Islands in a Troubled Sea
Community as a microcosm of the kind of world we want to create, and a workshop to learn how to bring that world to birth
Humanist and progressive religious communities may have conscious or unconscious visions behind why they exist. Each individual coming to such a community has a vision, also conscious or unconscious, of what they want to find in such a community. When these visions align, people not only visit but join and stay. When these visions clash, “community” doesn’t happen. We just have a group. And maybe, a group that doesn’t stick.
And of course, people, organizations, and their visions change and evolve. Often, when we find what we are looking for in a community, our vision of what a community could be for us expands and evolves. When the world outside the community changes, the community’s vision evolves and adapts, or the community becomes irrelevant.
Here is my very personal story of this dynamic. It began in the 1920s when my grandparents joined a humanist community. They had become disenchanted with the traditional religious faiths they grew up in. My mother, who grew up in that community, recalled visiting the church of her mother’s childhood for the funeral of a beloved uncle. The sermon, in Norwegian, was nevertheless clear to her: it was about hell and brimstone, and how this uncle was going to hell because he drank alcohol. My mother always said that was the moment she realized why her mother had left, and why she (my mother) would not want to be part of that, either.
My grandparents were also enormously proud that their congregation actively supported, through a local coalition, the teaching of naturalistic evolution in schools, when that was a significant local controversy.
It was also through that humanist community that my mother got involved in civil rights activism in the 1930s. Yes, there was a wave of that activism then, which I’m guessing your high school history text did not include. She was a part of college students marching for civil rights and even integrating restaurants in the far Northern state of Minnesota. She treasured so much the social change values she learned there that she spent a few years during World War II working for the American Unitarian Service Committee (not yet merged with the Universalists) as a community organizer in Ypsilanti. If you’ve read The Dollmaker, you’ll know the context of her work.
In the late 1940s through the 1960s, many who came to humanist and progressive religious communities were there for similar reasons to my grandparents. Some had become atheists or agnostic or at least had given up on the God that they were raised with. Some of these were looking for a rational experience, not the stories and beliefs of their religion of origin. It was sometimes said about Unitarian congregations in the 1950s that the members were mostly fallen-away Catholics and assimilating Jews.
Some, also like my grandparents, were looking for communities where their progressive or radical political ideas were welcome, and they could find others to work with towards a better world. For my family, the two visions were both there. For some, only one or the other.
Through the 1960s, there was also in the USA a cultural expectation that parents would send their kids to Sunday School. Humanist and progressive religious communities attracted those parents who wanted a different learning experience for their children. That inspired both my grandparents and my parents.
In the 1940s through 1960s, Ethical Culture, the Unitarians, and the Universalists (the latter two would merge in 1963) joined with some progressive Quakers and others in jointly developing materials for “religious education” to meet the needs of such families.
My mother was a volunteer Sunday School teacher and director for many of those years. She taught district-wide workshops to teachers who were going to use a curriculum called “Miracles Abound.” That name may surprise hard-core humanists – but it was not at all about Biblical miracles. In a subtle way, the title set up that it was a more humanistic replacement for such Biblical faith. “Miracles About” was about looking at the wonders of nature with curiosity and awe. It was about encouraging an experimental and rational approach to figuring out those wonders. We were part of the natural world, not apart from it. Mom encouraged children, through teaching the lessons herself and helping others teach them well, to develop more confidence in their ability to figure out the world around them and how to make needed changes. (A more recent version of this curriculum is called just Miracles and is available from the Unitarian Universalist Association today: link.)
I learned about ecology early, both from my Sunday School lessons, which stressed our place as part of the natural world, and from some opportunities I had in school. I wrote a 25–page high school paper on the history of environmentalism. That was three years before the first Earth Day, a holiday quickly embraced by most of the humanists and Unitarian Universalists I knew because it fit so well with our values and ideas.
We also, in that time in Sunday School, had a series of stories that a slightly older group of children heard and discussed, especially in the fall. Before December rolled around, we kids had read about the miracle stories of the births of the Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. These were presented not in a negative way (“look how stupid believers are”) but simply as part of the human journey of belief, with some consistencies worldwide. By Christmas, we could put into context the beliefs of our friends in more traditional religions.
In neighborhood life, my family definitely was made to feel we were outliers, if not pariahs, for our beliefs. The kids on our block were almost all either Lutheran or Roman Catholic, and they came to believe that as Unitarian kids, we were really Jews, and as atheists, we were dangerous. Some parents did not want their kids to play with us. At Easter, we were sometimes accused by the other kids of killing Jesus, though a few weeks later these same kids would have forgotten that and gone back to playing baseball and Kick the Can together. That we knew acceptance through the humanist religious community was a kind of sanctuary for us.
A little older, we got to learn about cultural diversity around the world, including that gender role expectations were not universal. I sure felt that my growing feminism was significantly influenced by that learning.
Unfortunately, I also had some negative learnings. I dropped out of the Sunday School program at 13. The few girls in the class were harassed by the many boys, a kind of treatment that much later would be called sexual harassment. Yet, the lessons I’d learned at Sunday School and at home were what told me that such treatment was wrong, and that I had the option and responsibility to walk away. I never told my parents, though, as without more understanding of what was happening, it just felt icky and intolerable.
My mother gradually walked away from the community she had so valued at about the same time, for different reasons. When our minister had gone to Selma to march, she had come to church the next Sunday very proud of what he’d done. But she was appalled that so much of the discussion in coffee hour was around “How dare he do that? What would we have done next Sunday if something happened to him?” (I hasten to add: particular congregation has come a long way from that reaction. But not during my mother’s lifetime.) Later, a discussion on integrating higher education appalled her further when the mostly-white-suburbanite men in the room reacted to a mention of the paucity of Black Ph.D. graduates by asserting that the imbalance was understandable, as there just wouldn’t be enough “qualified” Black students to fill such programs.
The vision of my family was of a community where children would learn more progressive values, and see them practiced by adults. Where adults and children would look at traditional religious stories with a skeptical but not unkind view. Where we would imagine the possibility of a world that was more diverse and inclusive than we what we were able yet to experience.
The vision of my mother – who grew up in a humanist Unitarian congregation and later worked as a community organizer for the Service Committee – was of a community that values justice, equality, inclusion, and transformation. And when those values of the equality of persons and the rights of all to fair treatment and full flowering weren’t embodied in the actions of the community, that community no longer was a place we wanted to spend our time and effort.
Even after those disappointments, when I got into trouble with my high school administration for suggesting that authoritarian methods of treating the students were not only unethical but illegal, my Unitarian Universalist congregation was the island of sanity in a sea of chaos. Even though our disappointments had reduced our involvement, we were still connected and found support and an opportunity to support others through that community connection. We never completely left, nor gave up our vision.
In my childhood, I was a little jealous of friends who had a nighttime prayer, even if I didn’t believe in who they were praying to. My mother, out of her experience in the humanist community, brought this to me as our version of a prayer:
“Since others do so much for me / I too shall freely give / to help to fill with happiness / this world in which I live.”
I still hold that personal vision of the interconnected world and human family as the source of so much happiness to me and, in turn, as my responsibility.
As an adult, I came to see that my vision of community was of a group of people practicing the love of self and humanity, seeing these as intrinsically related to each other. I came to envision a place that was a kind of microcosm of the larger world, in which we could learn and practice the skills of living in connection and love. A deep respect for the human dignity and worth of everyone, not just asserting it for oneself, grew out of that idea of love, and was the embodiment of justice.
As an adult, I also integrated those old disappointing experiences into an understanding that our communities were places of learning and could not be already completely perfect. In the words of a song we often sang together in that childhood church, we were all one human family. Like families, we would often miss the mark of our intentions and need to repair if we were to thrive.
Microcosms / Islands
I came to see that vision as a “microcosm” theory of community. At its best, a community isn’t perfect. Instead, it serves as an island that is a sanctuary from the worst of the larger world surrounding us. At the same time, it serves as a protected place where we can take the time to learn from and be supported by each other, so we have a better chance of changing that larger world. The idea of Beloved Community also defines for me what kind of microcosm and world I want.
I recognize that not all who come to humanist communities or even all who create them have that vision. Some mainly want relief from the outside world and enough strength to live in that world. Some want a place where they can find others who think just like them, as relief from a world in which most do not. Some want a place where, as one person said, “I can say anything I want, and nobody will tell me not to.” As yet another person said, “A place where I can tell my friends what I think.” Their version of liberation is mainly for self and not about liberating others.
And then there are some communities where I’d characterize their underlying vision, from the words I hear from them and actions I see, as “a place for those of us who are superior to tell each other how superior we are.” That’s related to the attitude that says, “We can’t have diversity because ‘those people’ aren’t smart enough to center rational thought.” Relief, but no action or change, internally or externally, as part of the vision.
Having different versions of community in the same community can, in the words of the late Ethical Culture Leader Walter Lawton, give us “double vision.” There can be variations, but if the basic visions conflict, the group will be a pseudo-community or granfalloon.
Margaret Wheatley, in her book Who Do We Choose To Be?, articulates a vision that I find is very close to mine – and a lot more poetic -- when she says that in a world with life-destroying problems, we need communities. And in particular, we need communities that serve as islands of sanity in a destructive sea. She makes a good case using science, economics, and history, that by doing so, by focusing on what we can change and engaging in the work within our reach, we can have an impact on the world. By creating on even a small scale the conditions for human thriving, where people contribute, are connected, and care for each other, we make an impact. And that impact can include strengthening enough people to go back to that raging sea and take the needed and wise actions to get to the root of those life-destroying problems. Very much what the “microcosm” I had long envisioned.
This kind of community embodies as well what Howard Zinn describes:
“We don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
I’m personally not interested in a community that is mainly defined by how different we are from the other kinds of communities around us – though I see how that can also be a sanctuary. I don’t want just a sanctuary to get relief – I want one that also helps us work together to create or restore a better dynamic in the larger world. In my experience, communities with a more narrow definition of sanctuary don’t do the work of examining their own imperfections and exclusions and hierarchical valuing of some people over others, and then they, too, act in ways that are hurtful.
The educator and activist bell hooks wrote:
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
An effective community, in my vision, is one that understands that there is still much to learn about how we live together and gives us the opportunities to do that by learning and practicing new ways of being.
I have thought of as “microcosms” the groups that embody my vision of sanctuary, empowerment, and love. Such groups internally embody the intentional practices that we would love the rest of the world to practice, and thus help us to take such work into that wider world.
Margaret Wheatley calls such groups “islands of sanity.” I recognize that words like sanity and insanity can be used in ableist ways — and I haven’t been able to find better words. Wheatley defines sanity as being aware of and in touch with the realities around us, not in denial, and I think that’s an important component.
And so I’ll close with a more extensive quotation from Wheatley’s Who Do We Choose to Be? I’ve read and re-read this many times for inspiration since I found it a few years ago. I wish more communities would choose to be aligned with this vision.
An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge. It is a true island because it sets itself apart from the destructive dynamics, policies, and behaviors that are afflicting people on the mainland.
It needs to be an island because there is no other way to preserve and protect our best human qualities. We are not seeking sanctuary; we are seeking contribution. We are magnetized by the island’s offerings— the possibility of working together in harmonious relationships to accomplish meaningful work.
This current culture, with people locked down in fear and self-protection, is destroying our relationships, our work, and our future. It is easier to withdraw than to step forward. It is safer to protect oneself than to be visible. This is the harsh reality that defines the need for Islands of Sanity.
We do not withdraw. We are not seeking self-protection. We commit to creating a community where generosity, creativity, and kindness are the norm —what we expect from each other and easily offer in return.
We realize that the current culture cannot create the conditions for these behaviors. Although they are natural to the human spirit, this culture has normalized greed, aggression, and life-destroying behaviors. In this ruthless environment, what’s needed is not individual acts of heroism, but island communities where sanity prevails.
What is this island? It’s rarely a physical form. It’s an orientation, an aspiration, a commitment born from our deepest motivation to contribute to this time in meaningful and purposeful ways. We realize we can no longer participate in the general culture because its dynamics are overpowering us. Even though we want to be generous, creative, and kind, we too often find ourselves caught in aggression and fear. We notice that, although we know better and have behaved better, we’re now becoming distrustful, angry, fearful—just like everybody else.
How do we stop this downward trend of bad behaviors? We need to create a boundary, a protective way of being that reduces the impact of these negative forces. We need to set ourselves apart and claim who we choose to be. We choose to be Warriors for the Human Spirit, people dedicated to creating the conditions for more people to realize their best human qualities. And for those who will never be released from their fear and anger, we want to be generous and kind.
We cannot do this alone. We need to gather together with others who are motivated by the same sense of call. We develop an island mentality not to exclude but to increase our capacity to serve. An Island of Sanity takes form from our intentions and aspirations. It develops strength and capacity as we work hard, struggle, stay together, figure things out, fail, succeed, learn, forgive, laugh, persevere.
It is pure gift to dedicate ourselves to creating these sanctuaries of possibility. May joy be our familiar companion.