Linked Hands, Love and Democracy

by Parker J. Palmer

Our friends at the Fetzer Institute (the foundation that got us started fifteen years ago and continues to be a great advocate of our work) have begun a new project on fostering “compassionate communities.” Recently, they asked participants to answer two questions: (1) What have you learned about how compassion is at work in communities? (2) What is the next phase of your work and what role do you see compassion playing in it? Here are my answers:

1. What I’ve learned about how compassion is at work in communities would fill a book. From my seminary days working with junior high kids from NYC’s Spanish Harlem; to my five years as a community organizer in Washington, D.C.; to the decade I spent living in the Quaker community at Pendle Hill; to my year of teaching in Appalachia; to the work I’ve been doing in “Circles of Trust” around the country for the past fifteen years, I’ve been blessed with a million sightings of this not-so-rare bird! If compassion means mutual aid and generosity, there seems to be more of it in communities that have less “stuff.” These communities know something all of us need to know: real abundance is found not in a surfeit of money and things, but in a rich network of relationships in which we can give and receive as need arises. If compassion means a capacity to accompany others in difficult moments and passages in life, there is more of it when we become more transparent and vulnerable to each other. Only when we can see another’s suffering is the doorway of the heart likely to open—a fact that has strong implications for our capacity to have compassion for strangers thousands of miles away, whose suffering we see only on monitors or TV screens. No matter how we define compassion, it seems to begin “at home,” in the smaller settings of our lives, before it flows out to larger forms of life together. As political theorists have said for many years, the habits of the heart on which democracy relies begin in the “little platoons” of our lives—and that includes the habit of the heart called compassion.

2. The next phase of my work has two parts: to continue to partner with the Center for Courage & Renewal in spreading ”Circles of Trust“ around the country, and to find ways (including but not limited to those circles) to work on the renewal of American democracy by renewing the soul of the citizen. Compassion is the aquifer from which citizenship flows: without a capacity to identify and ”suffer with“ others beyond the confines of private life, there can be no sense of being accountable to a larger community, especially a civil community. Something that looks like citizenship may emerge from the simple desire to protect one’s perks and privileges—but that motive ultimately makes society a war of all against all, a banal and brutal place. Banality and brutality are also not-so-rare birds in our land, so we need to replenish the aquifer of compassion from which citizenship flows by working with the “little platoons” where people have a chance to learn a habit of the heart that trumps narcissism and greed. I believe this is possible: beneath our narrow self-interest there is a deep-rooted human desire to receive compassion, and at least a dim understanding that to get it you have to give it, that what goes around comes around. In the work I want to do next, I do not intend to appeal to a high ethic of compassion, but to the soul’s tropism toward wholeness—a deep imperative of the soul to live out life’s brief span in generative rather than degenerative relationships, in circles large and small. This is one way, I think, to keep working toward a good society: a society that is measured not by how well its strongest members can do but by how well it cares for the weakest in its midst.

As I finished writing those words, I thought of the great American poet Walt Whitman and his poem ”States!” (a reference to the United States), which begins with these lines:

STATES!
Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?

Away!
I arrive, bringing these, beyond all the forces of courts and arms,
These! to hold you together as firmly as the earth itself is held together.

As the poem unfolds, it becomes clear what Whitman means by ”These!,“ these powers ”beyond all the forces of courts and arms.“ He means, very simply, friendship, affection and love. “There shall,“ he says, ”be countless linked hands”—if democracy is to work as it should and as it must. According to Whitman, it’s all about compassion.

Of course, it is easy to accuse Walt Whitman of being hopelessly romantic about the hard realities of life. But Walt has an answer for the cynics; after all, he wrote (and took practical action as a nurse in military hospitals) during the hardest of hard times, the Civil War. In a poem called “Over the Carnage” he again asks whether lawyers, agreements and arms can hold the world together, and answers with this: “Nay—nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.”

Surely he is right about that. Lawyers, agreements and arms may batten things down for a while, but this is not how living things cohere, not how they achieve integrity and wholeness.

Whitman’s sense of what makes a society whole is not restricted to poets and dreamers. At the end of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered just a month before the nation went to war with itself, this pragmatic and altogether remarkable politician strikes the same theme:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

I could do worse than siding with Whitman and Lincoln. It is not that I believe that lawyers and agreements are useless; “Some of my best friends, etc.“. But this much seems true to me about the ”lawyers“ and their ”agreements”: if those who operate the financial, legal and political mechanisms of a democracy are strangers to love’s terrain (outside of their private lives), the world cannot possibly cohere. Just look at the unraveling going on around us right now despite, not exactly the outcome of friendship and ”countless linked hands.“

Affection and compassion—and the courage to practice them—are the qualities we need if we are to find our way through the current carnage to a better way of life. I do not mean the affection and compassion we experience between family members and friends, but the kind we experience “in the company of strangers.” If we open our hearts to the drama of public life, from the tragic to the comic, and to emotions that range from empathy to amusement to outrage, we start to understand in our own bodies our membership in the body politic. Where and how to cultivate this habit of the heart called compassion to renew our sense of citizenship and salvage our democracy is, I believe, one of the most pressing questions before us.

Clearly, our schools, religious communities and other voluntary associations are among the answers to the “where” question. These are the settings in which we learn certain habits of the heart, for better or for worse. We can teach young people in a way that cultivates habits of individualism and competition, or we can teach them the habits of mutuality and linking hands, and we can do so not with our words, via bad preaching, but with our actions, via good teaching.

And, as I suggested in my response to the Fetzer Institute’s second question, some of the answers to “how” are found in Circles of Trust and the work of the Center for Courage & Renewal. Over the next year or two, the Center intends to develop this connection more fully as we reach beyond people in the serving professions to anyone who is seeking to “rejoin soul and role,” not least the role of citizen.

Like Lincoln, I am loathe to close. And I hope to return to this theme in future editions of this newsletter. But for the moment, I’ll leave you with a couple of questions to ponder.

What are you doing, or what have you seen done, in the organizations and communities to which you belong that might make Walt Whitman proud?

If you have participated in a Circle of Trust, or read any of the books and articles related to this approach, what are your thoughts about how the Center might contribute to renewing a sense of citizenship and reweaving our democracy?

If you’d like to link hands with us as we explore questions like these, please send your thoughts to our blog. We will listen carefully to what you have to say, fold it into our own thinking, and send you our thanks. As a bonus, you will gladden the ghost of Walt Whitman which, believe me, is looking over our shoulders these days!