This is gonna be a big year.
Lots of decisions. Lots of fullness. Lots of intense emotions. Lots of possibilities, too.
Certainly in my little corner of the world, it’s already been a very, very full month.
Amidst the fullness, I’ve had the good fortune to do 1-1 calls with people in my current ReMembering course. It’s one of my favorite parts of the course because I get to hear how people are making sense of the course as it intersects with their lives.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the conversations this month have touched upon “theodicy,” or, the nature of evil. Why, if the world is good (or, for some, if God is good), is there (still) evil? Or, for those who don’t want to get into “evil” as a valid concept, the question might be, “why do “decent”/good people do really bad things?”
Short answer: um, we don’t really know.
Longer answer: there are many, many ways of answering this question. And it is really important that we keep engaging with it, and not just jump over it. And that we keep finding ways to resist/survive and to create. Even to create beauty.
Engaging with our histories, with who our ancestors were as oppressors and as victims; as complacent and as misunderstanding what others are saying; as resistors and survivors and leaders and followers and artists and lovers and creators… engaging with the complexity of who we have been helping us engage with the complexity of who we are now and who we can be. Understanding the patterns helps us untangle from them.
It’s a major part of why I keep teaching the ReMembering course: because in our interconnected web of beingness there are, as Howard Thurman so brilliantly said so many years ago, some relationships that are “evil in design.”
There are ways of asking these questions that just send you down really ugly, twisted spirals. Some of you have probably experienced that.
And there are ways of engaging with these questions that help to loosen the tightly, twisted grip. To uncurl.
I think that is part of what restorative practices and peace-crafting practices and social healing modalities are here to do - to help us create the circles, the webs of relationality, that can help loosen those “relationships evil in design.”
All of which contribute to why I keep teaching the ReMembering Course.
Perhaps this is the time for you to join us. Or to recommend it to your colleagues.
I know it’s last minute. Perhaps, for you, it’s right on time.
Our next informational webinar about the course is this upcoming weekend. Kristine Hill will be joining me. Please do join us.
