| I hear the excitement in my musician friend Tim’s voice over the phone as he tells me he’s just returned from Dallas Texas, where he attended a conference for choir directors, (9000 people in attendance.) It’s clear that being in a like-minded community is affirming and often empowering. “Experiencing all those people who love what you love, in the same room –You come back feeling like you can do anything,” Tim says.
If you’ve played in a band, or trained, traveled, and competed on a sports’ team. If you’ve practiced a dance routine and danced in a chorus, or coup de ballet, acted in or assisted in the production of a play ––your body knows what being in community means – the satisfaction of being a part of something greater than yourself and of creating something that becomes more than just a sum of all its parts.
So, this Sunday in Pittsburgh, my colleagues and I, members of the InterPlay Wing and a Prayer Pittsburgh Players will get to take part in the worship service that Tim and his colleagues have designed for the 5th Sunday of March in this season of Lent. We’ll be engaging with the theme of Reparations or Repaying our debts. As we face what must be faced in these troubled times, we will dance to what he and his choir will perform– Marques Garrett’s song,My heart be brave — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDoWqGVTXX4
-And bravery is what we can have when we have each other.
Sunday afternoon with help from the music of Jett Downey, we’ll be using the moving, singing, storytelling forms of InterPlay to reconnect and create community. (image and information above.)
It is said, necessity is the mother of invention, and despite not believing it to be possible, we learned how to create a community experience online. The virtual course Christine Gautreaux and I started 5 years ago based on the second edition of the book, Stillpoint: A Self-Care Playbook for Caregivers to Find Ease, and Time to Breathe, and Reclaim Joy is still going strong, meeting once a week on the Reimagine Platform.
We put the course online because we knew that people would need ways to connect and reduce the isolation of the COVID shutdown. And to confirm that when you give in community, you get––on many days, after the class finishes, we say to ourselves or to one another, “Boy, did I need that today.”
Next week, after a 3-hour plane trip to Dallas, a night in a hotel, and a 3-hour rental car ride to East Texas I will sit down in the circle of women at a women’s retreat that has been meeting often and regularly since the late 1980s. My energy will drop into my chair, and it will feel as though my whole body has exhaled. As I take my next inhale, I’ll know for sure, I’m home. As Sandra Day O’Connor reminded us, “We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone…and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.” |
