Spotlight: Fall 2002

Start talking!

“There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that’s when the process of change begins.

“Yet it’s not easy to begin talking to one another. We stay silent and apart from one another for many reasons. Some of us have never been invited to share our ideas and opinions. From early school days we’ve been instructed to be quiet so others can tell us what to think. Others have soured on conversation, having sat through too many [bad] meetings. . . .

“But true conversation is very different from those sorts of experiences. It is a timeless and reliable way for humans to think together. Before there were classrooms, meetings or group facilitators, there were people sitting around talking. . . . We can take courage from the fact that this is a process we all know how to do. We are awakening an ancient practice, a way of being gathered that all humans intimately understand.

“We can also take courage in the fact that many people are longing to converse again. We are hungry for a chance to talk. People want to tell their stories, and are willing to listen to yours. . . . Change doesn’t happen from someone announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or when they respond to someone’s dream of what’s possible.”

—Margaret J. Wheatley in the Utne Reader, August 2002.

Faith that (doesn’t?) last

“It’s tempting to conceive of the religious world—particularly when there is so much talk of clashing civilizations—as being made up primarily of a few well-delineated and static religious blocs: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and so on. But that’s dangerously simplistic. It assumes a stability in the religious landscape that is completely at odds with reality. New religions are born all the time. Old ones transform themselves dramatically. Schism, evolution, death and rebirth are the norm. And this doesn’t apply only to religious groups that one often hears referred to as cults. Today hundreds of widely divergent forms of Christianity are practiced around the world. Islam is usually talked about in monolithic terms . . . , but one almost never hears about the 50 million or so members of the Naqshbandiya order of Sufi Islam, which is strong in Central Asia and India, or about the more than 20 million members of various schismatic Muslim groups around the world. Think, too, of the strange rise and fall of the Taliban. Buddhism, far from being an all-encompassing glow radiating benignly out of the east, is a vast family of religions made up of more than 200 distinct bodies, many of which don’t see eye to eye at all. . . .

“The fact is that religion mutates with Darwinian restlessness. Take a long enough view, and all talk of “established” or traditional faith becomes oxymoronic: there’s no reason to think that the religious movements of today are any less subject to change than were the religious movements of hundreds or even thousands of years ago.”

—Toby Lester in Atlantic Monthly, February 2002.

Why don’t we love?

“Inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.”

—James Baldwin, author, in an interview with Jere Real.

It’s up to you . . .

“You can blame people who knock things over in the dark, or you can begin to light candles.”

—Paul Hawken, author, quoted in The Sun, April 2002.

Rebel against the clock

“Time is not found in dead clocks and inert calendars, time is life itself: in ocean tides and the blood in the womb, in every self-respecting child, in the land itself, in every spirited protest for diversity and every refusal to let another enslave your time, in the effervescent gusto of carnival life; life reveling in rebellion against the clock.”

—Jay Griffiths in the New Internationalist, March 2002.