I haven’t been active on this blog and the reason is very simple: my life has been so full lately with inspiring work and projects, connections, love…, and, well, I just choose to live it as fully as I can, rather than sit in front of the computer trying to describe it.
But there is a celebration I want to share with you now.
For over 20 years I have been working as a group trainer full time and I thought that I have worked with just about any sort of groups, from hard-core business to school teachers and students, from doctors to soldiers… But a couple of months ago a call came in from a Catholic church in a village, inviting me to give a talk to parents about establishing dialogue with their teenagers. In the church! Straight after the mass!
At first I thought it was a joke. Namely, I am not at all excited about organized religions, especially the Catholic one (don’t know even where to begin listing all the unmet needs and values…) and I have written quite some pretty critical stuff about Catholic religion on this blog as well as elsewhere and so I thought I would be the last one that they would invite to lecture them. But it proved to be a true request for help and support.
Anyway, there I was yesterday, starting my talk right after the evening mass. The church was packed with almost 200 people, parents as well as their teenagers (I have requested to be able to talk to both “parties”, not to parents only), and the spirit was totally amazing. It felt a bit weird at the beginning, me standing there as a priest and everybody squeezed on these benches, but soon the magic started to happen. We connected so beautifully, somehow love and celebration of life was in the air, we were laughing together and feeling touched together while I was talking about building bridges across generations, hearing each other emphatically, using the connecting language rather then the disconnecting one, together working on ways for everybody’s needs to be met…
I felt touched, uplifted, very peaceful and connected to everybody. And grateful. It was just such a beautiful experience.
After it was all over and I left the church, walking toward my car under the shinning full moon and the stillness of the night at the edge of this village, I felt that this was probably the original idea for building places of worship; to bring the community together, to support the heart-connection to happen within people as well as among people.
To support the spirit of life to manifest itself visibly and to open space for rememberings, celebrations, mournings…
