[Seekers] [Write us] [Seekers Sermons] [Fair Use]
Sermon delivered by E. Vail, Kathryn Tobias
and Joan M. Dodge
April 29, 2001
The growing edge fund grew out of a donation made to Seekers Church by Hollis and myself at the time Mary Clare Powel was asking for money to self publish a book. The Growing Edge became part of the Seeker’s budget, and it has been funded for 20 years.
The concept of Growing Edge is a good example of how the individual infects the community. When an individual is moving into an unknown area there is risk and a dependency on faith. The image I have is a lit candle being held by this person who is taking this leap of faith. This light helps to light everybody else's candle. This growing edge is very personal. It may seem selfish to the person doing it. It is not about a worthy cause or success. It can fail. It is about trying and asking the community to be with one in this journey. The person in a faith place has difficulty sharing at this time, as there are many unknowns. We ask someone in the community to be with them at this time.
The epistle today -- about Saul's dramatic encounter on the road to Damascus -- and the gospel --about Jesus telling Peter three times to “feed my sheep”--both seem appropriate as metaphors for encounters with our growing edges. Sometimes -- mostly rarely -- we are blinded by insight; more often for me at least, I have to be told several times that there is some new path to follow.
In a sermon several years ago, Sonya spoke of strengthening the concept of the Growing Edge Fund “so that the invisible can be made more visible, the faith journey of each of us can be given more expression in our common life.”
As I prepared for this sermon, Billy Amoss charged me to think about the involvement of the community. Moreover, I realized in rereading my spiritual reports how important all of you were and are in undergirding my walk on the growing edge. It is not a place I would naturally walk without the community’s support. My growing edge story is inextricably woven in to the growing edges of other individual Seekers and of the community as a whole.
Several years ago, Roy Barber was pursuing his growing edge working on a play about what it was like to be homeless in the new South Africa. He researched it with young homeless men and women on the streets of Johannesburg. As a fellow member of the Artists’ Group, I watched and cheered as Roy completed the play and workshopped it with a group of homeless kids -- the MUKA Project.
Roy continued to pursue his growing edge, bringing the MUKA Project to Washington to perform his play in summer 1998. He asked for volunteers to house seven of them for the two or so months they would be here. I was one of many Seekers who volunteered. Peter Ndebele and Marcel Korth of the MUKA Project stayed with my housemate Nigel Fields and me for six weeks in a wonderful cross-cultural experience that reawakened my long-time desire to visit Africa. The MUKA project came to Seekers and charmed us with their loving spirit. They also visited my Lutheran church connection, Reformation, where the organist volunteered to help them make a CD of their music. I soon found myself peddling MUKA CDs.
The next year, Roy traveled back to South Africa, taking his high school jazz band on tour. Sonya Dyer and I, longing to see the MUKA people on their home turf, made plans to tag along and room together on the trip. However, Sonya’s life was already changing -- evolving toward a new growing edge. Then my housemate Nigel joined the entourage, and Seekers sent us all off with South African colors flying. We took the community along with us in spirit for a journey in which we encountered both the stunning beauty and the heartbreaking pain of the new South Africa.
We met Steve and Mary-Ann Carpenter, who had become acquainted with Seekers through Paul Holmes’ work in South Africa several years earlier. [Paul Holmes has reminded me that the first connection was actually through Fred Taylor, who knew and visited the Carpenters in the 1970s. I stand corrected!] In our 3 ½ days in the informal settlement that is Winterveldt, Mary-Ann put Nigel and me to work hauling furniture, visiting income-generating projects, hearing the stories of what it was like for the desperately poor, black residents of Winterveldt. Moreover, Mary-Ann asked me to come back, for two years or a lifetime, or at a minimum two months.
There it was -- my new growing edge.
I cannot say I said yes right away -- not aloud at least. Nevertheless, my heart was screaming "Yes!" Say yes!
My not-growing edge was saying "How?" In addition, "No!"
I felt like the rich man being told to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor -- I could see the camel and I was wondering how I could fit it through the eye of that needle.
To one like me who has been working faithfully -- some would say foolishly -- in the same place for almost 20 years--to just up and leave for two months or more! Who would do the work -- and what about my godchild Dmitry who depended on me for emotional support--to say nothing of the house, the dog, the cost, the other kinds of personal risks? It truly was not like me at this stage of my life to just get up and go. That in itself was a growing edge.
Back home that summer and fall with help from Seekers, I began wrestling with the pull to South Africa. In Seekers, I had two spiritual directors for the two mission groups I was in: Roy Barber in the Artists’ Group and Billy Amoss in Jubilate. To Billy I wrote, “Mary-Ann’s question to me is like that of Jesus -- not ‘Are you worthy -- and can you prove it to my satisfaction?' -- but simply 'Are you ready?' What comes to my mind is the idea that Jesus says we are all worthy -- and bids us come and die.”
I did a lot of reading about South Africa. In addition, I reflected on the power of community. In a book called Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog writes about watching Desmond Tutu calm an angry crowd:
“… Tutu got up, spoke into that crowd of thousands and got them -- all of them -- to wave their hands in the air, saying, ‘We are all God’s children--black and white.’
‘Did you plan to say that?’ [Krog] asked him.
‘You see,’ [Tutu said.], ‘I do believe very fervently that I’m being prayed for…There are many factors at play here, but for me the most important of all is that I’m not alone--I am not alone. A solitary nun in California once told me that she prayed for me at two o’clock in the morning. In a scientific, materialistic, secular society, that would be described as nonsense. For me, it brings a kind of confidence that things will be all right…’”
I wrote to Billy about this passage: “I find this somehow reassuring for us too” I said, “that our prayers, Seekers’ prayers, Reformation’s prayers, all our prayers for the world are not just going up in a fog of incense, soon to be dissipated and forgotten. They do make a difference. When we make a spiritual connection across oceans to MUKA and Mary-Ann and Steve Carpenter and Dr. Vicky Guzman, it is as real as or more real than a physical touch or handshake.”
I reported to Roy that I was serious about the call to South Africa. “So remind me, spiritual guide, and I will work to get it together.” Roy did not wait. His next reply to me said,
I had my marching orders. In a long report to Roy, I described some of the concrete actions I had taken. At the end, I noted, “…some ideas are taking shape.”
The Carpenters came to Washington that fall. I wrote to Billy, “Sonya was very supportive of the idea of my going to South Africa last Sunday when the Carpenters were here. She remembers from the Life Direction Lab my wanting to write, and she told Mary-Ann she thinks a time in South Africa would be wonderful for that. I am also getting a sense that some of the things that seem to be obstacles may not be.”
The call kept tugging at me--both internally and from external messages. In an email, Mary-Ann wrote that she felt “like God is dangling you just above Winterfeldt. Wish I had a huge pair of scissors to reach up and cut the string.”
I started thinking in very concrete terms. Eight weeks. When? When to speak with my boss? I wrote a poem.
At a critical moment, I applied to the Growing Edge Fund. Liz Vail had mentioned it to me earlier and I knew that Roy had also been a recipient. It seemed to fit. Therefore, I submitted a proposal that named several calls. First, Mary-Ann was calling me to work with the income-generating projects. I wrote that largely by chance, all of my working life had been in economic development programs. “I find that work inspiring for its potential to empower people, especially women,” I wrote. A second call was my growing passion for South Africa, and finally there was the call to writing.
That week I drove out to SERRV a catalog company in New Windsor, Maryland, that works with third-world crafters, to talk with them about Tumelong’s products, which were to be included in the catalog. I was beginning my hands-on work with Tumelong!
In Artists Group, I began a new spiritual guide relationship with Alan Dragoo. In my first report I wrote: “Sometimes I am amazed at how hanging around with Seekers has changed my life, almost without my noticing it -- until suddenly here I am, about to drop everything and head off to South Africa for two months! In fact, it doesn’t seem to take much to make a difference -- and then again, perhaps it takes everything -- to keep saying yes to what you hear as genuine call.”
By mid-March, all of the obstacles to my leaving for two months had fallen away. Once I got the courage to ask, my boss agreed to let me go. Kris Herbst said he would look in on Dmitry. I had spent some time straightening out finances and a neighbor had been enlisted in a mutually agreeable housesitting and dog-sitting arrangement.
The Growing Edge Fund had agreed to support my growing edge. Sally Holmes would be my faithful partner in exploring that new part of my life. “I am so wonderfully encouraged by Seekers,” I wrote.
Just before leaving in April, I learned about an organization that had worked in South Africa to develop curricular materials and games that could be used to teach business skills to the poor. Fiona from the organization, Making Cents, had just moved to Washington. Therefore, the Saturday before I left, she gave me a crash training course, and with support from the Seekers international giving fund, I purchased copies of several of the simulation games. I used these while I was in South Africa to train groups of the women.
In the end, it was a wonderful growing edge experience. I spent two months working with women on gaining business skills, developing a website and business cards, working on product development in income-generating projects from bread making to brick making to embroidery, going with the women to training programs in exporting, looking into possible trade missions, working on product development. It was great fun, and Sally and many others through email and prayers supported me.
When I came back in June, full of the joy of my experience in this place of great need, I shared stories at Seekers and at work. A colleague at work asked if I would like to take a group of American interns over for a 10-week program at Tumelong. Through the organization, she founded while still in school, the Foundation for Sustainable Development, she had been taking groups to Bolivia and Nicaragua for six years and wanted to set up a program in Africa.
Therefore, this year I am on a new leg of the journey. It got off to a slow start. Nevertheless, we now have four interns --g raduate students from Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and South Carolina, and an undergraduate from Toronto -- in May to work for ten weeks with Tumelong’s income generating projects, nutrition centers, haven for orphans, and youth development program. I will be leaving May 19 and staying for the first three weeks of the program in the role of guide, helping the students get oriented and work with their own growing edges.
Jean Adams and I are still working with SERRV on Tumelong’s products [with advice from Amelia Bennett!]. I have come to realize that many aspects of this work require patience and long-term commitment.
I have just spent this past week studying micro enterprise development with practitioners in the field at the Brookings Institution. I am not sure where that journey will take me, but I believe that what matters is to keep putting one foot in front of the other--and sometimes taking a wild leap on the journey of faith.
Roy Barber once used poetic words in replying to my spiritual report. Describing the call of another Seeker, he talked about “The sacred buoyancy of full speed ahead.” Yes.
Having many partners helps too.
While Liz has shared with you some of her important thoughts about the Growing Edge, my job is to share some thoughts about the reciprocal nature of the individual with the community around the “growing edge.” Specifically, in relationship to the role of the community in mentoring each other’s growing edge and in terms of the individual’s willingness to be visible and responsive to the community and to the larger context of the world.
Elizabeth O’Connor said in her writing that the “survival of soul, spirit, of psychic life and personality is dependent on giving and receiving. All relationship must be reciprocal.” Our gifts are not for ourselves or for our own little tribe. They are the means by which our energy and personality are released into life.”
In order to have our growing edge nurtured and “released into life,” we must be willing to share the germ of the growing idea or gift with another and the other must be willing to listen and to mentor that person until the “growing edge” has chance to grow and be born so others can see it. This means that as part of a faith community, we must find ways to listen carefully to each other; to listen to another for the struggles and the naggings as well as times of joy and excitement; to listen for the individual’s gifts or potential gifts; and to ask the right questions that stimulate further reflection and insight. This type of listening, questioning and mentoring of each other is an essential part of community life and we need to discover ways or develop structures so that we can be in such a mentoring relationship with each other, particularly now that Sonya has left as she fulfilled these functions for many of us.
However, the person who is exploring his or her growing edge and new emerging gifts, needs not only to have a mentor for listening and questioning but the person also needs to risk his or her own visibility within the community. As Liz will tell you, the Growing Edge Fund is not based on financial need but is based on a willingness to be seen by the community. At some point in one’s growing edge journey, it becomes important to have visibility within the fuller community and to receive feedback from the broader community. Without trusting the fuller visability, we are not risking the expression of our gifts with others. Ultimately, however, when we are ready, “our gifts are to be shared day to day in the solid reality of the world” (Elizabeth O’Connor). This last step requires much risk of the individual, can often be a forgotten step within community life, and demands much on-going encouragement within the community. Our Growing Edge is reciprocal in nature -- it demands that as a community, we create mechanisms to listen and mentor each other as our gifts are developing and also that as creative, growing individuals, we risk being seen by our fellow community members so that finally we can invest our gifts in service to others in an unsure world.
[Seekers] [Write us] [Seekers Sermons] [Fair Use]