The Pain and Promise of Politics and Transition

by Terry Chadsey, Executive Director

Earlier in my career, I spent 22 years teaching in public schools. Each summer brings me a stronger sense of ending and beginning than the turn of the calendar year in December. I imagine all of us who spent years in school as students have lingering feelings established in that childhood cycle. For those who go on and teach, this complex mixture of endings and beginnings is that much more deeply etched.

Good classrooms become deeply connected communities in a year. Relationships are built, we develop and grow, and challenges and conflicts knock us back or linger unresolved. And then we say goodbye. As a teacher, my experience of these transitions was a complex force field of loss and celebration, grief and joy, endings and beginnings.

This particular summer, I find myself in another time of transition--of endings and of beginnings.  On July 1 I stepped into the role of Executive Director of the Center, succeeding the founders, Marcy and Rick Jackson, who’ve so ably built this good work and this strong organization over the past fifteen years. For many of us close to the Center, this is a complex time of grief and joy, endings and beginnings, loss and celebration.

Looking back, there is indeed much for which I am grateful. And yet, given the nature of this transition for me, my energy is drawn to looking forward to this next phase in the development of the Center and to the new ways we will bring our approach to the world.

A few weeks ago, Parker Palmer collaborated with the Center to offer The Politics of the Brokenhearted: A Reflective Conference on Habits of the Heart and the Future of American Democracy. Parker is currently working on a new book on this topic. We created this program at the convergence of the growing edge of Parker’s reflections on democracy and our particular approach to personal and professional integrity. Seventy-five participants spent four rich days engaging with Parker’s ideas, with our own experiences of civic engagement and democracy, and with one another.

I stepped out of that conference and into my new role as executive director with three understandings that feed my excitement for the future of the Center’s work:

1.  There is a dilemma that defines modern life. We have increasingly placed our faith somewhat exclusively on the manipulation of the external world: the world of tools and technologies, money and material goods, systems and processes. This is true in education, in business, in healthcare, in communities, and in government. Yet it seems that the more we dwell on such externals, the more the problems of the world threaten to overwhelm us.

I believe that the evolution of human knowledge and technology carries great potential to make our lives better but often fails to do so because there’s another (often ignored or dismissed) dimension to human experience. Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue, said it well: “Human beings live in complex outer landscapes and complex inner landscapes and we seldom feel at home in either.”

When we place all of our faith and attention on the external and ignore the complexity of the inner, we end up living sharply divided lives and casting more shadow on the world than light.

2. The Center’s specific approach supports many purposes. What we offer has applications not only in personal and professional renewal but in finding that deeper source of clarity and integrity that enables us to more fully engage in the fractious world of citizenship and democracy, to better prepare for difficult conversations, to more effectively build trustworthy relationships in workplaces and communities, and to more openly cross lines of difference.

3. The power of our inner lives to inform and inspire how we fill our roles as citizens in a democracy is profound. My colleague Kathy Gille, who spent many years as a senior Congressional staffer, captured this well:

Politics is about how we carry ourselves into community and how we carry the larger community in ourselves. It is about how we create community and how community creates us. We face the injustices and conflicts of this world and we carry the wounds. We gather together to create something that benefits the whole and we are filled with greater possibilities in ourselves. This is the pain and promise of politics in a democracy.  

Yet in any gathering where the subject is democracy and citizenship, the pull is strong to external strategies and actions, calling up such questions as: What are effective strategies of civic engagement? How do we engage in dialogue on polarizing issues? How can we access the full diversity of our society in such dialogue--across lines of class, politics, race, culture, geography etc? What’s the relationship of inner work to activism?

This pull was certainly strong in our May conference yet the core of the conference was what the Center for Courage & Renewal has to offer: the opportunity to explore “how we carry our SELVES into community.”

As we bring the work of the Center to more people in different forms, I look forward to hearing your stories about how our work serves you. The future of our work is full of promise.

Join us near Boston in October--for the second conference on democracy--and beyond!