GATHER THE SPIRIT
A Multigenerational Tapestry of Faith Program
WORKSHOP 6: HOPE, COMPASSION AND STRENGTH
BY RICHARD S. (RICK) KIMBALL AND CHRISTINE T. RAFAL, ED.D.
© Copyright 2009 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/30/2014 12:20:06 AM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
If you give (a person) a fish, you feed (them) for a day. If you teach (them) how to fish, you feed (them) for a lifetime. — Chinese proverb
This workshop highlights reciprocity—loving one's neighbor as oneself—a central message of Unitarian Universalism's Sources. Participants extend their understanding of "neighbor" to the wider communities to which they belong, including the global community of humankind, and learn that one way to participate in the interdependent web of existence is to express our own need to give love and care. They understand why treating others as we would want to be treated means taking the time to discern the perspectives and real needs of others whom they want to help. The story, "The Caican Water Project," shows how organized, communal work can be more effective than the sum of individual efforts and highlights how, for many Unitarian Universalists, service is a spiritual practice.
If you have not used Workshop 5, Alternate Activity 2, Make an Aquifer in a Cup, consider including it in this workshop. It will help participants understand the engineering challenges the Caican community faced to secure clean, flowing water.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: River Scene — Flower Ceremony | 15 |
Activity 2: Story — The Caican Water Project | 10 |
Activity 3: Time and Talent Exploration | 15 |
Activity 4: Tug of Peace | 10 |
Faith in Action: UU Partners in Action | |
Closing | 5 |
Alternate Activity 1: Body Tracings | 20 |
Alternate Activity 2: Reverse Mural | 20 |
Alternate Activity 3: Making Machines | 15 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Today you will help young participants see themselves—perhaps for the first time—as contributors to their communities. Older participants will reflect on their relationship(s) with communities in which they both serve and thrive. Take a few moments to reflect on your congregation. How has your congregation supported you to express your own gifts? When have you listened before helping, to discern others' needs and perspectives? How have you nourished yourself by being useful? Consider the times you felt most useful in community. Take that positive energy with you into the workshop.
WORKSHOP PLAN
OPENING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
In Gather the Spirit, the chalice-lighting involves water, not flame.
Gather the group in chairs around the table with the chalice bowl, cup and plant. Indicate where you have posted the chalice lighting words. Say you will "light" the chalice by pouring the cup of water into the clear bowl as the group says the words aloud. Lead the group to say:
In the clear light of this chalice we see that as the drop joins the brook, the stream, the river, and becomes a mighty sea, so do each of us gather with others and become a group strong enough to care for and change the world.
Invite the group to share an opening ritual to help everyone connect with the sounds of water. Say:
We will make the sounds of rain. Follow me and make a storm together.
Lead participants by verbally directing and physically demonstrating these sound steps. Pause on each for 10 or 15 seconds, gradually building the storm's intensity:
Then reverse the process. Go slowly back through the sound steps and bring the storm to an end.
You might ask the group to suggest additional body percussion or other effects and make another storm. (Turning lights on and off for lightning is one possibility. Making whoo sounds for wind is another.)
Ask participants to briefly report on their Gather the Spirit activities. Who tried a Taking It Home activity from the previous workshop? Does anyone have a new idea to briefly share about stewardship or water?
If you have started a Gather the Spirit blog for the group, make sure all participants know about it. Explain, as needed, that participants can post results of their explorations of Gather the Spirit topics or other comments or ideas relevant to the program; and, they can respond to one another's postings. Hand out blog access instructions to any who need them.
Suggest participants bend and stretch before sitting again for the next activity. If needed, ask a few volunteers to help re-arrange chairs and set aside the table with chalice bowl, cup and plant.
Including All Participants
Pay attention to accessibility; arrange the chairs to accommodate participants with mobility limitations or who use a wheelchair.
If any participant cannot make sound with hand motions, adapt the activity. Assign a few participants a foot-stamping part, or a vocal part such as the sound of wind starting as a breeze, becoming a howl and then calming to a breeze as the storm subsides.
ACTIVITY 1: RIVER SCENE — FLOWER CEREMONY (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
This ceremony honors individual beauty as well as the greater power of the collective beauty of a bouquet.
Invite participants to make tissue paper flowers to "float" in the river on your mural. Demonstrate how to make the flowers. Invite participants to find their own ways to pinch, crumple, fluff or clip the tissue paper until the circles look like a flower to them. Tell the group:
This activity is a modified version of the Flower Ceremony many Unitarian Universalist congregations enjoy. For today, each individual flower symbolizes how each of us has a unique and needed contribution to give our communities. We will float some of our individual flowers in our river.
And, we will gather some of our flowers together in a vase. That will show how if we want to make a beautiful bouquet, we need lots of different flowers. When our community wants to solve a problem, we use many people's different mental, physical and economic gifts to make all our lives better.
Invite participants to attach individual flowers to the River Scene, so some flowers float along the river.
Gather some flowers to put in a vase. You may want to wrap one end of a chenille stem around the others and let the remainder form a stem; you may need to twist a second chenille stem to make the flower stem tall enough.
Once the bouquet is full and the River Scene has flowers floating on it, gather the group to reflect on their creations. Say something like:
We have made a bouquet of flowers in this vase and added flowers that float on the river. How would this look if only one flower was in this vase and only one flower floated? How does having a group of flowers add to the river and the vase?
Tell the group they will now hear a story that illustrates how partners working together solved a complicated, serious water problem that neither partner could have solved alone.
ACTIVITY 2: STORY — THE CAICAN WATER PROJECT (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather participants. Show and pass around the leader resource; explain it is a picture of an aquifer, an area of earth and rock that contains or moves water. If the group has done Workshop 5, Alternate Activity 2, Make an Aquifer in a Cup, display a model aquifer and remind the group how water moves and how contamination moves with the water.
Read or tell the story. Then, process with these questions:
ACTIVITY 3: TIME AND TALENT EXPLORATION (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Participants think about what they are good at and what they could enjoy contributing in service to others.
Distribute the surveys if you are using them, and ask participants to take a few minutes to quietly fill them out before regathering for group sharing.
If the group is staying together for one collective discussion, explain that you will read each question aloud, ask them to reflect silently for a few moments, and invite them to raise their hands when they have a response to share. Record responses on newsprint. When all questions have been addressed, invite participants to consider how their particular gifts might be of use to the communities to which they belong.
ACTIVITY 4: TUG OF PEACE (10 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
In this activity, everyone has a role in achieving the group's desired goal, providing a small-scale analogy to the community problem solving in the story "The Caican Water Project."
Gather participants in a seated circle. Hand them the rope, making sure one person holds the knot. With everyone holding the rope with both hands, challenge the group to use the rope to pull everyone up to standing. Repeat for the fun of it. When the group is standing, ask them to adjust their positions so their rope is taut. Then call out different shapes for them to make with their rope. A square or rectangle is an easy place to start. If you wish, add one side at a time (triangle, square, pentagon... ). See if anyone notices when a pentagon, hexagon, heptagon or octagon starts to resemble a circle. (Multiple sides blending into a circle will evoke for some participants the theme of the day: discrete parts/continuous wholes).
You can increase the challenge by asking groups to form letters of the alphabet.
Remind the group to make sure their rope is always taut. Shapes needn't be perfect, but encourage the group to agree that they have satisfactorily achieved the goal shape before trying a new shape.
You can add fun for a high energy group, if you have the space: Ask them to move while still maintaining their rope in the desired shape.
Including All Participants
If a participant uses a wheelchair, encourage the group to consider that person an anchor and to move around them. If any participant cannot take a useful role in helping the group make a shape, do not use this activity.
Take care that everyone in the group knows the goal shape. If participants range widely in age or knowledge of geometry, use cut-outs or drawings of shapes.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather the group. Briefly summarize the workshop:
Today, we talked about how we all have gifts and talents that we can use to help make our communities and the world a better place. We heard a story about how when people cared and worked together in community, and partners cared and worked with them too, they solved a complex, serious water problem. In Gather the Spirit, we find ways to be good stewards of the world's waters.
Then say:
Think about our time together. What will you take with you as we leave today?
Allow a moment for reflection. Then invite volunteers to share. Then say:
We will recycle our chalice water by nurturing our plant.
Pour the water from the chalice bowl into the plant.
As you pour, recite the closing words:
We leave our Gather the Spirit friends now, but not our Gather the Spirit friendships. May they be with us until we meet again.
Distribute the Taking It Home handouts you have prepared.
FAITH IN ACTION: UU PARTNERS IN ACTION
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
If your congregation has a partner church, a guest involved in the partnership meets with the group. If anyone in the group has participated in partnership activities, they share their experiences.
If your congregation does not have a partner church, share information about the UU Partner Church Council and its programs. You might talk about why your congregation is not a partner church, and help the group brainstorm other partnerships with which the group or the wider congregation might engage.
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
Meet with your co-leaders after the workshop to reflect on it. How was your mix of discussion and action? In the midst of the busy-ness, did you successfully include spiritual elements? Are participants growing in their understanding of the need to protect and equitably share the Earth's water resources? What should you do differently at the next workshop? If the group will do more Gather the Spirit workshops, look ahead to assign leadership responsibilities.
TAKING IT HOME
If you give (a person) a fish, you feed (them) for a day. If you teach (them) how to fish, you feed (them) for a lifetime. — Chinese proverb
IN TODAY'S WORKSHOP... We considered how each person is an important member of a community. We explored our talents and thought about how we each can make our community and the world a better place. Today's central story focused on a community that worked together to help themselves and partners who respectfully helped them solve a serious water problem.
EXPLORE THE TOPIC TOGETHER. Talk about... the communities you and your children belong to. Do you have any photographs of their child dedication or similar ceremonies? Do you have photos, videos or any other evidence of your child's participation in or recognition by community groups?
Consider the difference between giving money and fostering self-sufficiency. Are there times when it is better to do one or the other? When is giving money giving someone a fish, and when is giving money teaching them to fish?
In your own family, how do decisions help your children grow more self-sufficient?
EXTEND THE TOPIC TOGETHER. Try...
FAMILY VOLUNTEERING
Research your congregation's affiliations with organizations that help people acquire new capacities or knowledge. Or, use a website such as GuideStar (at www2.guidestar.org/)to find a local project you could join and could help someone grow in self-sufficiency. There are many literacy and tutoring organizations (for example, Everybody Wins (at www.everybodywins.org/)) and programs that match experienced moms as mentors for new mothers. Find something that would appeal to your family and make use of your individual gifts.
FAMILY ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Spend some time thinking and talking about all the people who have helped you and your family grow and learn. If you are still in touch with them, create a thank-you note or make a phone call.
FAMILY ASSESSMENT
The story we heard today told how a community looked together at their most important problems and how they could solve them. They looked at their priorities for choosing problems to solve, and also looked at their resources for solving each problem. Consider your family as a micro-community. Is it time to examine your most pressing organizational problems and investigate your resources for solving them? If you want to talk with your family about making changes, Lynn Lott's book Chores Without Wars offers creative and fun ways to help everyone pitch in. The Flylady (at www.flylady.net/)website is free and has helped thousands of families deal with clutter and other organizational challenges.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: BODY TRACINGS (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Like Activity 3, Time and Talent Exploration, this activity gives participants a chance to consider the ways they contribute to meeting the needs of others.
Direct pairs of participants to trace one another's bodies with a pencil as their partner lies on a length of paper—without pressing too close to anyone's body. Then ask participants to write or draw on their body outline the ways they use their bodies to help others. Suggest some of their gifts may be associated with particular body parts. For example, near the tracing of their ears someone might write, "I listen with compassion when my friends have problems to talk about."
Give everyone a chance to admire one another's work. Ask if they learned anything new about somebody in the group. If participants have been shy about coming forward with how they help their community, and if you think participants know one another well enough, allow a brief exchange of sincere compliments or appreciation for what they know one another to be good at.
Including All Participants
If it is difficult for someone to lie on the floor, they could stand against a wall for someone to trace their shape. If someone needs to remain seated, consider making a rough outline on about the right size paper. Or, if you have a bright light available, tape paper to a wall and use the light to cast each participant's shadow in profile. Have everyone cut out and decorate a silhouette instead of a tracing.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 2: REVERSE MURAL (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
This activity is a freestyle way to experience making a shared project through individual efforts.
While the paper is still whole, ask each participant to make one large broad, sweeping line, curve or other mark that touches most or all sections of the paper. Once everyone has had a turn, ask someone in the group to cut the paper along the fold lines (or if all the participants are very young, do this for them).
Give each participant a panel. You may allow them to choose, but assure them they need not feel disappointed if the one they want is taken since they each will change the piece anyway.
Invite participants to decorate or complete the drawing on their panel in any way they wish. Tell them how much time they have and that, when they are done, you will put the panels back together.
After everyone is done, ask the groups to look on the back of their sheets. Have volunteers help you lay the panels on the floor or work table — artwork side down — and tape the panels together.
Allow the group to react to their own creations and the murals of other groups.
Discuss how the murals look. Are they fun? Are they interesting? Very often a group's mural will hang together very well. Is anyone surprised that the beginning, random marks could inspire somewhat coordinated ideas for the panels? Ask what this experience might suggest about how our individual life and work fit into a community's efforts.
Including All Participants
This activity is vision-dependent, but can be made more inclusive if you provide a textured medium, such as oil pastels, for the initial whole-mural marks and for any participant with vision limitations to use.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 3: MAKING MACHINES (15 MINUTES)
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
This classic theater game reinforces the idea that everyone can be an important contributing member of a creative community. Each participant pretends to be a different piece in an imagined machine. Ask if anyone is already familiar with this activity. Invite that person to help you explain the process. Explain that when the group has decided on its machine, one member will start the machine with a sound and movement they can repeat for the machine's "life." Once the first person has established their sound and movement, others in the group will join the machine, one at a time. Encourage them to make large movements, involving all or a big part of their bodies. Encourage them to connect not just side to side but also in front of or behind one another and to achieve different levels, for example with some standing, or on all fours, or sitting. Invite each new participant to connect to the other(s) and contribute their own sound and motion, until everyone in the group is part of the machine.
Give the group(s) a few minutes to decide what kind of machine to portray. You might suggest a category such as "real machines", "imaginary machines", or "machines to protect a part of the interdependent web." Or you may leave it completely open-ended.
Add a dimension of cooperation by asking the machine to speed up. Changing speed makes it difficult for participants to synchronize their motions. The machine goes faster and faster until it collapses on the floor (or pieces fly off!).
Variation
Another way to play this game is to invite participants, one at a time, to join a machine in any way they wish, with no prior discussion about the machine's purpose. To conclude, ask participants what they think the machine's purpose was and what specifically their role was as part of the machine.
Including All Participants
If any participant cannot move or make sounds easily, allow them to participate as they wish. Perhaps they could suggest what type of machine they would like to be part of.
GATHER THE SPIRIT: WORKSHOP 6:
STORY: THE CAICAN WATER PROJECT
Based on information provided by Rev. Mike Young, The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu.
Sometimes, the moment you meet someone, you know they will be a very important friend in your life. Other times, friendships start slowly. You might not know how important the friendship is for many years.
The partnership between a congregation in Honolulu, Hawaii, and a Unitarian Universalist Church in Caican, Philippines began slowly, with children exchanging letters and pictures.
After some years, Mike Young, minister of First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, had a chance to visit the Philippines , and he went to Caican. He met many generous, wonderful people at the partner church. But, it was the Caican children he fell in love with. One time a whole crowd, all ages, came swimming with him in the ocean of their coastal village.
The next year, Rev. Young went back to the Philippines and again, he spent a few days in Caican. Again, he swam in the ocean with the children. This time, one of their ministers came swimming too. Mike let the children use the dive mask he had brought. It was too big for them. Some water leaked in, but the Caican children did not mind because the mask helped them see their ocean fish, up close and personal!
Back on land, a Caican minister, Rev. Tirso Ponca, took Mike to one of the village's hand-pumped wells to wash off the salt water. The fresh water felt good. Rev. Young cupped his hands to take a drink.
Rev. Ponca sounded angry. He told Mike, "You must never do that! The water is not safe!" Later, Mike learned why Rev. Ponca had tried to protect him. For 20 years, the children of Caican had been born with yellow eyes. They had a condition called jaundice, a sign of a disease called Hepatitis A. Hepatitis germs were in the well water—the water he had wanted to drink. Caican's simple septic tanks and shallow aquifer could not adequately filter and recycle the village's water. Water used for bathing and washing came back again through the public hand-pumped wells. The village of Caican had no safe drinking water.
Mike Young decided right then: Babies in Caican would no longer be born with yellow eyes! Now he knew their congregation's partnership could be so much more than letters, photographs, or even visits and playing in the ocean together. In his heart, Rev. Young had already begun the Caican Water Project.
In a true partnership, partners make plans together. Rev. Young had to find out if the people of Caican wanted to work on getting clean water for the village. Maybe there was something else more important the Honolulu congregation could help them get done.
So the people of Caican had community meetings. They talked about what was good about life in Caican, and ways they could make life even better. They listed problems they had tried to solve in the past and what had worked to solve them. For problems that were not solved yet, the people talked about what they could do differently to reach a solution. They talked about the time, the money and other resources they already had, which they could use to create solutions. They talked about ways local organizations or the government could help.
Because some people don't like to talk at big meetings, community members went around to each person's house to talk with them individually. Everyone had a chance to give their ideas to make life in Caican even better.
And the result of all this talk? The people of Caican agreed that clean water was the top priority to work on with their partner, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu. After Mike Young went home to Hawaii , the Caican people elected a committee to lead the water project. They started looking for sources of clean water.
They looked upstream of their aquifer and upstream of the recycling septic system. They found a clean, flowing spring that seemed to produce enough water for the village! The owner of the land agreed they could drill a well and put a pump there. When Mike returned to Caican, a happy parade of children, teenagers and adults took the American minister to see.
At first it seemed getting water from this spring would be a lot of work. They had to dig a well, get the pump and a tank and lay almost two miles of pipe to bring the water to Caican. They had to provide ways for people along the pipeline to get water, set up another tank and build faucets. But sometimes we get ahead of ourselves with what a big job we've got. Rev. Young remembered the first step was just to drill the well and make sure the water would really be clean to drink.
Drilling the well cost $385, a fortune in the Philippines but not so much for the American congregation to raise. First Unitarian Church of Honolulu sent the money. The well was dug and everyone waited for test results. Would the water be safe to drink?
The new well was polluted. Not with hepatitis, but with a common bacteria, E. Coli. The people cleaned the well head. They pumped more water. This time the tester said, "Clean!"
Plans went ahead to lay pipe and build six faucets so the village would have drinkable water. Soon, maybe there will be a tap in every home. And Caican babies will no longer be born with yellow eyes.
It sounds like a happy ending: A partnership that started out as letters and photos, and became very, very important. But there have been two surprising results. One is that just as the Honolulu partners helped Caican's Unitarian Universalist congregation bring their village clean water, the Caican congregation has helped other villages in the Philippines . Caican villagers now teach people in other communities to organize the meetings and interviews that bring good community solutions to real community problems.
Another surprise—and not so happy—is that the water improvement in Caican may worsen the village's sewage problem. More water means more flushing. Mike Young knows the partnership's work is not finished. The next project is inevitable: a sewage system for Caican that works. Everything is connected.
GATHER THE SPIRIT: WORKSHOP 6:
HANDOUT 1: TIME/TALENT/TREASURE SURVEY
Name:
If I had (more) time to help out in my community, I would want to:
I am really good at:
One way I use my talent to help others is:
If I won $100, I would:
If I won $100 and wanted to give the money away, I would
GATHER THE SPIRIT: WORKSHOP 6:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: AQUIFER
Source: Environment Canada's Freshwater Website. Reproduced with the permission of the Department, 2009.
FIND OUT MORE
Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council
Learn about the UUPCC (at www.uupcc.org/)online. The website includes information about current projects and how North American UU congregations can become partner churches.
On the UUPCC website, the Caican Water Project and related projects in the Philippines are well documented. Find a description of the community consensus-building process model (at www.uupcc.org/communitydev/MayoBato.pdf)used in the Philippines and a 2006 detailed report (at www.uupcc.org/communitydev/Philippines/DickFordReport20APR06.pdf)which describes the impact of UUPCC-linked community water programs.
Family Re-organization Projects
Read Lynn Lott's book Chores Without Wars (Roseville, CA: Prima Lifestyles, 1998) for a discussion about sharing individual gifts and taking pleasure in service, in the microcosmic community called a family.