Passion, Compassion, Community: What I Learned at GATHER

Margy Levine Young shared how volunteering at GATHER and learning to use “radical curiosity” relates to her spirituality as a Unitarian Universalist. Assisted by Becky Strum. We shared our offering with the Middlebury Festival on the Green held on Town Green July 13-19.

Readings

Reading 1

From the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Center’s blog, at blmzc.org

Joshin Byrnes said, “I suggest a core practice of gathering: embracing the art of togetherness, mindful welcoming, just listening and being present for each other, and responding out of a felt sense of kinship. There is nothing more important. By doing this, we bring calm, connection, and care into our communities and peace to ourselves and others. …

“Connecting daily with people from different generations, backgrounds, cultures, worldviews, and life experiences, we encounter challenges and difficulties. It is not always easy to stay connected to people who are different from you. Yet when we do, we also discover beauty, hope, and the miracles of life and moments. Each moment of togetherness builds the future, embodying the essence of peacemaking.”

Reading 2

From The Weekly Sift (at weeklysift.com), a political newsletter by my UU friend Doug Muder, writing about why the working class appears to support the rise of fascism

The people who shower after work have gotten so alienated from the people who shower before work that anyone who takes on “the educated elite” seems to be their ally. In the minds of many low-wage workers, the enemy is not the very rich, but rather the merely well-to-do — people with salaries and benefits and the ability to speak the language of bureaucracy and science.

Actual billionaires like Musk or Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg are so distant that it’s hard to feel personally threatened by them. But your brother-in-law the psychologist or your cousin who got an engineering degree — you know they look down on you. Whenever they deign to discuss national affairs with you at all, it’s in that parent-to-child you-don’t-really-understand tone of voice. And let’s not even mention your daughter who comes home from college with a social justice agenda. Everything you think is wrong, and she can’t even explain why without using long words you’ve never heard before. Somebody with a college degree is telling you what to do every minute of your day, and yet you’re supposed to be the one who has “privilege”.

Reading 3

From the book “Radical Curiosity”, by Seth Goldenberg, which Rev. Tricia referred to in her sermon on curiosity

We are surrendering our language, our tools, and our spaces for benevolence—watching the extinction of dialogue occur, like a slow-motion train wreck. … We no longer have honest, earnest, constructive exchanges in civil society. We have normalized divisiveness, [which] … vaporizes the appetite for inquiry. It undermines the hunger for exploration, shutting the door before the pleasure and joy of conversation can even begin. And conversation is, truly, a pleasure. There is even new evidence emerging that our brain waves might synchronize as people interact and cooperate on certain tasks. …

The only medicine for this mental health pandemic is dialogue. Not because a conversation directly fixes the mess. But because conversations lead to fixing the mess: slowing us down, changing our tempo, and putting us in a state of hearing each other, able to gain new insights and engage in peaceful cooperation, shrinking the distance between the two polar end points. We’d all do well to experience our brain waves synchronizing with those of another person.

Sermon

Hello! I’m Margy Levine Young, a longtime member and fairly new Board member of CVUUS. I’d like to talk about what I learned as a volunteer at GATHER and how it relates to my spirituality as a Unitarian Universalist. 

First, A Story

This past March a bunch of us gathered on the Green to demonstrate for women’s health. We were standing around in the cold, preparing to march around the town, with lots of signs decrying the current administration. I spotted a man with a MAGA hat on the edge of the crowd, occasionally shouting things like “Make America Great Again!” and “Long live Trump!”.

What to do? People were ignoring him, but it felt like a situation that could get ugly. I went over to stand next to the man. What to say to a guy who probably disagreed with the whole point of the march? 

Luckily, I knew the man–I’ll cal him George. I asked him how he was, and we chatted.

“I’m here to make sure that no one threatens Trump or Vance,” he told me, and I assured him that that was very unlikely.

We disagreed about some political statements he made–as you can probably imagine–but the conversation remained friendly. I told George to stay warm and that I’d see him around.  The situation no longer felt tense to me, and I hope that other people felt more comfortable seeing us talk.

How did I know George? I’d met him at GATHER.

So, What Is GATHER, Anyway?

For those of you are haven’t been there, GATHER is the community living room created by the local Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community in 2023. Bread Loaf Mountain Zen practices community-based Zen, that is,  Zen-inspired direct service in our local community, as a means of supporting personal liberation, social transformation, and spiritual flourishing. 

Their Guiding Teacher is Joshin Brian Byrnes, who has also been a member of this congregation, and several of our members are also active in this community. Bread Loaf Mountain Zen’s first projects addressed food insecurity in the Rutland area, but they soon determined that the issue that they could best address is the epidemic of loneliness and disconnection. 

Hence, GATHER.

GATHER opened on Valentine’s Day, 2023 between Town Hall Theater and the railroad tracks. This June GATHER moved just around the corner from here at 76 Court Street. It consists of a living room, kitchen, big dining table, and a meeting room. The new location also includes a crafts room, and the meditation room–the zendo–and offices of Bread Loaf Mountain Zen.  There is always coffee, tea, snacks, lunch, and friendly hosts, all provided by volunteers. There are art projects, community acupuncture, knitting lessons (big surprise for whose of you who see me knitting here every Sunday), and a boisterous sing-along every Saturday morning.

When it opened two years ago, people started coming for coffee and conversation, and a community of regulars developed.  It’s open every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 10am to 2pm. Think about dropping in! 

Who Comes to GATHER?

All kinds of people. The Zen community, of which I’m a friendly observer, always has volunteers there when it’s open, including several people who are probably here today – want to raise your hands? We get our share of homeless folks and Charter House clients who are looking for lunch or a warm (or cool) place to spend the day. We get folks who are in some kind of assisted living situation or in recovery. But we also see lots of people who are just lonely, who are looking for community and fellowship, or have arranged to meet a friend. A bit like CVUUS, actually.

I started volunteering at GATHER because my friend Colleen Brown, a member here, was organizing the volunteers before the opening, and was thinking about activities that GATHER could offer. I said that I could show up for four weeks in a row, ready to teach knitting, with extra needles and yarn to give away. That was over two years ago, and I rarely missed a week. 

Almost no one wants to learn to knit, but I became a regular presence, sitting and knitting. I did solve a few knitting issues for Abi and re-taught John Stark to knit. Knitting is a calm activity, and started many conversations.

When I show up at GATHER as a volunteer (usually one of three or four), I get there half an hour early to open up and make coffee. We put out snacks and figure out what’s for lunch. When we open the doors, we sit around and chat, trying to greet each person who arrives. 

I usually get out my knitting and sit in the living room area, where regulars comment on my progress and newcomers ask what I’m making. Everyone was delighted when I finished a complicated sweater for my son that took over a year. One regular has been making cross-stitch Kleenex-box holders for everyone she knows, and sometimes we trade yarn. 

Other than making coffee and serving food, there’s little to distinguish volunteers from guests – in fact, we try to de-emphasize this distinction. When someone comes in who I don’t know, I approach them a person, not as a “client” or a fellow “service provider” (forgive the air quotes).

Over time, relationships have developed.  We held a memorial service for a regular who died suddenly, even though we never knew his last name. We worry about folks who stop showing up or who are looking too thin.

What’s the Spirituality Behind GATHER?

GATHER is a practice of the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community, but it’s not explicitly zen for people who come as either volunteers or guests. Like CVUUS, they don’t proselytize. 

But Bread Loaf Mountain Zen created a list of values behind GATHER: Safety, hospitality, and belonging. They describe belonging this way: “We nurture a sense of connection and community where everyone has a place and every voice matters. We practice being genuinely interested in one another, discovering what we share, and building a culture of care for each other’s health, happiness, and safety.” To me, that last sentence was what hit me–”We practice being genuinely interested in one another”– and that sums up what I came to learn at GATHER.

How does that connect to my UU Spirituality?

My husband Jordan and I wrote a sermon in 1992 about what we believed. At that time, I said:

I look at life as an ongoing learning community, where all of us are given opportunities to learn lessons about truth and love. It is not a school, because that implies teachers and students. Instead, each of us is both student and teacher to those with whom we have contact. It is more like a graduate school, where we are all learning together.

Sometimes this is very obvious to me. Life puts me in a situation: for example, I would be happier if I stopped getting angry at someone at work. What is interesting is that if I don’t do the learning, if I continue to fume about it, the same lesson appears in another part of my life; someone else comes along who makes me angry the same way. Sometimes life has to hit me over the head with a lesson three or four times until I get it. The faster we can identify the lessons in life and truly learn them, the happier our lives are, and the easier the next lesson is. With each lesson learned, we get lighter.  

What proof can I offer that this is the way the universe works? None. But this way of looking at life lets me see positive aspects in almost everything, and feel progress in my life.  It also lets me appreciate the people who are playing the annoying or antagonistic roles that provide the learning situations I need.

1992 was a while ago, and I’m thinking about how I feel about what I wrote then. Maybe in a future sermon…

And How Has GATHER Changed My Thinking?

GATHER, and Joshin in particular, have taught me about curiosity. Rev. Tricia, one of our two interim co-monisters, recently talked about imagination and curiosity. “People frequently value knowing over learning,” she said. “We leap into answers without knowing the questions.”

That’s exactly what happened to me a couple of times when folks at GATHER said things that I found challenging. 

When a woman started what sounded like a lead-up to an anti-trans comment, something about teachers using a student’s preferred pronouns, I immediately bristled and the conversation ended. 

Another time, I was talking to a man about his job at a grocery store and how they were shorting his pay; I gather that wage theft is not uncommon. I sympathized and wondered whether it would be worth finding a lawyer. He dismissed this with an anti-semitic remark suggesting that all lawyers were Jewish. My mouth immediately said, “Don’t go there!” before my brain even had a chance to engage. 

I took a breath and noted that my name (Levine) is Jewish and people usually assume that I am Jewish. He walked the comment back and we were able to continue the conversation in a fairly friendly manner. And of course, my friend Geroge with his MAGA hat at the women’s march?

I asked Joshin for advice about how to respond to comments that I find offensive – not that this is common at GATHER, but it happens. 

“Be curious,” he recommended. He suggested that I ask what experiences lead the commenter to say that, and what feelings surround that experience. Be curious about the person before (or instead of) responding to the comment. Look for common ground. Then think about what might be helpful to say that indicates that you disagree.

Curiosity is the first step, and the second is engagement. I could have walked away, angry and dismissing that man with his anti-semitic remark, or George with his hat. Instead, I engaged, however clumsily, so that we could continue to be in community. I started working on not leaping into answers without knowing the questions, not making assumptions about people.  (What led that woman to make that comment about pronouns?) 

This is particularly interesting at GATHER, where volunteers, Charter House folks looking for a free meal, lonely people looking for company during the day, and folks just stopping in for a free cup of coffee mingle. We don’t know who is who, who is a GATHER volunteer, who is homeless, who is a local therapist, who is a social working from CSAC checking on a client, who is a gifted stonemason, who is (in my view) delusional about some basic facts about who they are, who is anybody, just anybody. I work on approaching everyone with a curiosity about what kind of person they are and what might have to talk about, and then being willing – no, eager – to engage with them. 

Curiosity and engagement. Watching my baby granddaughter, I see them both in her – she wants to explore everything, without judgment.

Why Is This All Important?

In this political climate, it’s vital that we connect with people who are outside our usual circles.  We all understand the vital importance of talking across all the various lines that divide us. 

Curiosity and engagement were – in retrospect – an obvious aspect of my beliefs about life as an ongoing learning community. I can’t learn about people if I’m not curious and if I don’t engage, and as I grow older, it’s easy to think that I know enough. In 1992, I wrote about “the people who are playing the annoying or antagonistic roles that provide the learning situations I need.” 

Curiosity turns out to be a tool for learning life lessons, curiosity about challenging people and also about the people I think I know well. Curiosity and engagement are a way that we can all work on healing our society’s rifts. I need to continue to seek out opportunities to connect with people who are different from me–I think we all do, GATHER is one place I find them.

In the words of Lois Van Leer,

Having let go,

Set our intentions,

Named our curiosity,

Committed our energies,

And given ourselves over to lives of balance, purpose and meaning,

Let us begin again

In love

Blessed Be.