Cooked in the Common Pot

ACTIVITY 1: UNRAVELLING A COMMUNITY KNOT

It is not uncommon for religious communities to get themselves tied up in knots. Personalities and issues get mixed up to such degree, especially where different cultures are involved, that it is hard to know where to start unravel them. Being committed to life in a religious community necessitates being able to distinguish between the who and what of problems. The aim of this exercise is to illustrate the importance of unraveling knotty problems in order to deal with them.

1. Ask the group to form a circle and hold hands. Break the circle at one point, thus creating two ends. Ask the end people to lead the others over and under arches made by people's arms until the whole group is knotted together. It is essential that no one lets go of hands and that all movements are slow so that no one gets hurt.

2. When the group members are thoroughly knotted together, tell them they must now untie themselves without breaking hands. Persistence will be needed, especially if the group is large.

3. When the exercise is complete, have members return to their places and offer comparisons between the exercise and the recent community meeting where people failed to reach agreement on specific issues. You might ask them to consider.

a. What kind of knot tied the meeting up?

b. At what point did the discussion get tied up in a knot?

c. Who started the knot?

d. Who tried to unravel the knot?

e. How did the meeting end? Tied up or untied?

Social life in a community is a life of interactions, and the most important meaning of it is our awareness on the behaviors of our brothers. When we are aware of the presence of the others, there is social relationship, and we want to know more of their backgrounds, their values, myths and beliefs. In the community, we are intertwined, weaved together for a purpose, to give meaning, We all live in values, on agreements, but we also have the spreading sense of isolation, insecurity and alienation and so we have become very functional, sometimes, finding the aspiration of the community meaningless.