Abbey Church at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota.

I’m just back from three days at the monastery with a working group on community-pastors, scholars, monastics and new monastics trying to understand what it is we mean when we say we want “community” and how this desire is cultivated and directed toward the common good in our society. One of my great heroes in the American pursuit of beloved community is Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement with Dorothy Day. He was a street teacher who distilled his message into “easy essays.” I’m not sure this is yet 100 proof (as we say in NC moonshine country), but I tried to do a little distilling of what we discussed in our time together.

Toward a Definition of Community

Community is not the crowd where we are together without being known (though a crowd is fine-unless it becomes a mob).
It’s not the club where we commit without encumbrance (though a club is fine-unless it becomes a clique).
Neither is it the clan where we find safety in shared history (though one’s clan is fine, too-unless it becomes a gang… or a military superpower).

Beloved community is, instead, that fellowship in which we know ourselves as we are known in mutual dependence.
It is the membership in which we learn to take responsibility for our future in mutual accountability.
It is the circle of trust in which we know our flourishing depends upon mutual welcome.

In the summer of 2006, I was teaching eighth-grade social studies in a Seattle public school. I was 26 years old, on a career path, in a long-term relationship, and a new homeowner. Life was good, and it was time for a summer vacation. So I signed up for a weeklong retreat at the Elat Chayyim Jewish Retreat Center in Accord, New York. I thought I was getting away after a busy school year, going on vacation, learning a little, but basically relaxing and rejuvenating. All of that happened. But while I was getting away, I was getting into new possibilities for my work, my ideas, my spirituality, my social connections, and my life. Fast-forward seven years, and I’ve dedicated my work and life to the power and potential of Jewish retreats. I’ve connected with a sense of purpose within the Jewish community and the wider world that places the model of retreat – the temporary autonomous zone designed for transformation – at the center of a vision for how religion and society are evolving today.

Students at a FSM rally at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza on Dec. 9, 1964. Credit: Creative Commons/ Sam Churchill.

I walked into Sproul Hall in my fluffy pink sweater embroidered with flowers, and my blue corduroy jeans. In my ears were gold loop earrings, also decorated with flowers. My long dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail. That outfit seems to me now to be a symbol of my innocence, even naiveté.

The Free Speech Movement grew on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the fall of 1964, culminating in the sit-in at Sproul Hall, the campus’s administration building, and the arrest of participating students on December 4th of that year. It was the first major student demonstration, and is generally regarded as the beginning of the Student Movement, which spread throughout the United States and even to other parts of the world.

I remember walking around campus with my blue canvas book bag in early December, as the tension grew. I bumped into friends who, like me, supported the movement, but for a variety of reasons were not willing or able to take part in the sit-in.

When asked if she believed in God, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir responded "I believe in the Jewish people." Credit: Creative Commons/Marion S. Trikosko.

“All the calculated dates of redemption have passed and now the matter depends upon teshuvah and mitzvahs.”
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b

I am grateful to belong to a people, a culture, and a community that embrace a spectrum of religious backgrounds and beliefs. When asked if she believed in God, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir responded “I believe in the Jewish people.” Questioning and struggling with the concept of God are deeply ingrained in Judaism and literally part of the word Israel, the community of Jews, from which the country takes its name. Therefore, atheism is kosher and I am proud to be an “atheist of the book.”

Spiritually and intellectually, I believe that complex questions are almost always better than simplistic answers. Faith, whether in God or anything else, is not necessarily important; what is important is community and action, that is, doing Jewish stuff separately and together, doing good deeds. With or without God, there can be and is Judaism, reverence, spirituality, awe, the sacred, transcendence, radical amazement, mystery, miracles, community, ethics, gratitude, compassion, kindness, education, wisdom, justice, mentshlikhkayt, and so on.

At Boylston and Berkeley, 8:00 a.m., Monday April 22

Two days after the Boston Marathon bombings, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was asked in a public radio interview if there would be a permanent memorial to the victims of that horrific act. Patrick understandably felt it was too early to speculate about such a memorial – this was before the dramatic lockdown of Boston and surrounding communities. He went further to say that the most fitting tribute would be to return next year with the biggest and best marathon ever.

That surely would be a testimony to the city’s spirit, but it seems the governor, as a good technocrat, was missing the point. Fact is, people were already finding makeshift ways to memorialize the event. And if past atrocities are a guide, they’ll eventually find a permanent space for that solemn purpose.

If I didn’t know this already, I’d have found out just by standing for a few minutes near Copley Square this past Monday morning, at the intersection of Boylston and Berkeley streets.

Boylston, a crime scene, was still closed at the time. But people stood silently on a sidewalk at the corner, leaning against a police barricade in front of a popup memorial. They gazed at the flowers, flags, candles, handwritten notes, and other items left by anonymous people. They stared at three white crosses in the center of that growing memorial – in remembrance of the three who perished in the twin bombings of April 15. The shrine to eight-year-old Martin Richard was teeming with Teddy Bears, balloons, and children’s books.

For years and years I’ve been mystified by the idea of acceptance. I could point to it as a need on the list that people who study Nonviolent Communication consult for their learning and growth. I could understand, in some general sense, what people mean when they say that they want to be accepted. I even included a commitment called “Accepting What Is” in the 17 Core Commitments. Still, all the same, there was something that simply didn’t make sense. So much so, that I didn’t even know exactly how to talk about it.

The core question that was so unsettling for me is remarkably simple: What does it mean to accept something we don’t like?

One loop I would go into in trying to understand this was the experience of the person who hears, from another, “I want you to accept me the way I am.” What’s the person hearing this to do if they don’t like the behaviors that the other person does? This would come up again and again with couples, in friendships, in groups I was leading. I couldn’t shake off the idea that, essentially, there was some subtle way that the person asking to be accepted is really, deep down, asking to be liked. What is the difference?

Salvation. A word I view with suspicion. When I hear “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior,” I have to hold back a wave of revulsion. Though I know some people’s lives have been transformed for the good at revival meetings, for me, “getting saved” (which I did three times in different churches) brings up bitter anger at the adults around me and disappointment in myself. Each time, my “salvation” meant a child collapsing under intense fear, pressure, and manipulation, abandoning her true self in order to conform and be accepted. My real salvation came through therapy and therapeutic groups.

Lita's cat, Mimi, at her new home. Credit: Lita Kurth

So when the writers’ group at the church I attend gave the prompt, “salvation,” I was stuck. Finally, I decided to write about literal salvation, saving someone from a fire, from an oncoming truck, from death.

The Salvation Story

Ironically, it was a Sunday. We sat on the concrete benches under a dead tree watching the daisies and finding snails until ten o’clock when the shelter doors opened.

The woman behind the desk discussed the cat selection. One prize beast displayed in a prominent glass box was double-priced, highly desirable, and it would go quickly. We glanced. Too large. And walked on.

Chris Stedman was the very first atheist I’d ever met who was actively engaged in interfaith work. When I became aware of him a couple years ago on Twitter, he’d just been offered a position at Harvard as the Humanist Chaplain and he stood out from the thousands of people I followed because of his positive attitude and sense of humor. I found myself wanting to engage with him because he seemed to genuinely like other people. Back then, Stedman regularly drew fire from both the religious and atheist communities for daring to put forth the idea that people really ought to be able to live together peacefully, even agreeably, while maintaining vastly different opinions about life’s biggest questions.

When he announced he was going to publish a book, I knew it was going to be a game-changer. I watched him online over the past couple years as he went through is writing and editing process, and I’ve followed with what felt like a vested interest over the past few months as he’s Tweeted through his book tour. (Still no book tour dates in Austin, though! *hint, hint*) He’s still getting those same criticisms from both atheists and religious conservatives, but what is heartening is that I’ve watched as an ever-growing crowd of people who are on “Team Human” rally to him– people who are genuinely happy to share space with others they don’t always agree with. People who are like me–who see diversity of thought and belief as a benefit to humanity, not a liability.

Surrounded by the usual code words for these holidays – “freedom from slavery” for the first, “resurrection and new life” for the second – this question may seem at the least silly and at worst an exercise of blasphemous anti-religiosity.

Yet it is actually a serious question. Consider that while freeing the Jews all, yes all, the Egyptians’ first born – from that of the Pharaoh to the Pharaoh’s servants to the Pharaoh’s pet cat – had to die. And consider that Christianity seems to require the suffering and death of an innocent.

That is why some people not under the spell of scriptural sanctity have had critical thoughts. Even as authentic member of the club as Holocaust survivor and extensive commentator on Jewish tradition Elie Wiesel was deeply pained that the liberation of the Jews required the slaughter of innocent Egyptians. And Matthew Fox, originally a Catholic priest and now an Episcopal one, asks comparable questions about what he considers his faith’s over emphasis on sin and death and lack of appreciation of creation and love. Not to mention radical Christian feminists who challenge what they think of as patriarchy’s love affair with violence.

My last blog ended by comparing our lives to a song, and with the reflection: But if we live with awareness and gratitude, compassion and love, we will face the end of the song with grace, knowing that the composer and performer is not us, but forces vastly larger, more creative, and (almost) infinitely more enduring.

I’ve been asked to expand on this thought. What are these ‘forces’? How are they larger and more creative and enduring?

We can start small. Walking my dog this morning through narrow, hilly neighborhood streets, I heard the brilliant “pyou pyou” of a cardinal standing on a tree limb about twenty feet over my head. The bird was only about seven inches long, probably weighed less than two ounces, with a small pointed beak surrounded by quarter inch of black, a tuft of feathers for a pointed crown, and a shockingly red breast and wings. “How does it do that,” I thought, “this tiny thing making a noise that can be heard for blocks? A call louder than the loudest whistle you ever heard from that friend in high school who could put two fingers in his mouth and bring forth a shriek that made people cover their ears and would stop cabs in the street.”