Welcoming Spiritual Animals
WN.05 \\ 06.10-16.24
‘allo, ‘allo!
Welcome to my off-weekly off-the-cuff review of efforts, insights, and whatevers in the last few days.
This week’s notes include thoughts on:
workshopping the workshop
public behavior across the centuries
education, formation, and desire
Hospitality in Bytes
In a previous life, I used to run events that had small budgets and even smaller personnel. Even though I never had explicit instruction for this, my personal mission for these events was that staff needed to be present to attendees.
Staff members shouldn’t be worrying about set changes or logistics: we needed to be available to respond to the person in front of us, no matter what. So room set-ups, physical supplies and decorations, printed materials: all of that was as scaled back as it could possibly be and still deliver a cohesive experience. This left staff members free to focus on conversation, connection, relationship: the stuff of hospitality.
I know how to do this when I have a room with tables and chairs. But given the realities of our digital moment, I find myself wondering how to do this with an online workshop.
How do you welcome embodied people into a disembodied space?
As I’ve spent time this past week going through slides and talking points for my upcoming workshop, I’ve thought about how to practice hospitality in a digital event. The rhythm of the slides and script feels good so far, but I need to start rehearsing what I’d like to say, so that the words can get out of the way.1
Yes, connection happens through words, but it also happens through “vibes” - the sense that participants feel welcomed and seen, talked with rather than talked at. Even if I don’t get the chance to speak with each individual, I still want them to leave the workshop with the feeling that their lives and challenges have been understood.2
But there’s one section of my script that remains stubbornly blank - my personal journey to this workshop.
A friend once said that “all research is me-search,” and I think this holds true for any mental models, habits, or techniques we devise for ourselves. It all stems from an effort to make sense of our experiences, to put the pieces of our lives into a narrative sequence that reminds us of where we started, where we now stand, and the journey between those two locations. But I find myself struggling with the tension between personal and private.
I am a big believer in what Parker Palmer calls “third things” - focusing attention and participation around a story or work of art that allows us to tell the truth about our lives, but to tell it slant.3 The workshop is the “third thing,” but I think that having some insight into the person inviting you into the space is also helpful. Share nothing, and you risk sounding disconnected from your hearers’ felt lives. Share too much, and you risks alienating your hearers through sheer TMI.
As a writer, the real work happens in the process of editing. What details convey the point with beautiful economy? What combination of sounds and meanings create the donegality4 you wish to evoke?
I’ll spend some time next week editing, I think.
Here’s a question for you…
When's the last time you paused to listen to your life?
If you're feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, or surprised by what's going on in your life, it might be that you're having a hard time gaining clarity and traction on your priorities and activities.
My July 13th workshop provides that pause so that you can Make Tough Choices & Practice Commitment Care for Self-Compassion.
Commitment Care, rather than project or time management, emphasizes a holistic understanding of our responsibilities, interests, and activities. Commitment Care cultivates discernment (what we say yes to) and discretion (what we say no to), so that we can maintain (or renew) personal integrity in our relationships with the divine, with ourselves, and with others.
In this workshop, participants will clarify their commitment areas, and map their existing commitments. They’ll also categorize their commitments by priority, which enables them to make decisions “ahead of time,” so that they can appropriately respond to new opportunities.
🗓️ Saturday, July 13
⏰ 3:00-4:30p EST
🖥️ Online via Zoom
🎁 Free!
Don’t break my heart,5 say you’ll come!
These next bits are in the vein of “more than passing thoughts, less than significant statements.” Not curations, but “huh, that’s a little somethin’-somethin’."
Public Behavior, Ancient and Modern
So, I listened to Russell Moore’s recent interview with Jonathan Haidt, and towards the end of the conversation, they brought up the question of differences in how boys and girls respond to the world.6 Moore mentions St. Paul’s first letter to Timothy, with its advice and counsel on dealing with issues within a specific congregation.
In the second chapter, Paul gives instructions for how members of the congregation should behave when they “gather as a sacred family.” To the men, Paul says, when praying, to “lift up their hands in a sacred manner, putting away all anger and disagreement.” To the women, Paul counsels them “to wear clothes that represent them well. They should dress in a modest and respectful manner. There is no need to try to look better than others with fancy hair, or with gold, pearls, or clothes that cost too much.”7
To sum up: these instructions focus on the members’ visible behavior in a public space. And they get at a core cause that requires these corrections: the human tendency toward pride, vanity, and competition.
And it struck me that we see much the same behavior online today, falling along much the same lines. How familiar are we with the dude-bros, the keyboard warriors, who constantly hold fights on the internet?8 And how many fashion and shopping hauls have we seen from female influencers, each one striving to be more polished and put together, more expensive than the next? Eerily similar activities in public spaces, doesn’t it seem?
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The (Mis-) Education of Spiritual Animals
I also listened to Ezra Klein talking with D. Graham Burnett on our current attention economy, and how it “fracks our minds.”9 Burnett suggests that, in mounting a defense or resistance to this fracturing, we have to get clear on what we do want (as opposed to simply saying “we don’t like that.”). He references Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an Indian scholar and teacher, in proposing that education is a means of helping us gain that clarity, for education is the “non-coercive rearranging of desire.”
For Spivak, education changes epistemologies—what we know—and opens up new avenues of imagination and possibility. While there’s an argument to be made that compulsory education can’t be anything other than coercive, Spivak’s definition resonated so strongly with me. But it struck me that it’s also a fantastic definition for the process of personal formation.
By speaking in terms of “education,” we may better recognize our formation as something that produces specific results: train one way and we become tyrants. Train another way and we become servants. (And a whole host of people in between!) Framing formation as education may also help us recognize the agency and intention we bring to this process of rearranging desire—it happens, no matter what. But what kinds of things can we train ourselves to want? What possibilities can we train our imaginations to recognize?
I’ve mentioned before humanity’s fundamental confusion that mistakes the sating of appetites for the satisfying of desire. Appetite points us toward our animal hungers for food, water, sex, and safety. Desire points us toward our spiritual longings for intimacy, security, and belonging. And because we are so wonderfully, weirdly spiritual animals, we often find ourselves scrambling our signals of desire in our pursuit of appetites.
And so, we have come back, through a global, two-thousand-year journey, to what Augustine of Hippo calls ordo amoris—the order of affections, the appropriate degree of love for things that prioritizes what is most important over what is least.
As one writer has said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”
So them’s my thoughts. How’s your week going?
Shalom,
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Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward An Undivided Life, pp. 92-93
Once upon a time, boys and girls, this was the most cringey member of the Cyrus family.
I’m not wading into debates about gender essentialism here. But let’s, for the duration of this newsletter, accept the premise that, for all we have in common with each other, men and women appear to have predilections and temptations unique to each.
1 Timothy 2:8-9, First Nations Translation
“Duty Calls,” xkcd
The whole conversation is worth a listen.