Reclothe us in our rightful minds
Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 08:16PM 
Here in Seattle we have seen the chief of police, the mayor and the superintendent of schools all decide they have had enough. Nationally the President and his crew engage in futile gestures to overturn the election. Here in Seattle left wing crowds visit the homes of city leaders late at night. And in Michigan right wing, armed protesters, gather at the home of the Secretary of State and there are plots to kidnap the governor. Here in Seattle the left took over a neighborhood and City Hall for a time. In Michigan the right stormed the state capital. I keep returning to Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish: "In the current chaos, I’ve come to appreciate Marcus Aurelius’s maxim that 'The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.'”
My personal reading in these early Advent days is Luke’s, "Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid."(Luke 8:35)
My personal hymn in these days seems to be “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” Yes, I know the words seem dated. Still, the insight is on point, and very in-the-moment, for my city, our nation and the weariness of so many in our parishes. A friend said last night, “I hate Zoom.” And I knew, deep in my soul what was meant. And yet I was so thankful to be on Zoom on Thanksgiving to attend mass with the faithful 
of Atonement, Chicago and On Advent I with St. Clements, Seattle.
The novitiate of the Order of the Ascension has been learning about parish development methods such as the Process of Planned Change, survey feedback, and how to use the Parish Life Cycle as a contemplative and assessment resource. During the work I found myself connecting with “reclothe us in our rightful minds.” How might a survey-feedback process help?
Let me describe survey-feedback in case you don’t know. It’s considered one of the most effective organization development methods we can use in changing any organization for the better.
1. Prepare and administer a survey
2. Have a gathering with everyone who filled out the survey. Present the results.
3. At the meeting join together in analysis and contemplation – what do we make of the survey results? What have we said about our life and work together? What is the work of the Holy Spirit in that?
4. What do we want to do? The most powerful way of engaging this is for people to self-select themselves into working groups around issues, and opportunities that have emerged from the contemplation and analysis.
It takes careful preparation and competent facilitation. The level of participation, along with reflective spirit, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative information seems to enable group energy and investment, a high degree of internal commitment to decisions, and increased trust.
During the pandemic it would need modification. You can’t bring a large number of people together for a whole day or weekend. So, think 1 ½ hours on Zoom. Maybe a second 1 ½ the follow week. And, it’s not wise to engage major issues in parish life when you can’t be face-to-face or spend enough time together. If it can wait until the pandemic eases – wait!
The most obvious set of issues and dynamics to work on are those rising out of how the parish is living through the pandemic. A number of parishes have conducted surveys in recent months. Many were very well done. Most could have had more impact if there had been a communal form of contemplation and analysis and the opportunity to move into some form of intercession and action based on that reflection and conversation.
In parish use it’s wise to integrate the method with a process of “Contemplation – Intercession - Action.” Times of silence and prayer, hymns and a slowed pace, careful and structured conversation.
It’s rather basic to the Christian life that our action flows from our prayer. Evelyn Underhill taught that for our action, our service, to be much good it needed to flow from adoration and awe.[i]
Parish life rooted in the fullness of prayer is the base for communal and individual discernment. And for parish leaders, it is the soil for all the interventions made in the work of parish revitalization and development. If the Threefold Rule of Prayer (Eucharist, Daily Office, Personal devotions, especially reflection) is the broad backdrop of prayer, the pattern that over time causes the parish to be soaked in prayer; is there also a model that might offer us a more direct connection between prayer and decisions about interventions?
I’ve made use of the “Contemplation – Intercession – Action” model[ii] as a way of understanding the more immediate process. This model connects the tasks of seeing things as they are in themselves and in the Divine Life of God, of connecting ourselves to the concerns and people involved, and from that place acting.
For some parishes a process of survey-feedback mixed with “Contemplation – Intercession – Action” could be a way of being reclothed in our rightful minds. An opportunity for people to join together in the stewardship of parish life, to listen to one another, and have a time of dignity and hope. This is not the preacher telling us what being in our right minds looks like, as useful as that can be. It is the experience of being in our right minds in all our individual uniqueness within a community of love.
rag+
[i] “One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your...life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good” Evelyn Underhill
[ii] “Contemplation – Intercession – Action” model, Robert Gallagher, 1990, 2020
Reader Comments (1)
Thanks Robert. I look forward to engaging this process in 2021. In 2018, we hired Ministry Architects to lead us through a discernment period around how we might engage children and youth in our parish. They used a version of the Survey-Feedback model and it was effective. We still refer back to that day-long workshop that followed the survey.