JANUARY

Week #1. Volunteer Personal Development Material and Tradition Elements for this Block.

IMMIGRATION
Encountering the Other

Doughnuts, Coffee, and Communion from The Word on The Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context by Stanley P. Saunders and Charles L. Campbell (see below) Cosmic Egg from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr. Luke 14:12-14 Closing Prayer

We cannot be alien to one another, even though we are total strangers. Thomas Merton Once the poor [the Other] can be represented as totally corrupt, as being always and only morally bankrupt, it is possible for those with privilege to eschew any responsibility for poverty or the suffering it generates. bell hooks

Objectives.
To better recognize how to hold our particularity as individuals with the universality of our faith traditions. To see how encountering the other can be a way of understanding our faith, while being careful to avoid romanticizing.

Background for Facilitator. For this session, please plan to spend 90 minutes together.
This juncture in the service year likely marks both a return from the holidays, and a halfway marker in the participants service term. This provides an important opportunity for standing back to examine interior changes: how is my perspective different now than at the start of the year? How have I changed? How am I being called to more deeply shift my perspective on myself, God, others, the world? Paradoxically, it can be by encountering the Other (total strangers, or people who are radically different from us in some way) that we can deeply encounter important parts of ourselves. Discovering our particularity, what makes us different from other people, is helpful, necessary, and natural. The challenge is to refuse to be confined by our particularities, choosing instead to see the larger story in which we all reside.

Materials You Will Need.

flip chart and markers copies of Doughnuts, Coffee, and Communion text (see below)

copies of Cosmic Egg diagram (see below) blank sheet of paper for each participant Bible journals, pens

Presentation of The Material. 10 min. Text: Doughnuts, Coffee and Communion, from Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context, by Stanley P. Saunders and Charles L. Campbell
Group members can alternate reading paragraphs aloud.

Gut Response. 5 min.

Give participants five to eight minutes to get initial responses to this material down on paper. Encourage them include intellectual and emotional reactions, what their favorite bit/quote is, and anything in between.

Engagement of the Material: Group Activity. 30 min. To engage todays topic and material, introduce to the group the concept of Fr. Richard Rohrs Cosmic Egg. Below is a quick paraphrased summary from Rohrs book the leader can choose to teach the concept to the group, or make copies of the summary for all participants. You might use a flip chart to draw a Cosmic Egg outline, or make copies of the Cosmic Egg diagram (below). The important part is to grasp the three domes of meaning that Rohr proposes each of us use to construct our experience of life. MY STORY: the smallest dome of meaning is my private story, This is me. Its subjective, interpersonal, self-help, psychological language. It is good and important, as far as it goes. But My Story is not yet totally The Story. It creates individuals, even good individuals, but not holiness or true wholeness, or even people who understand their place in society or history. OUR STORY: The this is us story encloses the this is me story. Our Story is where most people have lived their lives in all of human history: their ethnicity, their gender, their group, their religion, their occupation. We farmers, we Polish people, we Catholic people, whatever your group identity might be is the way most people in history have seen themselves. In many parts of the world, people have no time, or even no vocabulary for their private or personal story; their only identity is the identity of the group. The Christian biblical tradition honors both of these domes of meaning; though it doesnt name them as domes, it takes each of them seriously. The life of the individual and the life of the nation are both arenas for Gods action, but then it adds something more. THE STORY: The third dome enclosing and regulating the other two is The Story, meaning the patterns that are always true. This dome is much larger and more shared than any one religion or denomination. For example, forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish. There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. Love is love, even if the motivation might be different. The Christian tradition takes all three domes very seriously. In different ways, each gives us meaning, identity, and place. Biblical revelation is saying that the only way you dare move up to The Story and understand it with any depth is when you walk through and take responsibility for your personal story and also for your group story. Youve got to listen to your own experience, your own failures, your own sin, your own salvation, and youve got to recognize that

youre a part of history, a part of a culture, a religious group, for good and for bad. The genius of the biblical revelation is that, instead of simply giving us seven habits for highly effective people, it gives us permission and even direction to take conscious ownership of our own story at every level, every part of our life and experience. God will use all of this material, even the negative parts, to bring us to life and love. One word of caution: the Cosmic Egg can be misinterpreted in an anti-Gospel, role-based morality way, suggesting that within our eggs, we can only carry out our roles as lawyer, parent, etc., and that if everyone else carries out their roles, everyone will be fine. But of course, the Doughnuts story and our Gospel passage (see below) emphasize the Gospel message The Story frees us from the confines of Our Story and My Story!

After teaching the concept of the Cosmic Egg, the leader may engage the group in applying the model to two people described in the Doughnuts, Coffee and Communion piece. On the flip chart, draw two empty Cosmic Eggs (three concentric domes for each figure). Write Ed Loring near one egg, and Jojo near the other egg. The leader might choose another participant to play scribe to the group brainstorming that follows. Though we have only a few details about these two men, we might imagine other details. How might we fill in the three domes for each man? After some time of group brainstorming and discussion, distribute blank pieces of paper to participants. Allow time for individuals to draw and fill in their own Cosmic Egg (let them know they will not be required to share their diagram with anyone). If the Cosmic Egg handouts have not yet been distributed, they would be helpful now.

from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 22.

Group Reflection. 8 min.

The following questions can be posed to the group for brief discussion.

What did you notice or understand about yourself in diagraming your Cosmic Egg? To deeply understand The Story, we must first engage Our Story and My Story. But how do we become distorted when we live only from My Story? Or from Our Story?

The Tradition. 10 min.

Ask three different people to take a turn reading Luke 14:12-14 aloud.

Then Jesus turned to the host. "The next time you put on a dinner, don't just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You'll beand experiencea blessing. They won't be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returnedoh, how it will be returned!at the resurrection of God's people." (The Message translation, Eugene Peterson)
Allow for a couple of minutes of silent reflection, then pose one or more of these questions to the group: How does this text resonate with the Doughnuts, Coffee and Communion story? How does this passage tell The Story? How does it suggest we hold Our Story?

Synthesis. 5-8 minutes.

Allow participants to use journaling to gather the threads of this session together.

Prayer. 10 min. Holy, Almighty God of Many Names, Hear us in this moment. We find ourselves longing for you in so many ways. Sometimes our longing takes the form of a person with whom we want to connect a task we long to complete a future we want to build an illness to be healed a problem we want to solve

a conflict we want to end an evil we want to destroy a good we want to grow. In the silence of the next few moments, hear us as we name aloud or silently the longings of our hearts. But always, in our longing, whatever form it takes, we really are looking for You. In our core, we dont want to live in My Story. Or even Our Story. We want YOUR Story, holy God. We want Truth to be clear and free and accessible to all. Give us new eyes to see and new ears to hear how You are moving, living, breathing in us. How it is through your Son that you are always birthing new stories in us. Gather up our hurts, our own and those hurts of others that we offer up to you. Gather up our joys, our deep gladness, our grateful hearts. Hear our love. May we hear your love for us, now and always. In the name of Jesus the Christ we pray, Amen.