M: In genuine community, at some point it’s going to get messy. When this happens, my first impulse is to run away. There’s going to be pain in walking through the mess, and we may not end up in a better place. There’s risk, and I don’t like risk. Sometimes this is all I have strength for, but there’s no hope in running. There’s no healing or growth in running. It’s not a great option.
J: Another “not so great option” is wallowing in the mess. It makes it all about me and my wounds and my self-pity. I’m sometimes tempted to go there first—if I’m not running away with Mindi. Fortunately, I tend to get sick of myself when I focus too much on myself and just wallow in the mess. It doesn’t leave room for healing or growth either.
M: Another option is to gloss over the hard place and make it feel fixed by tidying up the situation. Glossing over means saying or doing whatever is necessary to make people feel better. It’s kind of like brushing the dirt under the rug, but eventually the dirt creates a bump under the rug so big you trip over it.
B: Or we just sit in the messiness. It’s a place of unknown and risk and discomfort. It’s vulnerable.
M: Working through the messiness means not running and not hiding. Working through hard places means being honest about the pain, but not becoming a victim of it. It’s scary and it can be really hard.
J: When things do get messy, and they will, we’re choosing to honor our community relationships by not running from the mess, wallowing in it, or glossing anything over. When we choose honesty and vulnerability and allow ourselves to risk relational pain and loss, then deeper intimacy is possible. Deeper community can develop, and hopefully we can hang onto it.
Scotty: The names of the demons range all over the map, from misuse of political power to apathy, from corporate lies to organizational myths that are unrealistic, and so forth.
Community can be one of those words - like God, or love, or death, or consciousness - that's too large to submit to any single, brief definition. At the Foundation we consider community to be a group of people that have made a commitment to learn how to communicate with each other at an ever more deep and authentic level. One of the characteristics of true community is that the group secrets, whatever they are, become known - they come out to where they can be dealt with.
By other definitions, a community is a group that deals with its own issues - its own shadow - and the shadow can contain any kind of issue. We have tried unsuccessfully at the Foundation to come up with a sort of slogan, but one of the phrases that kept coming up was from the gospels: "And the hidden shall become known."
The Foundation just finished a conference on business and community at the University of Chicago School of Business with some seventy-five hard headed businesspeople. The theme was "tension", and the subtheme was that, within an organization, community represents a forum where the tension can be surfaced out in the open and made known. You can't develop a "tensionless" organization. To the contrary, one of the conclusions at the conference was that you wouldn't want to develop a tensionless organization.
Creating community in the context of an organization permits those tensions to be surfaced and dealt with as best they can, rather than being latent or under the table.
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