Sometimes, "intentional community as a metaphor for life" is really unsubtle.
Tonight, I cooked dinner in the midst of soul chaos. We had a frightfully bad house meeting on Sunday. It wasn't explosive-bad -- we all behaved ourselves and abstained from violence and name-calling -- but there was fundamental disagreement about something that lies very close to my heart. In that meeting, our modified consensus process manifested one of its weaknesses: the ability for one or two stubborn people to overturn the decision of the majority. And in this case, I feel like those one or two people did it for reasons of power, not conscience. And the end result was that we made a decision that I (and many others from the house) feel is deeply and fundamentally flawed and alters the entire character of our organization.
Tonight, I cooked dinner for this ragtag family out of commitment, not love.
Tonight, those of us who could face each other sat around the dinner table together and ate our communal food (cooked out of commitment, not love), and we had to look each other in the face and see that we were people and not platforms; that we were friends, not walking issues; that we were composed not simply of stubbornness or emotion or fear, but of divine grace and holy breath. It was a damn tough realization.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
sometimes reluctantly...
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1 comment:
There's a reason why very few things actually run by consensus... It's an idea that denies the fundamental selfishness of the human condition, and I don't mean that in a cynical way. People are selfish. It's a natural state. Democratic (majority) decision-making lies closer to that reality than consensus (generally unanimous) decision-making.
I have found, over the years, that the consensus organizations to which I have belonged, generally run less smoothly than the democratic ones.
I hope, in your case, that wounds can be tended to before they fester too fiercely.
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