Community Catalysts
this is actually a really good follow up to my last post, and a good reminder that being distinctive and different in a neighborhood can be good! while there are serious issues of difference that incarnational re-locators must wrestle with, blending in completely is not necessarily effective for joining in the work of the Kingdom.
"Humility is a critical element for incarnational communities of people who have relocated and the inclusion of people from the wider community into the community of relocators can be important. But the thing that makes communities catalytic is not that they become the same as the surrounding community, but that they remain distinctive.
A catalyst changes things, not because it is identical to the other elements in a reaction, but precisely because it is different. In fact a very small amount of catalyst can dramatically promote or inhibit a reaction. The presence of a catalyst changes an environment.
These communities often live prophetically - becoming the change needed in an area, but they rarely really look much like the community in which they are planted.
For sure our ethnic, class, and power differences need to be viewed with a healthy dose of caution. We must be vigilant in addressing the messianic complex which can accompany groups who choose a life of incarnational mission. We must live lives of reconciliation in every place humans have put up walls. But I can no longer dismiss a community automatically just because it doesn’t look just like the neighborhood in which it lives. In the presence of humility, reconciliation, grace and peace – differences can be catalytic."
South African "Idol"
a little peek into cultural goings-on in South Africa and a reminder that race is (still) a (big) issue there, 16 years after the official end of apartheid. and oh yeah, the white guy won.
"The real issue is socio-economic. It's about who can pay for TV and who can't. Black folks comprise almost 80% of our population, but in M-Netland they comprise only 17% of Idols viewers. And audiences want to see themselves on TV."
The dangerous side of volunteering
another interesting peek into some of the issues that I will probably face when I get to South Africa. the ironic thing about this piece is that these potential harms of short-term volunteering exist everywhere, whether the volunteers come from america or zambia, and are serving in new orleans or the netherlands. having committed to living in places of need, i have seen first-hand the effects of well-intentioned people who send a message by forming deep bonds and then leaving soon after. i have experienced the effects of abandonment with children who don't understand why everyone who says they care keeps leaving. this was even something i wrestled with upon my leaving new orleans--is this how my friends there would see me? and now to see it in light of where i'm going, i have to keep it at the front of my mind when i think about whether i'm serving for my own benefit, or for the good of others.
"The psychological literature talks about attachment theory — very young children are programmed to build attachments… And so, you've got these sort of repeated abandonments — first with young children whose parents may die of AIDS. And then they go to live in an orphanage where you often have high staff turnover. And then you've got tourists that are coming as sort of the third wave of this abandonment. Children are left behind to remember a series of these foreigners who come in and then leave them there…"
why i love psychology
i found this so fascinating because it is such a true picture of the human mind, and the way we justify things--mostly our own behavior. i know this is true of myself, so to see it verified and studied is very reassuring. it confirms that i'm not alone in the way i'd like to manipulate my own memory, or self-perception. we really would like to believe that if we've ever been bad, at least that was in the past, our "old selves;" we are constantly improving and our "good deeds" more readily fill recent history. our good-ness is closer to who we are today, so we tell ourselves. this research confirms, though, that no, actually, we're not as good as we'd like to convince others...or ourselves. but, there's hope, as the scientists point out that our minds often tend to create future selves even better than we are now, demonstrating an appetite for redemption.
“Now, scientists are beginning to learn how memory assists and even amplifies this righteous self-messaging. In piecing together a life story, the mind nudges moral lapses back in time and shunts good deeds forward, these new studies suggest — creating, in effect, a doctored autobiography. Recognizing this tendency in oneself, psychologists say, can both reduce the risk of lapsing into middle-aged sanctimony and increase moral vigilance for when it matters most: the present.
‘The main finding is that if I ask you to tell me about a positive moral memory, you’ll tell me something recent,’ Dr. Escobedo said. ‘If I ask you to tell me about bad moral memory, you’re going to give me something from much further in the past.’
Future selves may score the best reviews of all, said David Dunning, a social psychologist at Cornell. ‘People seem to situate themselves in time differently than they do others,’ Dr. Dunning wrote in an e-mail. ‘Ask students what’s important for gaining an accurate impression of them and they emphasize more their unwritten future potential than they do when asked the same question about another person. We presume that future potential is more rosy than the past is.’"
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