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Clusters: Final Word & Notes

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Final and Notes

CLUSTERS concluded

Final Word

Anyone who wants to understand a people of another time or place will find in their rituals and celebrations a telling evidence of who those people were: their beliefs, their values, their social relationships and responsibilities. Rituals give a more concrete picture of the people than the words they speak. In festivals and celebrations and their attendant symbols, the society's meaning is bodied forth. Ritual is a means of remembering and transmitting values.

In ritual, a person's unity with the natural world and with brothers and sisters is expressed. One's own importance and growth is affirmed by the community. People in ritual understand their own lives as part of a rich fabric of celebrations and rites marking the changing of the seasons, seed time and harvest, conception and birth, puberty, betrothal and marriage and death. In ritual, status and role are affirmed, responsibility is reiterated.

But what about us? The rituals and celebrations and festivals which used to define us are dried up. We no longer embrace the values and relationships they were intended to manifest. Our patriotic holidays are a source of embarrassment and shame. In the echo of the salvo at the Memorial Day cemetery we hear the bombs of useless destruction in Asia. At the roll of the drum on the Fourth of July our wrath, rather than our pride, is stirred.

Religious observance has lost its meaning. Mystery has gone from cultic celebration. The ecstatic drama of yesterday has become a cheap imitation, lifting us nowhere. Easter means no more than new clothes and the hope of warm weather. Christmas has become cheap tinsel and aggressive sales. Even Thanksgiving, which still combines gratitude for abundance with a reunion of families, reminds us more and more that our affluence is built upon the decimation of the natives of this land and the continued destruction of Third World people everywhere.

We're not such rationalists that we don't want to dance and sing and march and shout. Stiff though they are, our hearts and spirits and toes long for more ritual than opening beer cans in front of the Sunday television.

Yet it's futile to pretend that the traditional events of social intercourse convey or even contain meaning. Candlelit midnight masses, Armistice Day parades, Easter worship, memorial flowers are all artificial. We content ourselves with the masturbation of sitting in separate cells with the sight and sound of the mass media hypnotizing us into meaninglessness.

Cluster life revives the hope and possibility of authentic celebration once again. We need not hope to revive old symbols. Symbols come from event and memory and, when forgotten, are unlikely to be revived. But life together suggests new traditions to be established which body forth who we are in relation to our world and to each other and what we are becoming.

The members of the Society of Brothers seize every opportunity to sing and to celebrate. At Ripton, one annual festival recalls the day that the roof beams were raised in the new dining room.

Birthdays are a good place to begin. A cluster of 15 or 20 probably means a birthday almost every month, a joyful focus for a cluster dinner or expedition. And then traditional holidays can be redirected. A small community of people will find it far easier to transform any celebration than a single isolated family. Since Christmas is traditionally a time of giving, it is a natural time for clusters to make decisions about their annual charitable giving. The cluster might be able to adopt a family or a nursing home or some other institution for the Christmas season. The local postmaster can sometimes be persuaded to turn over Christmas letters addressed to Santa Claus. They can be answered with gifts and poems and notes.

Although we can spoil the Christmas season by excessive expectations, modest attempts by clusters to seize upon the holiday as a time to redistribute wealth, and to affirm solidarity with the poor and lowly, may be very satisfying. And the ritual embodiment of what the cluster believes about a community of goods and property may be launched.

In primitive societies, ritual was essential to life together. In modern society, as life together has disappeared, so has ritual. We hardly need a ceremonial representation of the nature of relationship to our neighbor when such a relationship doesn't exist. We no longer need collaborate with the natural order to procure food and shelter, or so it seems. Nor do we need rites to define our social roles since we live such segregated lives.

But in the process of independence, we've lost what it means to be human, for ritual is the medium of self expression. The rituals of mourning help us to cry and to express the meaning of the loss; the ritual of initiation helps us to laugh, the ritual of a reconciling meal helps us to deal with conflict. As the ritual dries up, so does the human capacity to express the emotion which the ritual required.

Perhaps the revival of ritual will resuscitate our capacity for laughing and even loving. As our social fabric and network is strengthened, so we will be strengthened and more human.

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Notes

Part I: Family Inadequacy

1. Lasiett, Peter, Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge: University Press, p. 1.
2. Freed & Foster, "Divorce American Style," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 383, pp. 71-88.
3. Hamilton, G.V. and Macgowan, K., What is Wrong with Marriage, New York, Albert and Charles Boni, 1929, p. xv.

Children in the Nuclear Family

1. Coser, Rose Lamb, The Family: Its Structure and Functions, New York: St. Martin's, 1964, p. xxiv.
2. Stannard, Una, "Adam's Rib, or the Woman Within," Trans-action, Nov.-Dec., 1970, Vol. 8, No. 1/2, pp. 24 ff.
3. Bettelheim, Children of the Dream, New York, Macmillan, 1969, p. 62.
4. Slater, Robert. The Pursuit of Loneliness, Boston: Beacon, 1970, p. 87.
5. Bettelheim, Op. cit., p. 62.

Families in Other Times and Places

1. Laslett, Peter, Op. cit., p. 20.
2. Murdoch, G.P., Social Structures, New York, Macmillan, 1949, p. 213 f.
3. Laslett, Op. cit., p. 115.
4. Demos, John, Family Life in Plymouth Colony, New York, Oxford, 1970, p. 181.
5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Household and Family Characteristics, March 1970.
6. Aries, Phillipe, Centuries of Childhood, New York, Knopf, 1962.
7. Stannard, Op. cit., p. 30.
8. Aries, Op. cit., p. 365.
9. Aries, Ibid., p. 368.
10. Ibid., p. 341.
11. Ibid., p. 341.
12. Ibid., p. 375.
13. Ibid., p. 399.
14. Ibid., p. 404.
15. Ibid., p. 407.

Old People, Single People, Different People

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Op. cit.
2. Demos, Op. cit., p. 184.
3. Ibid., Quotation from Plymouth Colony Records, 111, p. 197.
4. Ibid., p. 78.

Individualism and Community

1. Myerere, Julius, Ujamaa, Essays on Socialism, New York: Oxford, 1968, p. 47.
2. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act II.
3. Elloitt, Katherine, Family and its Future, London, Churchill, 1970. Chapter by Robert Weiss, "Marriage and Family in the Near Future," p. 65.
4. Washburn, Wilcomb, ed., The Indian and the White Man, New York: Anchor, 1964, Chapter by John Heckwelder, p. 64.
5. Ibid., Chapter by Thomas Morton of Merrymount, p. 38.
6. Ibid., p. 64.
7. Demos, Op. cit., p. 61.
8. de Toqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, New York, Vintage, 1954, 11, p. 104.
9. Ibid., p. 109.
10. Demos, Op. cit., p. 178.
11. Elliott, Op. cit., Chapter by Sue Rogers, "Environmental Planning and the Family," p. 70.
12. Hancock, M. Donald, and Sjoberg, Gideon, eds. Politics in the Post Welfare State: Responses to the New Individualism, New York, Columbia, 1972, Chapter by John Alexander, The Soft Sell, p. 92.
13. Ibid., p. 94.
14. Aries, Op. cit., p. 406.
15. Zablocki, Benjamin, The Joyful Community, Baltimore, Penguin, 1971, p. 123.
16. Ibid., p. 123.
17. Ibid., p. 288.
18. Slater, Op. cit., p. 150.

And Let the Rest of the World Go By

1. Berrigan, Daniel, and Coles, Robert, The Geography of Faith, New York, Bantam, 1972, pp. 46 ff.
2. Upton, Letitia, and Lyons, Nancy, Basic Facts: Distribution of Personal Income and Wealth in the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge Institute, 1972.
3. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, New York: Bantam, 1946, p. xii.
4. Fenton, Thomas, Coffee, the Rules of the Game, and You, New York: The Christophers, 1972, p. 7f.

Part II

1. Berrigan and Coles, Op. cit., p. 65.
2. Plato, Republic, New York, The Modern Library, 1927, p. 419.
3. Kanter, Rosabeth, Community and Commitment, Cambridge, Harvard, 1972, p. 157.
4. Plato, Op. cit., pp. 40 ff.
5. The Rule of Taize, (S & L) France, Communaute de Taize, 1961, p. 50f.
6. Kanter, Op. cit.
7. The Rule of Taize, p. 53f.
8. Cooper, David, Death of the Family, New York, Pantheon, 1970, p. 45.
9. Murdoch, Op. cit., p. 213.
10. Fitzgerald, Geo. P. Communes, their goals, hopes, problems, New York, Paulist Press, 1971, p. 144.
11. Hancock and Sjoberg, Op. cit., p. 108.
12. Fahey, Richard, Quoted in "Communities," No. 2, p. 51.
13. Zablocki, Op. cit., p. 58.

 

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