The heart of our programmatic week at Life Together focuses on Wednesday mornings, when the Emmaus fellows come to 40 Prescott for worship, community time, and team meetings. Each week features a specific emphasis for our time together: contemplative worship, “clearinghouse” (where we practice breaking down our anxieties around interpersonal conflict), play, and Jubilee.*
Clearly when we set the schedule for our Wednesday morning activities months ago, we missed the memo that February 26th was Ash Wednesday. Upon learning that one of us was to lead the group in team-building play, I asked, “Umm, can we do somber play?” But when the time came, we never actually made it to the game. Rather, we reflected together on “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: moments where we had noticed the brevity of life and human fallibility. We talked in particular about the recent revelations about sexual misconduct by Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movement, and the dark complexity of many public leaders. It was a sacred conversation to welcome not only the Christian season of Lent, but the start of the 2020 election season as well.
In a society where we valorize charismatic public leadership, where we offer such leaders more power and less accountability to our communities, this Ash Wednesday conversation has pushed me to consider Life Together’s own claim to “cultivate prayerful and prophetic leaders.” Life Together was built from inception on the belief that leadership could be taught. One does not need to be particularly charismatic or exceptionally brilliant to lead others, because that model won’t necessarily create the widespread change we seek. My own Life Together training burned into my brain organizer Marshall Ganz’s definition of leadership: “to help others achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” Ella Baker and Dolores Huerta may not be household names for many Americans, but they helped their communities achieve purpose in ways that made civil rights for black and brown Americans possible. These are the kinds of leaders we seek to cultivate at Life Together: ones who understand that power lies within the community, not within any one individual that is set above the rest of us. Leaders who know that, as the prayer by Fr. Ken Untener says, “we are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.” The work of liberation is ours, is God’s. The work is not about me alone.
Will such leaders make mistakes? Of course. We are unlearning generations of systemic oppression and individualism that we have inherited from our ancestors. Or put another way, we are still figuring out how to “choose life so that you and your descendants may live” rather than succumbing to the practices of death in the world around us (Deuteronomy 30:19b). But I know I’d rather try together, with others to hold me accountable when I fail, rather than falling into the terrible hubris of thinking that I alone know the path to truth.
For those observing Lent in our community, I hope you have a holy season of the kind fellow Eva Dalzell eloquently describes below [read Eva’s piece here]. And I hope that you will find ways in this season to face uncertainty with courage, and to help others do the same.
*For those familiar with our practices around team norms, “Jubilee” is the day we all bring our accumulated norms corrections for a community feast of food, poetry, and the occasional silly YouTube video.