"Community offers the promise of belonging and calls for us to acknowledge our interdependence. To belong is to act as an investor, owner, and creator of this place. To be welcome, even if we are strangers. As if we came to the right place and are affirmed for that choice." – Peter Block
Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self, Senior Vice-President for the Baptist Healing Trust.
The best of community seems to lie in the quality of relationships. A number of scholars have referred to the cohesiveness of community as social capital, although in the language of Love such a phrase may sound harsh and depersonalized. Community is about the potential for mutuality, reciprocity, and trustworthiness among members, and as such stands to be of great worth within any organization. It is why we place great value on the practice of community circles within the Healing Hospital. Among many important aspects of building community, the asking of questions is vital to the possibility of transformative work and engagement. We must guard, however, not to rush to "the answer." According to author Peter Block, while answers may meet our need for quick results and can be very satisfying, answers can also shut down discussion and "the future shuts down with them."
There is an exquisite tension in the exploration of a truly powerful question that we sometimes seek to relieve through argument, analysis, explanation, and defensive reaction. Truly transformative questions result in requests, offers, forgiveness, gratitude, and welcome. It is in that transformative place that co-creation occurs. The nature of our questions either keeps existing systems locked in place or creates the possibility for an alternative future and potential. In seeking to build community, our challenge is to become aware of the mindset that a different future can be negotiated, dictated, controlled, or engineered into being. Building community asks that hidden agendas for dominance and "rightness" be left behind and instead that we bring open hearts and minds from a place of Love and respect for ourselves and each other.
In our healthcare systems, we seem particularly trained to solve problems, to "know" the answers. Questions that are asked with the intention of changing others reinforce the ideology that there is a problem to be solved, and create divisiveness rather than a place of belonging and community. Peter Block suggests questions that build community invite all members to the co-creation of future possibilities. The answers are not the focus. Rather, it is in the conversation where discovery is invited, however difficult or unpredictable the process may be. It is in that conversation that we are invited to bring personal meaning, passion, and commitment to relationship.
Healing lies in the possibility that is created when need is met by Love. Here are two questions that can help point us to a different future, a future of healing and radical love: 1) what do we want to create together that would make the difference, and 2) what can we create together that we cannot create alone?
This is a place where we can build community through shared responses of personal meaning, passion, and commitment to each other. I hope you will accept the invitation to join and help us create a different future for those we serve.
Journal of Sacred Work 
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