Action and belief in context of the group.

Action and belief in context of the group.
We can learn a lot from each other-- two heads are better than one and all that (except those in a basket). The groups we belong to offer not only “moral support” --reassurance that we’re right, and that we might have allies in a conflict-- but also a way to interpret our experience. Our groups also forge experience in some sense, focussing our attention on certain aspects of the world and away from others.

Years ago I was on staff at a workshop center. We employed fairly standard community education methods to help folks deal with economic, environmental, and other political issues. Participants shared their experiences, analyzed them, and from that knowledge developed strategies and tactics they could use when they got back home. We usually took care not to give extra space to the folks who get it in other circumstances, such as white men and professionals. But this is not to say our discussions were not without structure and direction.

Participants got moral support from each other-- very important for folks engaged in sometimes very lonely struggles. Many times participants said that the relationships they formed outside of the structured discussions were the best part of the workshops. Often they had a chance to look at their work in a new light-- understanding that they are not to blame for the devastation in their communities, that people from different parts of the community can become allies, that the common patterns they see are the result of large-scale economic and political structures, and so forth. We were often quite specific about what sources of information we could trust, and how to read the half-truths of, say, the New York Times. And by modeling in small ways a democratic society --sharing chores of talking and dishwashing alike-- participants reinforced their understanding that democracy is possible in the wider world as well. I’ve read that people who’d taken part in workshops at this center in the 1950s felt that the most compelling part of the experience was the racially integrated workshop and living arrangements, a kind of revelation for the segregated South.

Many elements contributed to the success of the workshops, including the right mix of people, the relaxed but focussed residential setting, the skills of planners, facilitators, cooks and musicians. We were trying to understand the world as it is so that we could act on it and change it. We were trying to be both truthful and hopeful. Indeed, my assumption has been that truth is the basis for hope; that we can’t solve problems if we don’t understand them.

My colleague S.J.W. used to say that the key to this kind of education was that as we share our stories, we have to incorporate parts of other people’s stories into our own. We’re also forging a collective Story, always in progress, getting closer to the truth about the world, but always open to experience, never complete.


Other groups, of course, have different ways of interpreting and reflecting the world, some very powerful. Bohdan Szuchewycz describes how a charismatic Catholic group reinforces their sense of the divine presence in prayer meetings. Like Protestant Pentacostals, these Catholics seek first-hand experience of God, and have developed their own voluntary practices outside the formal structure of church liturgy. “First, and most generally, prayer meetings are ritual events whose central message is the ideological core of the CCR: that it is possible (and desirable) for individuals to achieve a personal relationship with God-- and, because of this new relationship, to experience direct communication from Him” (Szuchewycz 390). Typically, the prayer meetings include sharing sessions in which participants relate and reflect on their spiritual experience. That so much of their experience overlaps and converges into a single compelling theme, that their many voices come to speak as one, constitutes for these believers powerful proof that they are in their daily lives and in the meeting itself being directed by the Holy Spirit. They take the unity and coherence of their talk as itself a message from God-- “what He’s trying to talk to us tonight about” (401).

To create that experience of unity and communication with the Almighty, these Charismatics employ a set of mechanisms for discerning and attributing and divine messages:

• The leader often (but not always) introduces a theme, which participants refer to and build upon through the course of the meeting. Leaders guide the discussion when it strays too far, and at the end try to sum up by linking various points made by the participants.

• From observing others and from evaluation and specific instruction by leaders and peers, new participants learn what contributions are appropriate. “One leader reported that, over the years, the leadership has given a number of talks to the membership about keeping sharings short and asking the Lord if it’s really of Him before you share it.” Or as one participant put it,
“And when they’d open it [the scriptures] if it were related to the sharing before then they’d feel, “Right, I must be meant to read it” . . . . If it’s not related they’d close their Bible again. Only if it’s related. . . . And I’ve held out for confirmation. I’d wait till someone else shared, again, and then I’d know if I was really meant to do it and if it’s not just a notion of mine, then I’d know but I’d hold out for a while before I’d do anything to make sure that it was from God” (Szuchewycz 404).

• Participants constantly refer to both the named theme and to comments by other participants, sometimes building on those comments, at times simply acknowledging them. In one meeting, the leader introduced the theme of obedience. Early in the sharing, a nun talked about how she lost something and rejoiced to find it again after praying. The next speaker tries to tie her contribution to both of these previous comments, touching in substantive and trivial ways on obedience, joy, and finding lost objects through prayer: “I think that brings me to what I really wanted to say tonight because all day since one o’clock about I’m really bubbling ove with joy --eh-- and by the way I’m here in obedience to my superiors . . . . So praise the Lord for that . . . “ (Szuchewycz 396). She goes on to describe the recovery of a lost communion medal.

• Again and again participants disclaim responsibility for their own thoughts and actions, implying or explaining what they see and do as God’s intervention. The leader starts the meeting off in this vein:

I don't know what I'm doing here leading a meeting really
and eh - but I'm just doing it in obedience to the Lord
and funny enough this morning there were three or four of us praying
and eh we got - it was a lot of things about obedience, really.
And eh when I got home a got a - a reading from Leviticus.
I don't often open the Old Testament but
it was all about obedience and the fruits of obedience to our God (409).

Note the passive tone: we got a lot of things, I got a reading. Others say, “Suddenly I thought that someone came along and spoke to me and said, ‘Look in the wardrobe.’” (397). A participant speaks of “a very strong urge to share something; another speaks of a thought that’s come into my mind. Still others speak of being led to make a specific contribution (398).

One device is to relate an event as if it were a remarkable coincidence, unexplainable except by . . . , and leave the listener to fill in the blanks as if he were making a discovery. So, for instance, the leader says it was a “funny thing” that he was in the cathedral and followed some tourists over to a sculpture which confirmed for him the importance of Jesus’ mother Mary. To confirm another theme introduced by the speaker, a woman says, “And even from the tapes I’ve been listening to, all happened to be on the Good Shepherd. Everything I took up for the past few weeks --not everything but almost everything-- was on the Good Shepherd and his care for us” (401).

By experiencing fairly structured discussions as the spontaneous outpourings of many individuals, all expressing the same truth, participants come to feel that God must be guiding them.*


Some of the political workshops I attended were likewise very moving emotionally. While I knew this to be a result of my fine work, my colleagues and I were somewhat taken aback, too. We wanted participants to understand that there was nothing magical about the process, because we wanted them to foster similar discussions when they got back home. But several folks told us it couldn’t happen, they couldn’t reproduce such a special experience in their own communities. There were many reasons for the intensity of these workshops, but in retrospect, I wonder if some participants were experiencing them as a kind of church service.

So what’s the difference in process between such “popular education” and the religious meetings Szuchewycz describes? Both are relatively egalitarian, and widely participatory at their core. The participation is structured in both types of interchange-- I remember reeling in folks who got too far off topic, or who were not letting the discussion move on. We encouraged some responses, for instance about the role of bosses, and discouraged others, such as racist assumptions, either by confronting them head on or by pointedly not responding. Like the Charismatics, participants in the community workshops learned what was appropriate in the given setting.

We usually consulted participants before and during the sessions to set and modify the agenda. I’m not sure how prayer meetings are planned, but surely they are no surprise to or imposition on the folks who attend. The prayer meetings may have greater continuity of participants than the political workshops-- but the risk of a group of insiders emerging is common to all lasting movements and organizations.

At the workshop center, in practice, affirmation was a big and deliberate part of our task. Many of the people we worked with had been ignored and put down so many times, they were reluctant to value their own perceptions, never mind share them. We worked hard to overcome that, by encouraging folks to see the similarities and patterns in each other’s stories, and the holes in the Authorities’. Participants also repeated many times that the most valuable part of the workshops, or one of the most valuable, was the chance for informal discussion in smaller groups outside the structured discussion, and the supportive relationships emerging from those (in this, our program was similar to that of the Christian men's organization Promise Keepers-- Faludi 1999 p.232). Some people came to several sessions, at least in part to feel the affirmation once again.

We challenged folks as well. Community educator Myles Horton was well known for poking at participants' assumptions, whether or not they coincided with his own. How do you know? Is there another way to explain it? Who benefits from that idea? While respecting folks’ knowledge we valued even more their capacity to learn-- and tried to demystify the learning process. At our best, we helped folks rethink their models without pushing them to a pre-determined answer.

That’s how I think about it. But I found it hard to maintain the balance. Affirmation and new learning go hand in hand, but simple affirmation is easier.

To me the biggest difference between democratic education and religious witness lies in the goals. It seems the point of the prayer meetings is to elicit religious joy and reconfirm religious faith. The political workshops were organized to tackle, if not completely solve, specific community problems. All of us brought to these discussions our own models of the world, overlapping but not identical, and I was probably not the only one interested in having others see it my way. But I also had a genuine expectation that together we’d come up with something new, some idea that could take us another step forward.

Part of the distinction lies in the difference between listening and testifying. Clearly the Charismatics in the study listened closely to each other, because they so often referred to others’ comments. But Szuchewycz records few questions. My impression is that these devout people are not that interested in each other’s experience except as it confirms their own. There’s little sense that closer examination will help us better understand the world, or god.

Theologian Harvey Cox writes of his early church experience, “I have come to realize that the meetings I was exposed to encouraged a somewhat corrupted form of testifying. Those attending them were often merely repeating standard phrases that for their forebears had been on fire. I was probably right to be anxious and angry. Still, the idea of testimony itself remains powerful and essential: to try to give voice and word to what is so patently interior, to stammer at its unspeakableness . . . .” (Cox 93).

While he questions the depth of feeling behind some ritualized testimony, Cox seems to hold an ideal of sacred testimony as the expression of some common, underlying, “unspeakable” reality. But that’s nonsense. I remember one time I smoked too much and stood up suddenly and fell down in a faint. For a few seconds, I could see but couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing, or even that there was an I. Imagine what an effort it was for our ancestors to talk about the wind, the matrix of life around them, or the work of language itself. Everything about the world is hard to speak, in whatever setting. We know more about the sun than our ancestors did, but after a million years words still fail us before a sunset. What’s inside the skull is no more mysterous, profound or inexpressible than everything else.

And, of course, we keep trying to put it all into words so that we can share it with our brothers and sisters. Our project is not simply to assert what is self-evident, else why would we need to communicate at all? Rather, we pool our knowledge, our individual pieces of the puzzle, so that together we can learn what is not already known and build what has never been built. In the beginning was the conversation . . . .

* As with all such ways of knowing, the unresolved issue is how to distinguish godly communications from those of the devil, or one’s own ego. Very soon after the English settled Massachusetts, Ann Hutchinson got run out of town for claiming direct access to religious truths which the ruling theocrats were not willing to accept. Churches have established criteria to judge these messages, but it always comes down to a judgment call.

An ‘Anointed Minister of God,’ the evangelist combines his gift of healing with demonstrations of another of the Pentacostal gifts enumerated in 1 Corinthians— that of the Word of Knowledge. This ‘gift’ consists of one receiving, directly from God, special messages that are then to be imparted to others. Usually such messages cannot be verified as having emanated from a divine source, so the typical procedure seems to be to credit those that coincide with one’s views and discount those that do not. States one Pentacostal writer:
I have people come up to me regularly with such messages just before or after I preach. Personally, I must admit that I am usually put off by most of these ‘gifted’ people and discount what they tell me. However, I have to learn to be careful. After all, I may be cutting myself off from a revelation that I very much need (Nickell 137).