Convergence

Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952

The other day I visited the open house of a new Humanist Hub, an impressively large space for non-religious people in the center of Harvard Square, Cambridge. Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, has facilitated a team of staffers and contributors, including myself, to develop this church-alternative. We have done a good job of it. Our individual daily practices have converged in concert to develop a community center. Some of us have devoted the majority of their waking hours to the task. They have done well.

Looking across a roomful of self-identified secular folks of various stripes caused me to wonder what various personal practices brought them to the same space. I prefer to think they were a convergence, rather than a simple congregation, a term which can too easily be associated with passive herding by a shepherd. Too many shepherds are actually wolves.

Between 1978 and 1982, I developed a group counseling program in a gay/lesbian clinic here in Boston, one of the first publicly supported gay/lesbian institutions in the U.S.. We provided low-cost or free counseling to hundreds of clients every week in the dilapidated rooms on the 8th floor of a dilapidated office building. My youthful passion, as a relatively inexperienced psychiatric nurse, was group counseling. I facilitated several weekly groups of six-to-eight clients each. 

I learned from my experiences and study as a group facilitator that the power of any group lies in the development of the health of each member individually within the group by the caring words and actions of the members. My job, I realized, was not to lead. My job was to identify the beauty and strength of the individuals in each group in order to facilitate their sharing it with each other, to help each other become healthy and confident. These groups were a convergence of people questing for growth and health in their individual lives. Once established, these groups met for years and did a great deal of good for members who came and went. The healing which occurred had little to do with me. Its source was the convergence of seeking minds in a caring environment. 

The lectern model of religion is a failure. Look at the most religious. Fundamentalists of every kind look to leaders to steer moralist revolutions. What they get is quite different. They get demagogues who often steer them into the worst forms of isolationism, homophobia, militarism and mental illness. I am hoping that Humanism as a movement seeks to bring people together in community to share their individual strength and intelligence, rather than develop another congregational religion which exists to support its clergy.