Jumping into our place
Mental models and images
Make ourselves at home under all circumstances
I’m a life professed Benedictine in the Order of the Ascension. Our tradition has this wonderful mix of practices to help those seeking to join us; for our Order to become one of the “homes” they live in. Maybe some of what we do will help you as you move into a new parish – try to jump into your place. Some of the elements: receive everyone, as they are Christ himself; make it difficult to enter into the community, (you really need to make an informed adult decision), know that you are expected to adjust yourself to the norms of the community; and you will be listened to.
The image of jumping into a situation and making yourself at home comes from Father Benson, SSJE. “The religious must be a man of great delicacy of feeling, delicacy of taste, delicacy of sentiment—not delicacy in the sense of feebleness and weakness, but delicate in the sense in which an experienced surgeon handles a tender part firmly but delicately, in the way in which an experienced hand will disentangle the fibers of a plant that has been dried, the delicacy with which the smallest things are touched by one of experience. … We must be as religious cherishing a habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home in it, just as much at home there as anywhere else … The religious life is not to be a dreamy dissatisfaction with the present state of things, it is not to be a mere not knowing what to do next, because things about us are as they are, but it is the consciousness of being able to make ourselves at home under all circumstances and able to turn everything that happens to account. This is what the religious should be—ready; ready but not fussy.” (Richard Meux Benson, Instructions on the Religious Life, third series, A. R. Mowbray & Co. Limited, London and Oxford, 1951.)
Sister Michelle introduced Father Benson’s thinking to the Order a few years ago. It contains wisdom any of us might use as we enter a new world of any type, including becoming a priest or parishioner in a new parish.
Benson notes what today we might refer to as emotional intelligence. “..delicate in the sense in which an experienced surgeon handles a tender part firmly but delicately..” It’s what comes with training, coaching and disciplined reflection on years of considerable experience.
He also assumes a stance, i.e., “a habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home in it” – that we are to accept adult responsibility for our spiritual life, including our participation in Christian community.
Another aspect of the process can be seen as a parish priest works with a newcomer, “The parish priest needs a speech and a process along the lines that Father Benson had. In its particulars it needs to fit a parish church rather than an order of mission priests. Still, it can share with such groups basic Christian understandings, such as: Inclusion is a two-way process. We orient you and treat you with respect and love; you take responsibility for making yourself at home …”
(Heyne & Gallagher, An Energy Not its Own: Three Cycles of Parish Life and the Purposes of the Parish Church, Ascension Press)
I’m going to explore other aspects of the process by which we jump into place. I’ll use some examples of my own experience as a young priest and reflect on them through several models and images.
Being adequately absorbed into the parish culture
At first “being absorbed” horrified me. I thought “how awful, disappearing into some more powerful body or force.”
In 1976 I became the Vicar of St. Elisabeth’s in South Philadelphia. It was my first significant priest-in-charge assignment. I stayed until 1981 when I became the Congregational Development Officer in Connecticut. As I began my work as a vicar I had already completed organization development (OD) training with MATC[i], was finishing up a master’s degree in the field and was serving as the coordinator of the diocesan consulting network and on the MATC OD training program staff. A lot of my training had to do with being an OD consultant.
Along the way one of my mentors said something to the effect of, “You have to allow yourself to be absorbed by the client and at the same time not become so absorbed that you lose your professional perspective.” Years later Sister Michelle and I would write an article for the Organization Development Practitioner “Understanding from Within: Working with Religious Systems.” “We practice OD “from within” church systems. In the most obvious sense that is because we are practicing Christians in the Anglican tradition, [and] We seek to understand and appreciate the values and deeper underlying assumptions of the groups we work with.”
In the years after being in that parish, Star Trek provided a nightmare narrative “Resistance is futile … you will be assimilated.” It was the loss of a world through assimilation. Individuality was loss and the person made part of a collective mind. It’s the horror of an excessive emphasis on the collective, harmony and unity. All too often the default stance of the church. Our life involves a polarity between self and the group. How are we to maintain a self while being part of something larger? I find John Macquarrie’s thinking about the end useful. he saw as it as “a commonwealth of free, responsible beings united in love.”[ii]
But assimilation is also the gaining of a world by making yourself at home in the culture in which you are living. The lay person going to a new parish as a parishioner or the new priest in that parish would need to take on the ways of that community and let go of the ways of their last parish or the best parish they had known or their imagined perfect parish. To be successful it had to be done willingly. And if done willingly over time an internal commitment would emerge within the parishioner or priest. That movement toward ownership had to come through learning about the new place and making a free decision or it would be experienced as a bad dream in which assimilation was known as losing not gaining, dying not living, being reduced rather than enlarged.
In those first years at St. Elisabeth’s I had to learn how to apply that insight about absorption to being a parish vicar. It helped that I was from a working class background, grew up in Philadelphia, lived in a small row house as a child and teen, and spent a good bit of time hanging on the corner by the candy store. But by the time I became the vicar I had been through college, gone to seminary, and been involved in a variety of left wing causes. None of that would be useful in really understanding and serving the people of St. Elisabeth’s and that neighborhood around 16th and Mifflin. The wisdom of my OD mentor did keep the issue before me.
Mental models helped
I had several mental models that helped me. Each allowed me to see the pathways that would interfere with my ability to make myself at home[iii] in the parish. The absorption image was very useful at the time. I needed to become part of things but not lose myself in that process.
Even though then unfamiliar with Richard Benson’s notion of the mission priest needing “a habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home in it.” I now find Father Benson’s image more useful and expressive. And in effect that’s what I did.
The task of making myself at home in the parish was a lot of what I gave myself to in the first years. I routinely had coffee at the kitchen table of my Sr. Warden as a stream of people floated through – cops, tow truck drivers, relatives and neighbors. Rose responded to my efforts to rush the inclusion process, “It’s okay Father, we’ll get to know you.” And then there was Ed’s caution to never try to buy flowers at the flower shop across from the church, “They don’t really sell flowers, Father.” I was fairly successful in making myself at home in the parish. Over the years I worked with three professional staff members. I ended up terminating two because they finally couldn’t make themselves at home in the parish. One couldn’t deal with the working class nature of the parish, the other resisted the parish’s Anglo-Catholic culture. I hadn’t given adequate attention to the culture-fit issue in the hiring process. The third proved a perfect fit with the culture as well as being a competent professional. She was a working class woman who was receiving a good bit of training to become a parish development consultant.
Two mental models I made use of:
The Drama Triangle - To make yourself at home you must reject the stances of victim, persecutor, rescuer.
Group Development Theory: Leadership Issues - To make yourself at home you must accept the gradual and rocky process of inclusion.
To make yourself at home you must reject the stances of victim, persecutor, rescuer
The Drama Triangle is something we do instead of making ourselves at home. It’s an avoidance game.
The Drama Triangle in itself isn’t about making yourself at home or working out the appropriate balance between being absorbed and maintaining your identity and role. Its helpfulness is in understanding that we play the Drama Triangle game instead of being at home. It’s a way that we step aside from making ourselves at home in the parish. It rises out of our anxiety about being a self in relationship with others.
I found the drama triangle extremely useful. It’s not that knowing a theory, in itself, allowed me to always avoid playing that game. It was just one more resource that helped me keep perspective and reflect on my behavior.
The task is to identify that the drama is about to begin and to step aside from participating. This initial act of awareness and refusal to play is essential because once the drama gets underway it’s very difficult to stop it until the participants are exhausted. We never manage that perfectly. But we can learn to increase our self-awareness and learn new behaviors.
The Drama Triangle – Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim – explores three roles or stances people take as they avoid some aspect of reality in a relationship. Many of us slide from one stance to another. Some seem deeply embedded in one of the roles, seeing their life and their world through that lens.
The model was created in 1968 by Stephen Karpman, a psychiatrist. The roles are expressions of our desire to make sense of our world, exercise influence, and achieve a degree of stability in the relationships. In the end the roles are unable to address any of those desires. Taking on one of those roles, or rotating among them, was a way of avoiding making oneself at home.
Persecutor - The leader moves quickly to blame others. Wants to be in control and sees themselves as superior to others. Easily angered when having tried being a Rescuer and that fails. And if blamed they may become the Victim. The Persecutor role tends to create an oppressive, defensive climate.
Rescuer - The Rescuer role seems to be pretty common among many clergy. You see it both in those invested in pastoral care and social justice, and yes, those committed to parish vitality. We can go too far. A couple of indicators might be a feeling of superiority as you are acting unselfishly to help, a kind of addiction to the role, you feel good and virtuous while in fact undermining people’s ability to care for themselves and manage their lives. The Rescuer may be driven by a need to act rather than worship; to not understand Underhill’s reflection on adoration, awe and service.[iv]
Victim - In the drama the Victim sees themselves as helpless, overwhelmed. They are not able to solve their problems or learn new ways of coping. But as this is a mental game, none of that is real. They aren’t true victims, but they get something out of seeing themselves as such. It might legitimize their resentments over the routine slights and difficulties of life. The Victim seeks out Persecutors and Rescuers, people who will participate in the drama.
The temptation to take on the roles is constant. In the Parish Life Cycle St. Elisabeth’s was disintegrating. So the appeal to this young, first time in-charge priest was to be the Rescuer. It’s important to note that other young, inexperienced clergy might enter the same scene in the role of Persecutor or Victim. i.e., “I’ll whip them into shape” or “The Bishop is expecting too much of me.”
I can look back on that time and be thankful that I came to the situation with knowledge and skills[v] I had picked up from my work with MAP, an industrial mission, and a significant amount of experiential lab training in group and organization development. I had ways of effectively responding to what I faced as a new vicar. Disintegration includes an emotional numbness and blindness. People knew the parish was in trouble but as they had no answers they focused their attention on the small and understandable aspects of parish life. There was no internal leadership able to steer a way out of the trouble.[vi] The task of this new Vicar was to offer such a way.
One of the signs of the disintegration was when. I asked “Who’s on the vestry? Robert and Don looked at each other. They didn’t know. The conventional and strictly canonical route would have been to form a vestry by having an election process. Instead of that I proposed that we have a series of meetings to create a way forward. We would meet every Sunday for several weeks for one hour before the Sunday Eucharist. Anyone who participated in all the meetings would be on the vestry. Everyone agreed. The meetings used a variation of the process of planned change, i.e., diagnosis, planning, implementation, evaluation. Though we didn’t use those words for what we were doing. The group talked about the state of the parish and in doing that, acknowledged that we were in trouble. We also discussed ways of moving forward. As I recall at some point we agreed to four goals for our efforts in the time ahead[vii]:
1. to serve our community
2. to grow spiritually
3. to work towards doubling our active membership by 1981
4. to double our pledging by 1979
The parish made significant progress in the next few years. And the diocese provided needed financial and prayerful resources.
To return to the Drama Triangle, and to compete this part of our exploration – what allowed the young vicar and the people of the parish to avoid the trap of the drama game was that they had something else to do with their time and energy and had knowledge, skills, and finally the resources and support necessary to work their way out of disintegration.
Related reading:
Karpman drama triangle - Wikipedia
The Drama Triangle - Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim
To make yourself at home you must accept the gradual and rocky process of inclusion
Group Development Theory is a description of the process we go through as we make ourselves at home
I learned “Group Development Theory: Leadership Issues[viii]” in training programs a few years before beginning at St. Elisabeth’s. It was a mental model I came to know through experience. The particulars would unfold differently in various groups, but the phases were always there: dependence,
counter-dependence, and interdependence.
Dependence – “The formation stage. The group and leader come together; gather initial impressions of each other, make initial judgments. A new group is being formed. There is usually a time of tentativeness and uncertainty.”
Counter-dependence – “The group and leader experience a time of tension over influence and control.”
Interdependence – “Leader and group sort out roles and processes for communicating and deciding. Norms emerge for how we will treat each other and work together. There is more collaboration and a focus on the work to be accomplished.”
I had more experience leading groups than most new priests. I had been a leader in other settings – two civil rights groups in college, director of a summer program at an inner city church, coordinator of several human relations labs, and leader of the diocesan consulting network. So, I had been through the phases both as a member of groups and as a leader. That experience along with my training gave me eyes to see. It wasn’t a total surprise when the honeymoon ended, and disillusionment arrived. My sense is that many (most) clergy have had little real leadership experience before they find themselves in-charge of a parish.
All the group development models share at least two assumptions about how groups function. One was that every time a group came together the phases would take place again. So, a vestry gathering for its monthly meeting would go through inclusion and control dynamics as they moved toward openness (in Schutz’s model). In a vestry that worked together well it would usually flow so easily you wouldn’t even notice, unless you had group development training (eyes to see). The second was that every time a new person joined the group the phases would have to be worked through again. A rather important understanding when you were dealing with a new vicar in the parish.
So, as I joined the life of St. Elisabeth’s the stages of dependence, counter-dependence, and interdependence were before us. And in that case, the willingness of people to allow me as their leader “to deal with the group’s anxiety and the ambiguity of the situation” was an important element of our forward movement. When I asked them to set direction and establish the vestry in a series of meetings – they readily agreed. It was an act of productive dependence for them to permit the young priest to step in and take on the presiding role not only in liturgy but also in the Eucharistic community’s decision making.
The mutual success of that early process made for a fruitful dependency stage and that would mean that the next stage of counter-dependence had a better chance of also being constructive. And for the most part that productive dependency continued for almost a year. All the way up to just before Easter. The first significant counter-dependency event took place around what we would do to celebrate Easter. Easter, also known as the vicar’s folly.
Navigating through the counter-dependence stages involved two major missteps on my part. One was in the way I handled the termination of an employee the other was about the Easter Vigil. On reflection I learned a couple of things. First, leaders always make mistakes. And second, the question for the leader was, “can you exercise power and influence effectively, with a degree of humility?”
When I arrived at St. Elisabeth’s the church was still in a trial period for the Book of Common Prayer. But what was in 1979 to become the standard was already in use at St. Elisabeth’s. I still use a copy of that book in saying the Daily Office. One of the new elements was the Easter Vigil. I had participated in the Vigil in several other parishes and considered it the best and most faithful way of celebrating the Feast. So, of course we would do the Vigil in my new parish. Now watch carefully – here was my folly. As a small parish it was obvious that we couldn’t celebrate both the Vigil and a mass on Easter Day – just not enough people. So, I dropped the Easter Day Eucharist – otherwise known as “The Vicar canceled Easter!”
This was an invitation into counter-dependence. The event also served as a vehicle that pulled together all the little ways in which the new vicar had changed things in the parish. Many of the generally accepted, but not fully owned, changes were now linked to this big change.
During Lent, Ed, our parish musician came to me. “Father, people are upset about Easter morning being canceled.” I knew enough to not allow the other paid staff person to become the go-between. I responded, “Ed, thanks for letting me know. Please tell people that they should come and speak with me.” The following Sunday at coffee hour a group of parishioners approached me and expressed their distress. They were polite and calm as they spoke. We sat in a corner and talked. We all listened a bit, me hearing their attachment to the Easter morning mass, and them hearing my desire for the parish to experience the Vigil. I then proposed a deal, “How about we do both. You agree to come to both so there are enough people to carry the liturgy. And let’s have a small party just after the Vigil.” They agreed.
The Vigil went well. Beautiful and graceful. People were so delighted that at the party they came to me again – “Father, this was wonderful. Would it be okay if we don’t come to Mass in the morning?” I agreed. Together we had navigated the first large counter-dependence moment.
In 1986 “Bonding: Priest and Community” emerged from my reflecting on and drawing on The Group Development Theory, an Alban Institute piece by Warner White “Should I Leave?” (January/February 1986), and E.M Pattison’s, Pastor and Parish – A Systems Approach, 1977. You might find that a useful update/addition to the Group Development Theory as you reflect on your own relationship with the parish.
For me, arriving at a place of strong interdependence or realistic expectations and relationship was a kind of making myself at home. It took a few years. And it included a few difficult moments.
Being at home at St. Elisabeth’s was a two way street. The parish had become “at home” with the new vicar and, in some respects, with a new sense of itself.
This making yourself at home image of Fr. Benson wasn’t just about the mutual comfort of the priest and parish community but was expressed in a productive and holy relationship. Handling parish life and work “firmly but delicately” and an increased ability “to turn everything that happens to account.”
This is the Feast of Albrecht Duerer and Michaelangelo Buonarroti. I’ll close this with a sonnet by Michaelangelo (trans. J. A. Symonds) “On the Brink of Death.” Maybe a reminder that after all our efforts and work, all our making ourselves at home, our true present and future home is always “His great love.”
Now hath my life across a stormy sea
Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall
Of good and evil for eternity.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
This abides,
Robert
[i] Mid-Atlantic Training and Consulting was a training agency serving a mix of church judicatories and nonprofit groups.
[ii] We make use of Macqusrrie’s view in a collect used in Shaping the Parish. “O God, you call us to freedom and responsibility within communities of love; May our parishes increase in adoration and awe, guide us to real life, and nurture us as instruments of your love to the world, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
[iii] From “Make yourself at home” on A Wonderful and Sacred Mystery – “Father Richard Benson, SSJE, wrote of those called to the religious life an understanding that applies to all those who would contribute to the parish’s fabric of holiness, all who would be present : “The religious must be a man of great delicacy of feeling, delicacy of taste, delicacy of sentiment—not delicacy in the sense of feebleness and weakness, but delicate in the sense in which an experienced surgeon handles a tender part firmly but delicately, in the way in which an experienced hand will disentangle the fibers of a plant that has been dried, the delicacy with which the smallest things are touched by one of experience. … We must be as religious cherishing a habit of at once jumping into our place and finding ourselves at home in it, just as much at home there as anywhere else … The religious life is not to be a dreamy dissatisfaction with the present state of things, it is not to be a mere not knowing what to do next, because things about us are as they are, but it is the consciousness of being able to make ourselves at home under all circumstances and able to turn everything that happens to account. This is what the religious should be—ready; ready but not fussy.” (Richard Meux Benson, Instructions on the Religious Life, third series, A. R. Mowbray & Co. Limited, London and Oxford, 1951.)
[iv] “One’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created. We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your...life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good. “ - Evelyn Underhill, The Inner Life
[v] Dick Bartholomew was a priest in the diocese and in an advance degree program in organization development at Temple University. As part of that program he conducted research on the experience of young priests being appointed to serve small and struggling parishes. In a discussion with the diocesan Consultant Network, he said that these clergy were throw into situation that quickly overwhelmed them They might have gone in thinking they would be the Rescuer but soon found themselves feeling like a Victim. Few of them had any experience leading groups or organizations nor did they have the knowledge and skills of leadership and group process that the situation called for. Dick believed that this first in-charge experience damaged many of them in the years that followed as they took on responsibilities for other parish churches.
[vi] From a report written three years later, in 1978, “slowly drifting toward closing. There had been a decline in membership and pledging, the Vicar was part time, lay leader- ship was tired and pessimistic, there was no functioning vestry, community outreach had ceased, the relationship between the parish and neighborhood was poor, members spoke openly about giving up and closing, there was no sense of direction or mission strategy.” R. A. Gallagher
[vii] From the same 1978 report – “By the end of 1976 we had already made progress on all the goals. Community programs were underway, worship life was more stable, the declining membership had been stopped, and 1977 pledges had increased by 70% from the 1975 level. Enough had been done to enter into a special relationship with the Bishop’s Office and other South Philadelphia parishes in in which the parish would receive a significant increase in its resources for the next three years.”
[viii] This description of the model is my own. The phases were part of the common language in early 1970s lab training. The early work on it appears to have been done by Richard Weber. As I learned later it was all congruent with work of, B. W. Tuckman and William Schultz. A useful image noting the relationship among the various models.
