Every year 47,000 Americans kill themselves and 72,000 more die from drug addiction. Journalist David Brooks says: “This kind of pain is an epidemic in our society. When you cover the sociology beat as I do, you see other kinds of pain. The African-American woman in Greenville who is indignant because young black kids in her neighborhood face injustice just as gross as she did in 1953. The college student in the Midwest who is convinced that she is the only one haunted by compulsive thoughts about her own worthlessness. These different kinds of pain share a common thread: our lack of healthy connection to each other, our inability to see the full dignity of each other, and the resulting culture of fear, distrust, tribalism, shaming and strife.
Brooks is part of a movement called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The first core idea was that social isolation is the problem underlying a lot of our other problems. The second idea was that this problem is being solved by people around the country, at the local level, who are building community and weaving the social fabric. He found these “Weavers” everywhere across the country. Some of them work at organizations: a vet who helps other mentally ill vets in New Orleans; a guy who runs a boxing gym in Appalachian Ohio where he nominally teaches young men boxing, but really teaches them life. Many others do their weaving in the course of everyday life—because that's what neighbors do. One lady in Florida said she doesn't have time to volunteer, but that's because she spends 40 hours a week looking out for local kids and visiting sick folks in the hospital. We go into neighborhoods and ask, “Who is trusted here?” In one neighborhood it was the guy who collects the fees at the parking garage. There's a lot of emphasis in our culture on personal freedom, self-interest, self-expression, the idea that life is an individual journey toward personal fulfillment. You do you. But Weavers share an ethos that puts relationship over self. We are born into relationships, and the measure of our life is in the quality of our relationships. We precedes me. Social scientists tell us that selfishness is natural, people are motivated by money, power and status. But Weavers are not motivated by any of these things. They want to live in right relation with others and to serve the community good.”
I see many Weavers here on this campus listening patiently, being good neighbors, helping people to feel a sense of belonging and purpose, building relationships one by one. One of our residents recently passed who was embraced by this community unlike anything I have seen. Although Margaret had limits on her ability to communicate, she and those who knew her found other ways to connect. Her brother said, “Margaret embraced this community and it embraced her.” Our Director of Independent Living, Kathy Amend, said, “The Margaret Lundy story at the Beatitudes, from the beginning through the end, just makes me smile to see the way God wove his fabric to help Margaret through her final ordeal.” What examples of Weavers do you see here and in our larger community? In what ways are you a weaver seeing people deeply and making them known? The question for each of us is: What can I do today and tomorrow to replace loneliness, division and distrust with relationships, community and purpose?
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