politics, yes they are important. But in the end it is economy and the spirit which must be reconciled. Religion and politics can be instruments of that reconciliation, but it is ecos, logos and spiritus which must be reconciled. I hope you are reaching out to do this work.

I am also here today because so many of you have become so dear to me, from my sweet wife Mary, to my pastoral companion Bruce, to my mentors and role and thought models Greg and Steve, and Courtney and Alicia and Anita. No matter where we go next, what we do based on these last few days, or the heritage of a hundred years which under gird us here; we will make a difference in no small measure, by letting go of what has been and reaching out to what will be.

Peace & Love, Mark

* The poem I read, The Journey, is followed by the poem I would have liked to have read from her current collection “Red Bird” titled Of The Empire

The Journey

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save

Of The Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death

and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity

for the few and cared little for the penury of the

many. We will be known as a culture that taught

and rewarded the massing of things, that spoke

little if at all about the quality of life for

people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All

the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a

commodity. And they will say that this structure

was held together politically, which it was, and

they will say that our politics was no more

than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of

the heart, and that the heart, in those days,

was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver

Red Bird, Beacon, Boston, 2008

** Quotation from Daniel Berrigan’s The Kings and Their Gods. The Pathology of Power. William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI 2008. [A commentary on the books of Kings and contemporary politics.]

Kings 2:1-11

In such wise, we biblical folk of another time are invited to ponder a far different wisdom than is urged from the royal couch of passing.

Or yet another tack, an implication, a dangerous one. Suppose this: we choose to pass over the evidence of blood vengeance and curses, dismissing such matters as relics of another, more savage age.

A more savage age than ours?

The truth, one thinks, gives pause; it is as large and crude as a public billboard. It also allows for no illusion, no mistaking the message. In a different time (our own), blood vengeance and cursing take a form similar to the tinder which set the bones of David blazing.

A like reality. We know well, if we know anything: the many-headed hydra of our time – war, racism, contempt for the victimized, duplicitous authority, greed, domination, violent death inflicted, eye-for-eye vengeance.

And the curse: the incanting of death as “solution,” sought after, revered, worshipped; death as a chief cultural principality. Death paid tribute in the research and deployment of weapons of genocide. P. 18