Anvil with the branch and the phrases "Disarm Hearts," "Forge Peace," and Cultivate Justice."

Whacking a Gun


The participants were very deeply attuned to each other by the end of the first act. There was a noticeable shift in the serious way they all held space for each other. There were moments of shared experience and relatability, moments of deep empathy when someone talked about coming from a hard place, and lots of “aha” moments as they all collectively made more sense to each other.


If you’ve ever heard the clanking of a blacksmith’s hammer against an anvil, you know it has a distinct, medium-high pitch, an oddly comforting sound, as if business is getting taken care of, and strong, determined people, perhaps channeling the energy of Greek god Hephaestus, are nearby.

 

An urban dweller like me rarely has occasion to hear that sound. Even so, the music of the clanking on the terrace just outside last week’s Parliament of the World’s Religions, held for thousands of interfaith and peace leaders and workers in Chicago, reached my ears for three days, out on the lakeside terrace of the conference center, before I was drawn near by the sound of a folksinger accompanying the labor and singing his heart out.

 

It was neither horseshoes nor cabinet hinges that the blacksmiths were making that had caused Parliament attendees to form a line to take their turn at helping.

 

What these blacksmiths from RAWTools were doing was taking surrendered guns from a variety of sources and re-forming them into garden hand tools, embodying their mission and message of peace as elegantly as possible. The organization takes literally the passage from the Book of Isaiah to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

 

A chance to help pound instruments that can kill into tools that can bring forth new life? I got into line and awaited my turn to put on the suede work apron and goggles. 

 

 

The 1893 Moment

The Parliament of the World’s Religions — which attracts people who are engaged in interfaith work from all over the world, and from more than 200 different world religions or spiritual traditions — has its roots in Chicago, dating from the 1893 World’s Fair.

 

At this Columbian Exposition, Chicago got its chance to compete with Paris’s Eiffel Tower by introducing the Ferris Wheel (in other countries referred to as the “Chicago Wheel”) along with other prized local inventions, including Cracker Jacks, Juicy Fruit gum, zippers, and the first modern skyscraper, which had been built only five years before. 

 

I was excited to attend the Parliament in its — and my — home city, including partly at sites where the 1893 World’s Fair took birth, including at the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

The inspiration for the Parliament dates from September 11th that year when religions of the world had the opportunity, for the first time, to represent themselves publicly, rather than be represented through an outsider’s distorting lens. Most notably, it was when Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda shocked and delighted Westerners in the audience by addressing them as “Sisters and Brothers of America!” and showing them the many commonalities between Eastern and Western faith traditions, calling for religious tolerance, opening East-West dialogue for the rest of us, and certainly changing American spiritual cultures in marked ways.

 

You can expand this image and start to read Vivekananda’s speech at the site of the Art Institute of Chicago in this 2017 public installation, entitled Public Notice 3, by Mumbai-born artist Jitish Kallat on AIC’s grand staircase. 

 

The Healing of No More

 

When I reached the top of the line, it was my turn to let a gun have it with the hammer as the blacksmith steadied the barrel with his tongs. To begin the work of beating a glowing-red sword, fresh from the forge, into a ploughshare. And, like the others, I did so with the energy of someone whose work is about peace.

 

A worker for peace in the Middle East insisted at the Parliament, “We must let go of an idyllic concept of peace. We will have peace with problems, but not peace with violence.” Peace becomes working together to solve those problems. And RAWTools does more than invite people to surrender their weapons. It teaches nonviolent means to resolve problems.

 

When I finally had to relinquish my hammer, the line had gotten even longer. I stood near to watch and learned that RAWTools typically invites those whose lives have been directly impacted by gun violence to come to the head of the line. I heard the story of a woman who had lost a child to gun violence who, taking the hammer, brought it down over and over again with full force, crying out, “Enough is ENOUGH!”

 

Learn more about, and certify in, THE HUMAN JOURNEY® methodology. 


Wow... what an experience... I knew THJ would help [the] menfolk, and it delivered!


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    Grief on the Comedy Stage

     

    You no doubt know by now that THJ helps groups come together in the face of difficult diagnoses, end of life, bereavement, and even other major life transitions.

    We’ll talk here about the role of laughter in bringing groups — even groups that grieve — together. We hope you’ll join us for training! 

     


    “Do not hesitate!”

     

    Recently, the New York Times featured a story about a seemingly new trend in stand-up comedy: using death and grief as comic material. “That’s the Funny Thing About Grief” tracks how common the subjects of death and grief are these days in the work of stand-up comics.

     

    Is it in supremely bad taste, or career-limiting, to use these serious subjects on the American comedy stage?

     

    Healthy and young people have mortality, death, and grief on the minds in ways they may not have prior to 2020. Members of Generation Z think about death more than any other generation, with 35% thinking about it every day. More than 50% of all American adults think about their deaths more often than before they did before the pandemic. With death on so many more people’s minds, it stands to reason that it would be in the popular consciousness and appearing in pop culture in new ways — indeed, that it would be bursting to come out.

     

    We may be more receptive to comedy that leaves a “respectful” amount of time (whatever that is) between a painful event and its treatment in literature or other art forms. For many years, 9/11 was off limits.

     

    In the years after 9/11, articles appeared in the popular media in which their authors would muse about how much time would have to pass before one could produce comedy about a national event that had at once produced enormous loss of life and attacked Americans’ sense of invulnerability.

     

    Writers and comics had to consider:

     

    • Whom would a joke hurt?
    • Whose memories would it disrespect? and …
    • What kinds of people have we become if we’re even capable of creating comedy out of loss?

     

    Does the Taboo Make Any Sense?

     

    But we might consider a broadly held assumption that grief and loss don’t belong in comedy. Re-visiting a painful event through a comedic and performative lens — provided that event has been grieved to a large extent — might actually help both performer and audience. Using their creative writing and timing when engaging with a live audience could conceivably provide a healing communal experience, easing the natural isolation of the grief experience. Shared laughter can improve mood, boost the immune system, and ease pain. It can relax muscles, decrease your heart rate and blood pressure, and release dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins.

     

    And perhaps it is not inappropriate to share, particularly if it is about the author’s own condition or grief, if it is their own story to tell, rather than trying to own someone else’s, including making any assumptions about the audience’s experience.

     

    Breaking such a taboo might even break the ice of a shared reality.  When Carnegie-Mellon computer scientist Randy Pausch, who was well-known to have pancreatic cancer, was slated to give his final public lecture, the audience flocked to hear him. His presentational style in that talk could be described as ebullient. At one point he quipped, “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be … sorry to disappoint you!”

     

    Comedy in the Family Gathering Post-Funeral

    In my own extended family of cousins engaged professionally, semi-professionally, or simply by proximity in show business, gatherings at the house after a funeral ceremony has always included funny as well as moving stories. It simply wouldn’t be like the Klitsners (yes, you’re free to chuckle) not to laugh in the midst of tears.

     

    Those stories bank on the eccentric or particular behaviors of the person who had died, those habits or ways of a person that endeared him or her to us, or even annoyed us, in similar ways. It was the unique ways in which they questioned the world, the scrapes they would get themselves into that made the person themselves memorable, all the more important after their death.

     

    I’ve always loved when such stories would start out with the something that the person “would” do over and over again, as if on automatic. (I finally learned in writing this what’s the “would” is called: the “habitual aspect.”)

     

    Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as what happens when what is human seems to be mechanical, acting out of keeping with the norms of a given situation. (The idea of the habitual or mechanical also can become comical when used to poke fun at someone who’s still alive: the boss who doesn’t, but pretends to, know more than his employees; the toddler who says things to nasty relatives his parents wish they could get away with.) The pleasure of the laugh, whether the person being jostled is dead or alive, is perhaps most enjoyable when the audience shares the same knowledge of the person and can recognize their interactions in the speaker’s tale.

     

    So comedy while the performer or storyteller is grieving … comedy that holds up the personality of the person who’s died … comedy that acknowledges an experience all have shared and done work on grieving: all stand the chance not only of success at humor but also success in supporting both individual and group healing.

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      Even though our relationships might seem like the least quantifiable things we have in our lives, that doesn’t seem to stop people from thinking of them as sums. I’ve seen that play out a few ways. 
       
      I’ve met people who talked about their “A” list and their “B” lists of friends. (The “B’s,” I guess, are the people they’d call if no one on the A list was available to come to the party or go out. There’s something vaguely disturbing about someone being on either list.)
       
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      The Time You Spend is a Real Number

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      After the age of 20, just how much time do we who are Americans typically spend with our parents and siblings?
      With our friends?
      Our life partner?
      Our children?
      Co-workers?

      It’s pretty stark when you look at a graph that plots, by age, to whom the hours go. 

      After they’ve done the backbreaking work of raising us, we may only spend an average of an hour a day with parents and siblings. (I hear my mother’s voice: “It just isn’t fair, Sara.”)
       
      After the age of 18, we spend significantly less time with friends. By the time we’re in our 30s, according to the survey, it’s less than an hour a day. 
       
      It appears that, after our 30s, the time we would have spent with friends — and more — seems to go straight to time we spend with our partner, with whom we spend between 3 and 4 waking hours each day—that is, until our retirement years. If we’re still with our partner in our later 60s that amount of time rises precipitously.
       
      Time with children? The time goes fast and then it’s really, really gone.
       
      That leaves co-workers, whom we see about as much as (and sometimes more than) our life partners.
       
      All of which begs the question — and circles us back to those darned “A” and “B” lists — to the degree you have some choice, is the time you’re spending in line with the various people in your life in line with consonant with just how important they are to you?
       
      And, more to the point, are you making decisions about your time with the awareness that time flies, and eventually stops, for all of us?
       
      Bloom’s very qualitative insights that he draws looking at the quantitative data remind us of this. They read less like truisms to ignore once you’ve seen the chart with your own eyes:

      “Family time is limited—cherish it.

      Friend time is limited—Embrace friendship breadth, but focus on depth.

      Partner time is significant—never settle.

      Children time is precious—be present.

      Coworker time is significant—find [ones who energize you].

      Alone time is highest—love yourself.”
       
      Bloom’s analysis of the American Time Use study telescopes time so that we see it from birth to our 80s. This is how we, as a society, live; this is likely how we ourselves live.

      Becoming conscious that we will never have more, or even as much, time with the people we care most about, how are we making decisions today?

      Helped me remember what is important in life.

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