Acting out a New Story; Singing a New Song

Every day, Mother Culture whispers in our ears a story that explains and supports the unjust and unsustainable way things work around us. This week we’ll uncover her deceptive assumptions and piece together God’s alternative story. Then we’ll conspire together to stay awake enough to enact this new story. In Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael, the…

Workshop Description

Every day, Mother Culture whispers in our ears a story that explains and supports the unjust and unsustainable way things work around us. This week we’ll uncover her deceptive assumptions and piece together God’s alternative story. Then we’ll conspire together to stay awake enough to enact this new story.

In Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael, the narrator longs for a sustainable, just world but has given up trying to figure out how to create the change necessary to put things right. He meets an unconventional teacher who asks probing questions, explores assumptions, and clarifies choices. The teacher challenges the narrator’s learned helplessness and demonstrates that another story about how to live is indeed available. The only requirement for understanding it is to free himself from the worldview that’s lulling him into colluding with and giving power to the destructive, ever-present cultural story.

During this week, we will bring our Quaker tradition, tools, faith, practice, and experience to the same work of uncovering buried, unexamined assumptions we need to shed if we are to undertake enacting God’s alternative story. The fire that we often envy in early Quakers came from this radical freedom from the world’s story, and we will explore together how to get free, stay free and support each other to do so.

On Monday and Tuesday, we’ll use Quinn’s novel as well as wisdom from Walter Wink and Richard Rohr to understand how the Domination System/Empire/”Taker” story relies on staying hidden to obtain our cooperation, and we will together identify and expose its lies. On Wednesday we’ll reconstruct the alternative story offered by God’s Promise/Blessed Community/”Leaver” cultures. And for the rest of the week, we’ll work with Howard Thurman’s framework about how to emigrate from Empire to God’s Kingdom and live there in freedom and resistance.

No reading is required in advance, because those of us who have explored the sources will share their outlines, but if you have the time and inclination, you’ll really enjoy Quinn’s Ishmael. Walter Wink’s Engaging The Powers is a heavier read, but powerful and well worth the effort. And Richard Rohr’s podcast series “Another Name for Everything” will help you claim the joy of living in the middle of Empire while free of its clutches. Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Dispossessed offers a clear-eyed vision of God’s alternative story and how to get there. Join us in reading/listening as you’re led and help us summarize the ones you choose for others.

Participants will leave the week with

• a clearer vision of how we have been co-opted into the culture’s Domination System
• a set of alternative underlying principles that must be a part of any sustainable way of life, and
• a plan for how to organize the support we need for the radical work of enacting a new story

We will spend the first two hours of each day charting out the competing stories and our response, and the final hour in worship letting our head work sink down to the heart where the Inner Teacher will continue the work.

Leader Experience

We are both experienced group leaders whose professional lives involved helping participants interactively co-construct understandings and come to agreements. We’ve led Quaker workshops, weekends, and consultations.

At the Gathering, Joann has developed and led two separate explorations of Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers and (at the request of the workshop committee) one on Managing Anger as a Spiritual Discipline. Twice, she led a hands-on Quilting as a Spiritual Discipline workshop.

Carolyn joined Joann in leading explorations of Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers. She offered, with Kodi Hersh, a workshop for High School and Adult Young Friends on coming out. She also led two virtual workshops on examining racism through films. Other FGC work includes four years as a counselor in the High School Program. During her tenure on Central Committee, Carolyn served on the Nurturing Ministries Committee with focus’ on Youth and Ministry on Racism. She served on the Institutional Assessment on Racism working group and co-authored with Janice Domanick and others the report on racism within the Religious Society of Friends. She clerked the evening program committee at the 2018 Gathering in Toledo.