I'm taking part in a reading group for "Hospicing Modernity" with a particular focus on how the messages in that book might apply to churches and spiritual community.

We're gathering once a month and the meetings are confidential (I don't think we've even agreed on using the Chatham House rule) but I'm only going to share some of the things that came up for me, both in my prep (I'm medicated, I can now do prep! I read the chapter before the meeting!) and in the course of the gently- and gracefully-facilitated (by Liz Slade and Al Barrett) session.

I'd already tried reading this book a couple of times and then I also tried listening to the audiobook.  I've never got very far before.   So I'm grateful to have this group as an excuse to make perseverance more of a priority.  It's not just me, it is a difficult and challenging book, in the same way that I found my first reading of "Alcoholics Anonymous" difficult and challenging.  

The subtitle is: 

"Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism" 

Yikes!

and the publisher's bibliographical summary reads:

"A discussion on how we must face the multiple crises of modernity, interrupt and retire damaging modern behavior patterns, and reimagine how we learn, unlearn, and respond to crisis"

It's a lot.  

I will need more than one post to cover what went through me yesterday.  I had the familiar feeling of having my inner world rearranged both by reading and discussing with others. I dreamed weird dreams afterwards.

The first part (which we've covered in the first couple of sessions, while also gingerly getting to know each other) is about sixty pages and it lays the preparatory foundations for the rest.  It begins with a discussion of what, or rather, WHO "modernity" is and then invites you to "to witness and offer palliative care to modernity dying within and around you".

We focused yesterday on the third and final bit of "prep work" which clarified for me that this is about cleaning house (mostly within, but also without!).  One of the creative tensions that I expect to return to throughout is between the processes presented here of internal decluttering and composting and the processes that I'm familiar with from my step work in taking inventory, dropping the rock(s) and making amends.  I'm fairly sure from what I've seen already that they'll be complementary.

Without knowing the content, just before I sat down to read, I'd followed an urge to tidy my desk (if not the rest of the room around me). And then had to laugh at myself reading in the second paragraph: "Since modernity’s logic is one of accumulation, it conditions us to hoard stuff (both literally and metaphorically), thinking it might one day be relevant." 

Oof!  Is that what all this is?  An unconscious hoarding of stuff?  Certainly, if I were able to change my thinking about it's one-day-maybe relevance then I would walk away immediately.  I can imagine the lightness of doing so.  Immediately crushed by the grief and loss that I imagine would follow. And I'm not the worst at this kind of thing.  I've done some work.  I've let go of a lot. But there are things that follow me around, that haven't really been touched yet.

A lot of my physical stuff is important to me either because it's about me in the past or because it carries some feeling or meaning about people who aren't here any more.  When my dad died, you may remember, I wrote about the need I felt to gather up the things that might otherwise have disappeared with him.  Was that just modernity?  A trick, to distract myself from what's really going on in the world or the pain of losing someone so close? Maybe also the pain of being me (don't worry, I don't expect that it's any worse than the pain of being you!) and the difficulty of recovering from whatever shit went on in the past that wasn't possible to solve there and then.

I was very grateful, for example, to find my old school reports in my dad's stash, the contents of them really helped me understand and have a bit more compassion for the guy I've always been.  When I shared about that at the time, there were people around me who said "Now burn them!" but I wasn't ready to and I'm still not.  There's another stage in the process between where I am and "that's all gone" and I think it's something to do with transmuting, or in the language of this book, composting all these things that aren't needed in their current form, but which hold something precious that can support another cycle of life.

I've had an ongoing fantasy project that never gets anywhere.  You know, a bit beyond "someday/maybe".  A bit more like "when I've really got my shit together and am a much better, more enlightened and free person and don't have to sit around writing stupid e-mails and that". And it's about taking all of the books, tapes, records, pictures, files and shit and creating new things out of the precious emotional parts of them, new things that carry the essence of me and my ancestors for my descendants where it's useful, so that the non-precious physical parts of them can be reused or recycled.

I came away from last night's session with a little more hope that regardless of how unenlightened I feel, I might have permission to do more of that kind of thing now.