Years ago, I got into a tangle with a woman in the church I attended. I’d developed a practice of standing during the Eucharist — instead of kneeling as was a more conventional posture during the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in Episcopal churches in those days.
“Your problem is that you always have to be different! You want to be noticed!” she yelled at me one Sunday. “Don’t you know that we Episcopalians have common prayer? That means we all do the same thing at the same time. Nobody is supposed to stand out — this is common prayer.”
I drew a breath and quietly responded, “Yes, I know. We have common prayer. But not conforming prayer. Holding something in common doesn’t mean that we are all the same. Common, yes. Conforming, no.”
“You shouldn’t stand up during prayer! You’re not special! You have to kneel!”
She walked away.
That unpleasant encounter has stayed with me — and it taught me something important about living with diversity and the larger issues of the common good.
Politics this week has me thinking about the common good. Like common prayer, the common good doesn’t ask us all to conform to some imagined ideal of the perfect citizen. The common good isn’t like residing on the fictional planet of Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time. At first, the place seems peaceful, perfect, and orderly. But it was blanketed with a shadowed conformity, controlled by a central intelligence called IT, that allowed no one to be different or stand out. Diversity and identity were surrendered to alikeness and a brutal homogeneity.
Camazotz was a society of forced conformity through authoritarian means.
Common might mean routine, established, or conventional. But it can also mean shared, public, or social. Common prayer simply refers to prayer offered in public in contrast to private prayer, not some conformist need for particular words or postures. Some faith communities pray publicly using ritual; others pray in public extemporaneously. But both are common prayer, and neither is — or should be — intended to force worshipers into docile submission to some controlling IT.
Common good is the same. To seek the common good is to strive for community — not a Camazotz-style authoritarian sameness. It is a quest for the shared welfare of all people, a society where everyone looks out for everyone else’s well-being without being coerced to surrender one’s own identity. To hold all things in common means to share the goods and struggles of living together without having to be the same. In truth, the common good, genuine community, requires diversity.
Both common prayer and common good are about what we share in public, not about being exactly the same in the space beyond ourselves: Sharing, not enforced sameness or shaming for being different.
And those are the social and political questions I care about: With whom am I — or are we — sharing both the goods and the struggles of life? How do we share? What do we share? Are we sharing fairly? Is everyone invited to the circle of sharing?
When it comes to politics, I rarely ask what is good for me. I ask how I can share. I ask if those around me have a fair share.
In the same way that there is public prayer and personal prayer, I have private questions about political life, too, even if they don’t always drive my voting choices. Questions like: Why am I working hard without getting a fair share? Has someone taken what should be my share? Am I being kept away from a table of sharing? Do I really want to share with others?
Sometimes my personal questions about sharing point to larger, communal ones. Am I being excluded from the goods of society because I am a woman? Because of ageism? Perhaps because of corporate greed or an unfair tax burden? Does my experience indicate a larger, structural injustice of not sharing?
Of course, private and public are not neatly separate spheres. They bleed into each other. But when one is emphasized over the other, we fall into either self-driven individualism in politics or a flattened communalism, both of which can lend themselves to authoritarianism and deprive others of their dignity and freedom.
The path to a mature politics is in the balance — or perhaps it is in the tensions inherent in a sharing society. Sometimes I function as an individual-in-community; at other times, as part of a community comprised of diverse individuals. Personal identity and interconnected community are the tapestry of a loving and just commonwealth. We can strive to balance them, move within both realities, and find the threads to weave individual well-being with the weal of the world.
You might guess that I genuinely appreciated the Democratic convention this week — and was glad that it signaled a better kind of politics. Not because they ticked diversity boxes; not because people quoted scripture; not because leaders addressed my political hobby horses. But because I sensed, amid the production and hoopla, a renewed commitment to the balance and tension of private and public, and of the power of individual stories entwined with the common good. At its best, it wasn’t selfish but insisted that individuals should live their best lives; it wasn’t communalistic but built up a sharing society.
That’s a hard tension to communicate. And an even harder one to achieve. You may disagree with me — you may have heard a different story. Whatever the case, and however imperfectly, I will continue to stand up in the commons — even when someone tells to me to sit down because I’m standing out — for the weal and welfare of every one of us and us all.
INSPIRATION
I
The grace that is the health of creatures can only be held in common.
In healing the scattered members come together.
In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
II
The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.
A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one creation, and we are its members.
To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the creation, to keep the creation fully alive in oneself, to see the creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.
The most creative works are all strategies of this health.
Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the creation to novelty–the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder.
Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In loneliness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot fulfill.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
III
There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair–done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.
Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride equally betray creation. They are wastes of life.
For despair there is no forgiveness, and for pride none. One cannot forgive oneself, and who in loneliness can forgive?
IV
Good work finds the way between pride and despair.
It graces with health. It heals with grace.
It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.
By it, we lose loneliness:
we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;
we enter the little circle of each other's arms,
and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,
and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.
— Wendell Berry, from “Healing”
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My mom, in her steady quiet way, lived out that striving sense of hope every single day of her life. She believed that all children, all people have value. That anyone can succeed if given the opportunity. She and my father didn’t aspire to be wealthy — in fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed. They understood that it wasn’t enough for their kids to thrive if everyone else around us was drowning.
So my mother volunteered at the local school. She always looked out for the other kids on the block. She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that, for generations, has strengthened the fabric of this nation. The belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off — if not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.
You see, those values have been passed on through family farms and factory towns, through tree-lined streets and crowded tenements, through prayer groups and national guard units and social studies classrooms.
Those were the values my mother poured into me until her very last breath.
— Michelle Obama
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
— Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25
Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.
— Parker Palmer
This is a remarkable piece. Reading it in a hospital waiting room the morning after the debate is grounding, comforting and hopeful. As always, thank you Diana.
My wife began standing for the reading of God's word in our church. I stood with her. We were the only ones, and for me, it was awkward, almost painfully so, but a double allegiance to my God and my wife compelled me. Before long (not soon enough for me, though, as my discomfort with the nonconformity continued), the pastors began inviting the congregation to "stand for the reading of God's word, if able." And nearly everyone did. I suspect the sitters may then have felt discomfort for their nonconformity. My hope is that in the prior and latter practices, we held a common devotion to God's word, no matter our postures.