Monday, November 7, 2011

development.

This probably goes without saying, but I haven’t been blogging much. Or writing. But every time I sit down to write something, it ends up sounding very similar to what I was saying three weeks ago. Yesterday I sat down to write an e-mail to a friend, but after writing a paragraph I realized that my e-mail was almost exactly the same as an e-mail I sent her a month before.

The external change has been obvious. Working in a church is new. Community organizing in indigenous communities is new. Public education around sustainable agriculture is new. Living in Spanish is new. Resistencia is new. The food is new. The support systems are new. The options for how to spend my free time are new. Almost every day I experience a new situation or setting or question or event.

But even though the external change has been profound, the internal change has taken more time. Every once in a while I am confronted with an aspect of this change, but something I learned quickly was that understanding what has changed doesn’t mean I have any idea what to do about it. For example, a couple of days ago a friend asked me if I was growing spiritually.

Um…probably?

The thing is, the things I used to do for spiritual growth and fulfillment – prayer services at church, conversations with certain friends, meetings with my spiritual director – aren’t options in this new setting. I know what I’m missing. I know that I’ve lost the consistent space for community prayer, the sounding boards for new ideas and the spaces to talk about old questions. What that leaves me with, though, are questions and needs, but not necessarily with any answers. Recognizing (and even embracing) the change is one thing. Moving from the loss of certain things to the acquisition of new processes, routines and systems seems to be a whole different story.

I’m currently in the middle of The Way We Were: A Story of Conversion and Renewal by Joan Chittister. It's a book about how a particular group of nuns confronted the effects of large-scale social change in their small religious community and their personal spiritual practices. A few days ago I was reading and came across the following passage:

It was a time of transition, of course, but to what?

Simply dismantling the assumptions of a past era, we soon learned, had little or nothing to do with making a successful bridge to a new one.

In the first place, new eras evolve slowly. They do not appear overnight. Scripture is clear about it: the chosen people wandered for forty years in the desert “until the older generation died off.” Social transition demands that people be given the opportunity not simply to put down old ideas but to try out some new ones along the way.

In the second place, people must be ministered to tenderly in times of great change. None of us is independent of the ideas that formed us. They tell us what our world is like. They tell us our proper place in it. They tell us who we are. To lose those definitions is to lose the very mainstays of our lives. To lose all of them at once is even more traumatic.

Development of ideas and the development of people go hand in hand, then. All the time we are exploring new ways to go about life, it is equally important that we support in their personal growth the people who will be most affected both by the loss of the past and the demands of the new future.  After all, however irrelevant the things of the past may now be, they are at least familiar. However enticing the future may seem, it is at best unpredictable.

Last week I spent a day in the home of a community developer who works with indigenous communities living in and around a town called La Leonesa. Until 1991, the economy of La Leonesa and nearby Las Palmas was almost entirely dependent on a local sugar mill. In ‘91, after 109 years, the mill went bankrupt and left many people without jobs and at risk of being evicted from the land on which they were living, which had previously been owned by the sugar company. The indigenous communities organized and were able to take control of the land. As it turned out, though, that was only the very beginning of the process. After over 100 years of a local economy sustained almost entirely by sugar production, the communities had to re-learn how to use their land to produce the things they needed. It was a slow process, defined most often by long periods of information gathering and evaluation.

More than anything else, this man emphasized the slow process of development. Simply re-gaining ownership of the land on which they lived did not mean they knew how to best utilize the land as they worked to rebuild the local economy. And learning the technical aspects of running a ranch or dairy farm did not immediately lead to the shift in social customs necessary when moving from one general lifestyle to another. For example, in the past few years, a major topic of discussion has been finding ways to teach younger generations the knowledge needed to sustain an agricultural lifestyle and instilling in them pride for agricultural work. The buy-in of younger generations is a necessary part of creating a sustainable economic system, but this wasn’t something they could simply make happen. It has been a process full of many questions and a lot of learning.

I was struck by the ways that the experience of the community in La Leonesa spoke to the feelings I had been having for the past couple of weeks. It was a good reminder that this year is a process, and that I will not just know how to live well in this new setting, but will have to take the time to learn, to adjust, to try different approaches and evaluate the experiences I’ve had. I also hope it will be a lesson I will take with me as I continue to work in the world, pursuing justice and supporting community growth wherever I end up. After 20 years, the people of La Leonesa are still committed to growth, still asking questions, and still willing to acknowledge and address their weaknesses. Beautiful.

All my love.