One day we will be open hearted

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From today’s reading, Parker Palmer‘s Healing the Heart of Democracy: the Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit . Palmer repeats this Hasidic tale:

A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?”

The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”

Group size to the power of one

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Nancy White’s post drew my attention to the important points that Chris Corrigan makes about group size.

He  suggests that groups should be made up of one, three of five people for creative purposes (odd numbers), and made up of two or four people for “settling” purposes (even numbers). There should never be more than six people in a small group because  introverts begin to withdraw when groups get to that size and the group then begins to lose the benefits of diversity.

According to Chris, the reason smaller groups work well is because there are more “edges”. The more edges you have, the more diversity you create. The more diversity you create the more resourcefulness and sources you have. This is a principle from nature about how things combine better “when we have more ways of offering ourselves to each other”.

The concept of a group of one sounds odd in our world governed by groupthink. But it does seem reasonable to start counting group size with the number “1”. Not only does that include those who work best alone in the common enterprise, but it also acknowledges the creative tensions of intra-personal interaction. The pendulum is swinging back to recognise that “groups of one are the best way to innovate” and that larger groups are not a “good place for generating innovation”.

I often hear fellow ministers talking about the power of small groups. What we forget is that groups can be as small as one. Already congregations and organisations are made up of small groups without anyone having to try to engineer them. Rarely do the groups of one have their voice heard which means that they may not realise their responsibility or potential.

Extraversion has been the order of the day and the assumption is that we get our creative energy “out there”, through collaboration and with developed “people skills”. But, according to research by psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (you’d have to be broad shouldered to have that name on the back of your football shirt!) and Gregory Feist, most creative people in many fields are often introverted. They need solitude as a catalyst to innovation.

Susan Cain is critical of “groupthink” in a New York Times article. She quotes Eysenk’s observation that introversion fosters creativity by “concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work”.  She refers to research which suggests that group performance gets worse as group size increases and quotes organisational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “Evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.” Picasso’s take on it was that “without great solitude, no serious work is possible”.

PS Susan Cain is author of Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking

Hope springs …

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We celebrated our wedding anniversary by going to watch the film Hope springs … It is a touching story about a couple who have been married nearly as long as we have. Their relationship has become stale. The couple have lost touch with each other. There is no contact apart from the mindless peck on the cheek. They sleep in separate rooms. The film follows Kay’s (played by Meryl Streep) attempt to reconnect with her husband (played by Tommy Lee Jones).

It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination – (74% on the tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes) but this (non) touching story reminds me that there needs to be routines and structures for us to keep in touch with each other. This is true of marriage and any community. There comes a time when we can no longer say that we are in touch if our relationships are starved of physical expression.

I love  The Touching Place  by John Bell and Graham Maule. It is a beautiful song set to the tune Dream Angus.

Christ’s is the world in which we move.
Christ’s are the folk we’re summoned to love,
Christ’s is the voice which calls us to care,
and Christ is the One who meets us here.

To the lost Christ shows his face;
to the unloved He gives His embrace;
to those who cry in pain or disgrace,
Christ, makes, with His friends, a touching place.

Feel for the people we most avoid.
Strange or bereaved or never employed;
Feel for the women, and feel for the men
who hear that their living is all in vain.

Feel for the parents who lost their child,
feel for the woman whom men have defiled.
Feel for the baby for whom there’s no breast,
and feel for the weary who find no rest.

Feel for the lives by life confused.
Riddled with doubt, in loving abused;
Feel for the lonely heart, conscious of sin,
which longs to be pure but fears to begin.

Without physical expression feelings become empty. Our feelings get blown away with the wind without physical routines and structures. Community is made of touching places.

I have posted a reflection on the importance of touch by John Hull from his account of the onset of his blindness.

Touching rock

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This is from an earlier post I wrote after reading John Hull‘s incredibly moving and honest account of the onset of his blindness, Touching the Rock. He refers to the “thousands of tiny accidental happenings” which led him along the path to blindness. According to Hull, faith transforms such accidental happenings into the “signs of our destiny” by “retrovidence” rather than “providence”.

He describes his stumbling on the altar at Iona Abbey during his stay there in 1986, through which he became a WBS a “whole-body-seer”. Here he sees things for himself, sees through his blindness, and discovers how he can see things through. His seeing is full of feeling and emotion as he touches the rock.

Altar at the Iona abbey
Altar at Iona photo by Calypso Orchid

“After several nights, I discovered the main altar. I had been told about this, and I easily recognised it from the description. It was a single block of marble. Finding one corner, I ran my fingers along the edge, only to find that I could not reach the other. I worked my way along the front and was amazed at its size. The front was carved with hard, cold letters. They stood out baldly, but I could not be bothered reading. The top was as smooth as silk, but how far back did it go? I stretched my arms out over it but could not reach the back. This was incredible. It must have a back somewhere. Pushing myself upon to it, my feet hanging out over the front, I could reach the back. I did this again and again, measuring it with my body, till at last I began to have some idea of its proportions. It was bigger than me and much older. There were several places on the polished surface which were marked with a long, rather irregular indentations, not cracks, but imperfections of some kind. Could it have been dropped? These marks felt like the result of impact. The contrast between the rough depressions and the huge polished areas was extra ordinary. Here was the work of people, grinding this thing, smoothing it to an almost greasy, slightly dusty finish which went slippery when I licked it. Here were these abrasions, something more primitive, the naked heart of the rock.” (P 163).

As a post-script, he writes: “God is many and yet one, and in God there are many worlds yet one. God does not abolish darkness; God is the Lord of both light and darkness. If in God’s light we see light, then in God’s darkness we see darkness. If a journey into light is a journey into God, then a journey into darkness is a journey into God. That is why I go on journeying, not through, but into.” (p165)

Now quoting

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Like many I like to include a bon mot  at the bottom of my emails. Currently I am quoting Janice Price from World-Shaped Mission. She writes:

It is important to make ‘difference’ the beginning of the conversation not the end.

I like quotes but can never remember them (or jokes). Hence The Jog – so named originally because my running was its inspiration. Now it is more of a jog to my memory.

I like this quote about quotes from Havelock Ellis (great for student feedback, I think):

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

Turning stones

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Stone Tower III

How far skims the stone on the water?
big bounces, many bounces,
final skip
each stone weighed with outstretched arm
for howls of laughter
for cries of pain.
How deep gashes the body with violent pelt?
Turning stones on the one hand
to the other
(weaker)
turns random stones
from arsenal to cairn no stone unturned

Richard Beck posts a quote from a recent interview given by Sr Joan Chittister for the Jackson Free Press. The question was:

“So, as a woman of faith, as a monastic, how do you see your role and the role of other people of faith in the world?”

Sister Joan’s reply:

It’s a simple one: To see injustice and say so, to find the truth and proclaim it, to allow no stone to be unturned when it is a stone that will be cast at anyone else. It’s just that simple. There is nothing institutional, organizational, political about it. It says: “Where I am, you may not harm these people. You may not deride them; you may not reject them; you may not sneer at them, and you certainly cannot blame them for their own existence.”

Shard Villa (1872-1874) - stone megaphone detail

Photos by Keith Bloomfield and Don Shall

Measurement by story

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Measurement is part and parcel of the recent Olympic Games. The fastest, highest or most guarantees Gold. But measurement by number isn’t what makes life count.

I am enjoying Organic Community by Joseph Myers. He reminds us of the place of “story”. “Story is the universal measurement of life” and “reducing living organisms to a census count demeans the way we were created.”

Conversations #3

Myers reminds us that “life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away.” He quotes Peter Block, from The Answer to How is Yes:

The quality of our experience is not measured by the seconds on the clock, but by the timelessness of our experience. We fool ourselves if we ask how long it will take before we know we are, become conscious, identify with our purpose, or remember our own history in  a more forgiving way.

The things that matter to us are measured by depth. Would you assess your humanity by its pace? When I view myself as a time-sensitive product, valued for what I produce, then I have made depth, extended thought, and the inward journey marginal indulgences.

But stories represent a problem for managers. Stories can’t be managed, but numbers can. Myers again: “Churches don’t become legendary in the community grapevine via reporting of numbers. They become legendary through the sharing of their story of mission within the community.”

The photo is from  “camera baba” aka Udit Kulshrastha 

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Every year Snugbury’s Ice Cream Farm entertain Cheshire with a sculpture with a good twist of humour. Last year it was the meerkat. The previous year was Big Ben. This year it’s for the team pursuit in the Olymplicks. Mike Harper, of Harbrook Engineering, is the creator of this piece of art. It took 3 men 3 weeks to fabricate the steel, and 4 people 2 weeks to stuff the straw. The piece weighs 7 tons, is 35 feet high, with the bike alone being 8 feet tall.

a most inspiring award

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Well, blow me down. I’ve received a nomination for  a Very Inspiring Blogger Award from Ivon from his Teacher as Transformer blog.

Isn’t that lovely? And isn’t the award a great way of building community? Now, I’ve got to nominate 15 other blogs and their authors as “Very Inspiring”, by which I mean that their blogs are inspirational to me. I know it’s not going to change their life, but it’s proof to them that they are making sense – to me, at least. (And it is reassuring to know that we are making sense to others).

And it’s going to get their oxytocin levels going! Dr Love – aka Paul Zak (can I change my name?) has researched the “moral molecule”, the chemical in the blood called oxytocin. It turns out that “being treated decently causes people’s oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly. And it’s not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as “the cuddle hormone”: for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab”.

So, let’s hear it for the male voles, and for social networking. Zak recommends, according to Oliver Burkeman writing in the Guardian

we should all be doing more to boost oxytocin in benign ways. He recommends a minimum of eight hugs a day (pets count, too); massage and even soppy movies seem to work: he has done the blood tests. Interactions on Twitter and Facebook seem to lead to oxytocin spikes, offering a powerful retort to the argument that social media is killing real human interaction: in hormonal terms, it appears, the body processes it as an entirely real kind of interaction

Get pressing that like button! William James claimed that “the deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated”, and a Harvard psychologist speaks of the importance of having a praise-criticism ratio of at least 5:1. Does anyone ever complain that they are praised too much?

Award ceremonies contain suspense, appreciation and thanks. Awards are prized and hard to come by – when we think of the Oscars, Olympics and such like. But there are everyday awards that are not so hard to come by, but are equally prized and create community. I had my own New Year ceremony which you can read about here. But there are awards to be made in our everyday world. These awards are not made with fanfares or fine words, but may consist of a “thank you” or simply a smile.

I’m not going to think too hard about the awards I am going to make today, but among them are my nominations for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award. (I am only including blogs which have recent posts).

And the nominations are (in no particular order and chosen from those who post regularly):

  1. Spirit 21 – Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
  2. Inspired Beeing – Cat Jaffee
  3. The Painted Prayerbook – jan Richardson
  4. Growing up with God – Rachael Elizabeth
  5. Simon Marsh
  6. shinystuff – Jan Dean
  7. Beyond the Edge – Viv McWaters
  8. Another Angle – Stephen Cherry
  9. Lost in the North – Dave Mock
  10. Plaza – Oliver Herbert
  11. People Reading
  12. Do not dance UK – Jose Campos
  13.  On the plus side – Lynn Walsh
  14. Christopher Burkett
  15. The Six Doyles – Katherine Doyle

The rules for accepting the nominations are:

  1. Link back to the person who nominated you
  2. Post the award image to your page
  3. Tell seven facts about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 other blogs
  5. Let them know they are nominated

So here’s the award

And here are seven facts about myself:

  1. I’m part of a lovely family – Jeanette, Adam, Oliver and Leo and their loved ones
  2. I was ordained in Sheffield in 1974
  3. I am still listening to Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon after all these years
  4. I love the beach – Patara and the beaches of Wirral and North Wales
  5. I’m intrigued by ideas of leadership and ministry (nominating here Dee Hock and Meg Wheatley for Very Inspiring Author awards).
  6. I follow the ups and downs of the Foxes – Leicester City – my home town team
  7. I recommended a book by Jay Griffiths to someone yesterday – A Sideways Look at Time

Thank you Ivon for nominating me and for inspiring me to today’s awards and community building. You would have been on that list.