SECOND YEAR
The second year was a little scary for everyone. Two first year classes (1975 and 1976) were combined and we were very defensive about our own personal experiences, afraid they would be discredited some way or that would set our expectations way too high. I was thinking about going into the ministry and a little touchy about that.
In the first year we had had one “custom” text xeroxed for us. In the second year we bought the “1977 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators.” The idea was for us to “facilitate” each other this time, rather than taking instruction as much as we had the first year. We also had a “custom” book that contained “Introduction to Theory and Practice Papers,” “Design considerations in Laboratory Education,” and “Introduction to Instruments,” all from “Reference Guide to Handbooks and Annuals". These two books are from University Associates, Inc., 7596 Eads Avenue, La Jolla, California, 92037. Also, on an optional basis, some of us bought “Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources,” by Hersey and Blanchard. (Published by Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632). This is very technical stuff, not written for ordinary people to enjoy browsing through on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
We broke into groups again by sign-up with only journal-keeping groups, loosely based on Progoff to replace Credo. Peter again assigned journal groups. This time there was no gimmick for separating us, except that we were urged to choose different people instead of sticking with buddies.
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN
Ord gave us the following advice for designing our OD group projects:
1. Think of the big picture/Gestalt/whammo experience.
2. Consider the sequencing of material. What is the relationship of individuals to their group? How does the theology relate?
3. Look at adaptability and modifiability. How can you tailor to fit the group? What can you do to compensate for the unexpected?
4. Consider pacing. Take advantage of natural pace.
5. Try for flexible spontaneity.
6. Work on integration awareness: how will you build and tie in concepts.
Ord and Peter acted as invited consultants only. Needless to say, we didn’t hesitate to ask for help. In some instances, it was a real test of the two leaders to keep from intervening when things got shaky, but they had faith and it paid off when the learners coped by themselves.
All the OD exercises we did were taken from “Handbook for Group Facilitators.” They were: “Blue/Green, an Intergroup Negotiation,” “Pyramids: a Consensus Experience,” “Executive Pie: a Power Experience,” “TORI Group Self-diagnosis Scale,” and “Conflict Styles: Organizational Decision Making.” Some of these were originally designed for a business context that didn’t adapt too well while others worked without tinkering. Each group taught a session by setting up some sort of experience and using it to develop learning, and then were critiqued by Ord, who was MERCILESS. He said right up front that he intended to treat us as professionals in the field and so he did. We were soon smarting and trying harder and harder. UU’s are not used to criticism!
We added in an exercise on Androgeny and Jim Zacharias led a few exercises about sex roles. I was particularly pleased that when a paper-and-pencil test assigned us places on a continuum, I ended up next to Peter Raible and Alan Deale, thinking this signified something about fitness for the ministry. I’m not sure what it really meant, but more something like the tradeoff between nurturing and power. (I was an animal control officer at the time.) For everyone this started up a train of thought that effectively headed off some of the steamy problems of the year before. We noticed that this year instead of everyone dancing and yelling for two or three hours after the regular sessions, people tended to sit and talk quietly in small groups. There was much less drinking than the year before. We had access to the gymnasium and a nightly volleyball game drew off some energy.
Evil hit us on the fourth night again, but this time it was in an OD group. The planners of the session had dead-locked on power issues and absolutely could not resolve their differences about how to present the material, or so we were led to believe. They called for help and everyone began to sweat. People got up and stalked out of their meetings. Feelings were hurt. We all felt like failures and no one knew what to do. We got to the session, which was arranged formally with the planners as a group around a table up front and the rest of us on chairs in the audience. The planners began to make their presentation and bickering started up. We in the audience tried to gloss it over, but it just kept getting worse, until we were truly embarrassed. The whole experience kept getting more and more incredible until suddenly there were explosions in the bathroom! It sounded like gunshots! Uproar! (Firecrackers.)
Finally we realized we’d been conned into a satire of the planning group’s experience. They had decided they would simply present a Mexican standoff. What had seemed like chaos had actually been one of the most controlled experiences of the whole workshop. The actual points of the lesson were taped to the undersides of our chair-seats. As an added fillip, each one quoted a Bible verse.
THEOLOGY
The theology groups were based on three recurring complaints about UU churches: the “coldness,” the “lack of spiritual content,” and the lack of program and curriculum. My group started with one page of “doing theology” directions and one page of questions dealing with the issue of spirituality. We had quite a struggle, mainly because we were coming from such different mental contexts and had so much divergence semantically. Finally, we backed off to an almost pre-verbal definition of spirituality and were able to design an experience around that.
Earlier in the day, as part of a compromise exercise, we had all written definitions of “spiritual,” so we collected them to use as a starting point. We designed the class almost as though it were a worship service. First we played music long enough to set a meditative and fantastical mood. Then we each read a definition from the morning. The one I remember was the older man from Victoria, B.C., who said that God to him was a “pale oblong blur.”
Next we formed triads and Joan Goodwin directed us through a shared account of our personal spiritual journeys, a regular UUA exercise. Each of us prepared a personal “roadmap” symbolizing this journey and we put them all up on the wall while we took a coffee break and walked around to look at what other people had done. The contrast and imagination were unbelievable. In fact, this set me off on an interest in maps that has continued to the present. (There is a remarkable blog about strange maps.) Joan has done this exercise many times in many places and assured us that it always happens that way. We reconvened with music to get back into the mood. this time Susan Newell guided us through a fantasy in which we envisioned our essential selves and described that essence. Then we broke into triads (different ones) and told each other about our spiritual needs, how and where they were being met, or whether indeed they WERE being met. Last, each of wrote a letter to our own church telling it how it could meet our spiritual needs.
Again, we critiqued unmercifully. Actually, my group came off pretty well. It was experiential, went someplace and had a concrete product at the end. The most enlightening thing I got out of the exercise was some insight into my own group dynamics. I’d been really excited about the subject matter and wanted to bite down hard on it, do something astounding and intellectual -- maybe do something with religious vocabulary because it seemed to me so few people had the words to say what they meant. I wanted to draw on some of the material we’d been uncovering in a discussion group in my home church. I was being as dynamic and persuasive (and arrogant) as possible, but it seemed to me that my ideas all fell by the wayside and that I was forced to compromise a great deal. When at the end we critiqued our experience of the process, I complained about having to give up so much. Then another person pointed out to me that every one of my ideas had been used in some transformed way! And another person said that I’d supplied some of the basic links in the development process and that person could identify just what I’d said and how it had keyed the next idea. I was dumbfounded! I’d been so lost in my own grandiosity that I hadn’t appreciated my own insights!
WORSHIP
The worships of that summer are fuzzy to me. The first one was the most striking. (When I got to seminary, I used it to propose the basic schema of worship, illustrating Victor Turner’s theory about crossing the threshold into liminal time and space.) It was late at night in the dark gymnasium. At supper the committee had asked us to write down a few lines about a particularly happy moment in our lives. They had written these on an area covered with paper, about twenty feet square. We carried big fat candles in and sat on the paper in a group, thus acting out the “crossing of the threshold into sacred space.” In the course of the service, which included music and poems, each of us took a candle and read the lines on which we sat. This might be called a “thought communion.” Then we took our candles and went back over the threshold into the darkness. (I doubt that anyone present had ever read Victor Turner.)
I have a vague recollection of us playing “crack-the-whip” in and out of the doors of the barracks, scaring all the swallows off the porch. It seems as though we did something at one of the big concrete gun emplacements, taking advantage of the structure. I have a clear memory of a traditional church service at the chapel, complete with procession and greeters at the door, where that particular group attempted to exorcise the ghost of past patriarchs and oppressors by taking their roles. The ghosts were strong and the worship exposed the anger that still lived in the celebrants.
One very misty morning service was down by the bay with a bank of wild sweet peas for stained glass. We sat on blankets in a semi-circle and the content was fairly straightforward and traditional except that Alan Deale, wanting to do something “religious,” took up a collection of favorite words. I missed the very last worship service because I took Joan Goodwin to catch her plane. I was so tired that Joan had to gently remind me at one point (luckily on a side road with no traffic), “Mary, in this country most people drive on the right hand side.” As soon as she was delivered, I parked and took a nap.
Virginia Lane, Mary Watson and I were the committee for the fifth worship, the next to the last for that session. Our only beginning point was that Mary was adamant about wanting to use a wonderful feminist song she had learned about male sex symbols instead of female symbols, which often creep into church imagery. We were all three among the unromanced. At first Virginia and I just couldn’t relate to Mary’s idea very much, but then we found a key, going from Mary’s song to the Song of Solomon. Then we moved to enlarging the physical imagery to agapic love for each other. We decided to be three high priestesses, in caftans and wreaths. At first light I gathered flowering boughs, creating three wreaths for our heads of Victorian hat proportions, before wakening Mary and Virginia for preparation.
To us it seemed mysterious and sacred and seemed to strike the others the same way. We’d choreographed everything from where we stood to the gestures we made to the final face caresses, which were only possible because it was the end of the conference rather than the beginning. Our big problem came at the end. No one would get up and leave! We had made a formal exit and shut off the music, but everyone just sat there. Finally we announced the coffee was perked, which normally brought everyone on the run, but they got up very slowly and some people went on sitting for another ten minutes! The critique mentioned things like using images that were hard to grasp (so tell Solomon!), minor timing and that last problem of what to do when no one will leave. We needed to take people out on an upbeat of some sort. We had a few flubs that only we were aware of, but the three of us worked together so tightly that we could compensate seamlessly.
One of Peter’s recurrent comments about worship was how much care was expressed in every detail. It was universally true. We considered such tiny things as the nasty sound masking tape makes when it is pulled off, which meant we wouldn’t use it a second time to reserve chairs (running the tape from the back to the seat) because it broke the mood. Part of the reason we got so much out of worship was that our consciousnesses became extremely sensitive.
This second session was difficult to summarize. We returned again and again to the previous summer’s work. We referred to the Rokeach materials and went back to conflict resolution techniques. The point of contact between OD and UU is again the “organizational ideology” which functions to specify goals and values, describe the individual/organizational relationship, define the rewards and controls, set the behavioral standards for members, set the intra-group behavior norms and set the inter-group norms.
I didn’t attend the second winter workshop. They designed programs for their own churches. Some of the smaller congregations pooled their resources. The groups used the same techniques and design elements that we learned the summer before and most of the actual productions went off quite well.
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