Convergence
Rev. Jennifer Brooks
July 17, 2005
Anyone who dared to go into Stop & Shop on Saturday morning may have seen a few kids standing around selling cloth shopping bags. One of them was Grady Murtaugh, the 12-year-old son of members Jean and Kevin Murtaugh. The others were Bram Daly, Owen LaFarge, and the LaFarge’s Fresh Air Fund visitor from New York , Julian.
The project to sell re-useable shopping bags at $1 over cost was a brainstorm of Nini LaFarge, Owen’s mom and the Nantucket coordinator of the Fresh Air Fund. The kids told me that during the summer Stop & Shop uses 15-20,000 brown paper shopping bags every day. These bags may or may not make it into recycling. Even though trees are a renewable resource, the energy consumed in the production of the millions of bags over a summer has to be enormous.
Grady and his friends thought there was a better way, and so they volunteered their time to peddle the cloth bags, sharing between them the small profit that Nini built in as an incentive to encourage them to learn what it’s like to be activists.
Because that’s what they are: a small group of people doing a worthwhile project that has the potential to change the world.
People everywhere want to live with dignity. They want happy, productive lives; they want their children to be safe. This is the shared vision.
But the world is filled with problems. It’s easy to focus on the magnitude of the troubles: just open the paper or turn on the news. When people lived in villages without satellite TV or the internet or other forms of global communication, they knew about troubles on an individual or community level, but were not weighed down with all the troubles in the world.
Today we are. And the weight of all those global problems wears us down. Sometimes it’s just too much, and we need to close the newspaper, turn off the TV, go down to the beach at sunset and breathe.
Even with the best will in the world and regular spiritual practice, the load of continuing global concerns can lead us to say, “What’s the use?” As a minister, I have at least one of those conversations a week.
“People say, what is the sense of our small effort?”
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, took on that question. She said, “We must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.” She believed in what she called “the primacy of the spiritual” in social change. I understand this idea, the primacy of the spiritual, to mean that on an individual level we must learn not to be spiritually defeated by the odds against the change we seek.
It is easy to become discouraged. Dorothy Day’s pioneering work, creating shelters and hospitality centers for the poor and homeless, began during the Depression. Today there are more than 185 Catholic Worker communities committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, and Dorothy Day’s life work sparked other forms of work for social change. There is still much to do about homelessness and poverty. But when Dorothy Day established the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933 it was a single voice calling out for change; when she started the first hospitality center in 1934, it was hard to find funding and people scoffed at this one small effort when the Depression ground millions into poverty.
Dorothy Day said, “A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts and deeds is like that.”
The phenomenon I call “convergence” is what happens when individuals join together in small groups of three or four and work on a project that is itself a small effort, but if multiplied will transform social life as we know it. These small groups work below the radar screen of national media. They work not knowing that elsewhere others are working on the same problem with the same hopeful vision.
Because they don’t know of the existence of the other groups; because their efforts usually don’t attract much attention; because the magnitude of the problem is so great—it is easy to give up. It is easy to sit down and feel hopeless.
That is spiritual defeat. Whatever our area of action may be—what ever small piece we have of the vision—we must not allow ourselves to be spiritually defeated.
Consider: it is true that one small effort may be a drop in the sea of troubles, and not enough to end them. But if we are spiritually defeated—if we give up or don’t even try—then we guarantee that our drop is no longer there to create ripples, to fill the cup till it runs over, to flood the world with change.
The power of convergence has been at work in the world for centuries, for thousands of years, and is at work still, more effectively exactly because of our new tools for communication.
For example, take garbage. Garbage has been a problem for 10,000 years, ever since people began living together in settlements. Two thousand years ago, paper was invented in China . The Romans had the first known garbage pick-up service in the year 200. The first known recycling of metal occurred in 1776, when a small group of New Yorkers made bullets out of a statue of King George III. But it was not until more than a hundred years later that NYC established the first recycling center. And the first curbside recycling—of newspapers—was in University City , MO in 1976.
Now, Less than 30 years later, curbside recycling is standard in many communities throughout the world, and many more communities have recycling collection points. Switzerland recycles 91 percent of its aluminum cans.
When someone looks at a soda can, and decides to recycle it, that one small act saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours (now there’s an example of the good news and the bad news). Tossing that can into the recycle bin instead of into the trash doesn’t make headlines. The Nobel prize is not awarded to each person who has recycled a soda can. But taken together, all those individual acts make a difference.
More important, those people thirty years ago who met in small groups in people’s living rooms to organize the first recycling efforts in their communities did not give up when it seemed impossible. They kept working. And eventually their ideas became mainstream.
That’s convergence. It’s as if an idea has to have a certain critical mass before there is a paradigm shift, before the idea becomes “mainstream.” A vision of a better world has to proceed in near-darkness, slowly, unevenly, carried by people working in small groups and wondering whether what they are doing is worth the effort.
They are people who feel despair, and frustration, and hopelessness, because they cannot see and cannot know that there are others all around the world who share the same vision. Giving in to these feelings is spiritual defeat. Proceeding in the face of these feelings, setting them aside in favor of just getting the job done, changes the world.
Habitat for Humanity’s first house was build in 1976, not quite 30 years ago. It takes a long time to build one house with volunteer labor (especially on Nantucket ). But today there are more than 175,000 Habitat houses around the world, all of them owned by the families who live in them. Nearly a million people have shelter today, own their own homes today, because of the small efforts of the volunteers who laid one brick at a time.
The Fresh Air Fund finds summer vacation homes for children who live in city neighborhoods where it’s not safe to go outside to play. For each family who takes in a child for a week, it’s a small effort. For each child, it’s a life-giving vision of a different world.
This week I spoke with Rosario , Ray’s mom. Ray is staying with us this week. Rosario talked about her neighborhood, how she makes her children stay inside all the time. She wants something better for her kids. Ray is here on Nantucket . He and my son ride their bikes everywhere—Young’s Bicycle Shop donates bikes for the use of the island’s Fresh Air Fund kids. Ray told us matter-of-factly about his life in the city, how a kid was killed by drug user for an iPod. It’s different here. He can see the possibility of a better life. Each summer 10,000 kids are placed with families in places where the possibility of a better life is evident. It gives them hope. Since the Fresh Air Fund was established in 1877, nearly two million children have been able to experience hope.
Convergence. We are individuals, and we can only do so much alone. If we join together with a few others, we can work on projects that make small changes on a local level. We sometimes think that we have success only if we can expand the local effort to a national or international organization, like the Red Cross.
We must remember that there are others who share the vision of a better world. They are out there. They are working, too. They are standing in their supermarkets selling cloth bags. They are planting trees. They are handing out brochures. They are clicking “reply” on internet petitions and sending their voices through the ether to the computers of their elected representatives, with messages about peace and justice and restoring the funding for National Public Radio.
The truth is, we don’t need a huge organization to have a movement. The movement is all around us, often unseen, often unreported. All that is asked of us is that we continue with our own task. That we don’t give up. That we stay hopeful, persistent, courageous.
Convergence. It is the unseen and unsuspected coming together of many small efforts until the world is different. It is happening every day. It relies on the actions of individuals, and it relies on the courage, the faith of individuals.
We are not alone. We share a vision. One day that vision will be the world.
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