The responsibility of community

I have had the following quote on my mind lately:

"Some are guilty, but all are responsible." -Abraham Joseph Heschel

I read it while trying to put together my final essays for my Jewish Theology class during the opening notes of the organ recital for the 4th of July at the National Cathedral. I read it, and then listened to the patriotic music that celebrated the US and what it means to be American.

It struck me as a different way of framing discourse around the so-called "hot" issues of our day.

Two stories jumped to mind:

1. My mom once told me about how a former University of South Carolina football coach would make the whole team run laps if a player was late. This coach would make the offending player sit on the bench and watch while his teammates ran laps in the heat. Why? To build a sense of responsibility and community accountability. To make sure the other players were just as invested in that player making it on time as they were in themselves making it on time.

2. When I worked as a part of a facilitator team for a study abroad program, I quickly found myself chafing against the sense of responsibility I was given for my co-workers. After all, I did my job and I did it well! Why should I get yelled at for a mistake that wasn't mine? ...Because I was missing the whole point- sure, the ideal was to have a perfect session. But the real lesson was that community is about supporting and owning the actions of those around us, even when it wasn't our fault. Because the fact that we didn't do enough to support each other was my fault. And it became our problem.

At the time, I thought these might be isolated cases- after all, our society encourages individualism and the idea of a self-made person.

But after pondering the above quote from Heschel during the 4th of July service, I am reminded- we are all responsible. Just as I feel elation when my country, church, or community behaves admirably, I am equally responsible for its actions when I don't agree with them.

To build community requires that we acknowledge our own guilt in creating systems and dialogues that are unkind and demeaning to others. But it also- just as importantly- requires us to recognize that even when things aren't our fault, they're still something we need to love and work on.

I struggle with this- it is so hard to accept how deeply we are tied as human beings when I find myself repulsed by another's actions. It is so much easier to feel the commonality of us all when I agree with the other!!

But what if, instead of looking for where to place the blame, we instead asked ourselves what we could have done to support or challenge the situation lovingly? What if we asked ourselves questions before we asked them of others?

It reminds me of a question I used to ask when folks were trying to rush out of a meeting or were feeling impatient with group process- "Where are you going?"

While this started as a literal "But seriously, where are you rushing off to? Your room? The bar? Where?" it became a more metaphysical question.

Where are we going? When we say we don't have time to understand each other and listen, where are we rushing off to?

I'm starting to understand that we will probably never reach the perfected and ideal world of our dreams, our beloved community. Instead, all we have under our control is the process- the holy process of how we work together and retrain our selfish souls into becoming loving, community building pieces of a greater machine. After all, "some are guilty, but all are responsible."

I'd like to end with this quote, which addresses a practice in many Protestant church services where we "pass the peace." In my experience, this is typically a time when the clergy says "The peace of Christ be with you." The congregation answers "And also with you" and then proceeds to shake hands and greet those around us. In some places, it can be a real time of extending loving gestures to one another. In others, it can be slightly awkward shaking of hands and not moving from your seat.

"We may not even particularly like the person with whom we exchange the peace, but in this case the gesture reminds us that 'liking' is not what binds community together. To pass the peace is to allow ourselves to be bound to others by more than our fickle likes and dislikes. In passing the peace of Christ, we train our bodies to rely on that peace to transform our dislikes, our hatred, and our propensity toward violence." [Elizabeth Newman]