Growing up in a small town in farm country, I experienced the whole package of being a member of the geographical village right up to the time I left home. People loved me and I loved them. Life felt safe; everywhere you looked was someone you knew. You could always find help if you needed it, no matter what the situation.
Does this all sound like love to you? It does to me. Love and trust ... the underlying unspoken, operating principles of The Village.
Everybody had their role in The Village. Even we kids knew we had a part. At that time we weren’t particularly aware of what The Village gave us—like a fish that doesn’t know what water is.
In modern society there are not so many geographical villages as there once were, where people lived out their whole lives in one place. Now most people move around a lot during their lives: from place to place, job to job, church to church, even from marriage to marriage. It seems to be the nature of our times.
Yet The Village still exists, and in fact, it’s more significant than ever. Now we live lives in which we find and create the villages we need to survive and flourish. We find a spiritual community to support our faith practice, such as this one. We join villages where we do our work in the world and where we study with others. We find villages to support our children’s education and well-being, as well as to grow ourselves.
Villages can range from tiny "villages" of two to Earth, our Big Village. Everyone has her role in each village, just as each village has its role. Mary Oliver is the poet in her town. Jesus was teacher, rabbi.
Villages are there for recovery and rehabilitation, for healing and wholeness. We have villages for creation, for building, for constructing the new. Such villages bring together minds and hearts to solve problems that no single individual could possibly figure out on his own.
We create and join villages because we need to. We can’t do this thing called "life" alone ... or death either, for that matter. Well, we could, but it is pretty grim to try to be the sole proprietor of one's own life.
Here at this church, many of us are active in little villages like Spirit Life, Earth Stewards, and Tribal Elders. In these small teams, we get to bring our unique gifts to the community through direct actions and ideas. We give, help others, and pour out that which is in us, crying out to be shared.
For me, I have been sharply reminded of the importance of The Village since I began working at Hospice by the Bay. As a spiritual support counselor, I am a member of one of the teams of clinicians who support each patient and family through their entire journey with Hospice.
Ours is a quite focused and intentional village. Our team includes nurses, social workers, a medical director (the doctor), a pharmacist, a chaplain, home health aides, an IT guy who enters all the team notes into the computer, a volunteer coordinator, a bereavement counselor, a team leader. We meet together each week for a few hours and, one by one, we talk about every patient. Everyone who saw or spoke to that patient or her caregiver or family member speaks up. We put together a picture of exactly where they are on their journey, and we collaborate on the next steps each one of us needs to take for our patient’s very best care. This is truly the village in action!
I know who I am; as a spiritual support counselor, I know my part in this village. Listening to people reveal their deepest fears and doubts, witnessing them say and do the bravest acts of redemption and healing, I get filled with humility and reverence for this life-journey we are all on. I am reminded that all—absolutely ALL—of life is sacred. And I am so aware that living this life well includes companionship for the journey, including that most sacred of times when life is winding down.
We are members of the village to be accompanied, supported, loved. We share caring, attention, mentoring, help and guidance, teaching and learning. We share falling down and getting back up. We share the practice of faith and the practice of fear. We share our suffering, our losses, our confusion, our joys, our creativity, our proud moments, our pleasures. The more we participate in villages that we trust, the more our faith grows and our fear diminishes.
We are in every village so that we can do what we have come here to do. We receive that which we need from the village and we contribute to it as we can. Collectively, we are brilliant—or at least, we can be.
God gave us the possibility of being in community, so that we could find out who we are, who God wants us to be—and then carry out the life of that person with integrity and grace.
In the center of each of your villages is you ... the real you. Just look!
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This article is adapted from a sermon offered on April 26, 2009 at Community Congregational Church, Tiburon, California.