Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Closing Dance

[Fred H Olson WB0YQM (fholson]

VELMA [at] CSN.NET Velma Kahn  S: velma [at] csn.org
is the author of the message below but due
to a listserv problem it was posted by the COHOUSING-L sysop (Fred).
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                To put my two cents in...

                I'm perhaps not typical of the cohousing community, in that
religion is more important to me personally than anything else; it's always
my effort to think of God twice in each breath, once in, once out.  (Of
course, I often don't succeed.)  Nevertheless, although I attach this level
of personal importance to my relationship with God and spirit--I don't hang
out with organized religion and the organizedly religious much--because of
the perpetual tendency to the Crusade, proselytization and murder and so on
for those with different beliefs.  I also was raised an agnostic.

                Personally I adored the closing dances.  Hadn't done them
before, and have planned now to do them again.  I would have thought they
were perfect in that they were on the one hand so neutral (the earth is our
mother, we are healing her; peace and healing the earth are the two concepts
that stand out in my memory; perhaps there were specific references to God,
but I don't  recall them) and on the other hand so full of spirit.  Because
they were so neutral I would have imagined they would not have offended the
non-spiritual.  Because they were so full of spirit, they didn't seem to me
like the 'superficial New Age Boulder crap spirituality' I'm often
unpleasantly snotty about; the pulling of pieces from many traditions did
not seem offensive to me in any way, because the spirit was genuine.

                So I'm surprised to read the responses of those who were
offended.  When we on the RMCA conference planning committee chose this
ending, we were all excited about it.  We felt like it would bring the
conference to a close in a real bringing-us-together way.  We chose to make
it a surprise because it seemed fun to us--we did discuss substantially
announcing it earlier, to give anyone time to think about whether or not to
participate--but we didn't accurately foresee that there would be this
substantial small section that really didn't want to participate.  (I didn't
notice it at the time either--I was caught in the joy of the event.)  Were
we back there planning it again, having heard the feedback, I'd plan the
same closing, but I'd have a description on the schedule, and I'd have
framed the announcements such that it was clearly optional for those who
wanted it--others could have considered the conference concluded at the end
of Chuck's talk--certainly another appropriate stopping point.  I apologize
to those who were offended that we didn't announce it earlier and frame it
as optional.  I'll remember.

                I'd like to note for the atheists and agnostics amongst us
that the regulated absence of spirituality is as much oppression for those
of us for whom that's the center of life as is the forced participation in
spiritual practice for you.

                I'll try to see that this entire conversation on the closing
ceremony is added into the evaluations notebook from the conference, which I
presume we will pass on to Marci and crowd planning the 97 conference.

Velma Kahn