Transformative Presence

I felt honored to be asked to lead a service and offer a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo on August 18, 2024.

For the call to worship, we used the poem Our Space.

For the sermon, I spoke first about the Peace Circles that UUCB hosted in partnership with VOICE Buffalo, then about learning/training with Faithful Fools and finally about our work with Community Canvases’ Kind Fools. The text of the sermon appears below the video.

Written Text of Sermon

In December 2019, we gathered right here, just upstairs in the Alliance Room for one of our Peace Hub Circles, a partnership between this church and VOICE Buffalo.

We had a great team leading these restorative practice circles. Of course there was Sharon Walker, Steve Wixson, Ginny Vaughan, and Liz Parke. There was also Pastor Scott Johnson, Pastor Dan Schifeling, and the incomparable Jimmy Darby. And also the team from VOICE-Buffalo, especially Whitney Walker and Rev. Denise Walden, now Walden-Glenn

At this particular circle, Rev. Denise’s 18 year old son David, a graduate of the Buffalo Public Schools, was my partner in facilitating. There were about a dozen adults and six buffalo high school students in attendance.

While the adults did speak in this circle, our primary focus was on listening to the young persons. Their experiences included being suspended with little cause for days or weeks without a clear process for returning to the classroom. The students described not being believed or even listened to when they spoke to teachers or administrators.

Why was this circle so transformative for many people who participated? We still speak of it to this day. For the adults like myself, we witnessed students sharing conditions and experiences beyond what we had imagined possible in Buffalo Schools. My heart ached as I listened to their stories, and recognized that we need to do better for them. For the students, several reported afterwards that they were not used to being listened to, not by adults. And that they really appreciated this chance to share, and to be heard and respected by us.

I look back on that circle as one of our successes with the Peace Hubs. These young leaders felt heard, and the circle supported VOICE-Buffalo in bringing positive change to the Buffalo schools. But this wasn’t my first circle, far from it. I encountered circles as a way of being with the Faithful Fools in San Francisco back in 2014, where nearly every gathering or meeting used the non-hierarchical structure of a circle. With the Fools, I also encountered spaces of transformative presence. Spaces where being witnessed by others who are present with you offers an opportunity for change.

I entered these spaces with my own energy, which had once been described on a high school report card as “rambunctious.” I brought my own goals of helping people through fixing their problems. Like a puppy running around licking and barking, people could feel my affection but they could also get annoyed or occasionally… bitten.

What I appreciate about the space created by Faithful Fools is that it is a nonjudgmental presence. One that allowed me to ask questions or even take foolhardy or unskillful actions, and to have people offer me the opportunity to discover for myself my own mistakes, sometimes with their gentle guidance.

For example, in the fall of 2015, I was walking to the Faithful Fools building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, when I saw my friend Mike, not his real name, sitting on the pavement. Mike said “please help.” I told him I would be right back and I walked into the Fools and found someone to ask what I should do. I had gotten to know Mike over the past year as he stood outside the subway station asking for money. I enjoyed his boyish smile and we would sometimes find ourselves in long chats.

The Fools encouraged me to follow my gut and assured me that someone would be available to reflect with me when I was done assisting Mike. I returned to him, and I could see that his legs were in rough shape from years of neglect. Honestly, I had never seen such wounds before. I offered to call an ambulance, but he refused, making it clear he would turn the paramedics away. He took my offered hand to stand up and we meandered towards Tom Waddell, a medical clinic serving people experiencing homelessness. We walked in and asked for his doctor. The person behind the counter took one look at him and told us to get out.

I don’t know the history that he had there, but I do know that we hadn’t walked more than 20 feet from the clinic when someone followed us out and told us that his doctor was on her way over to see us. It took another 15 minutes to persuade Mike to go back into the clinic after that rejection, but we did and the doctor examined him. She told him that the infections on his leg were getting worse and could be getting close to the bone. She said he needed to go to the wound clinic at San Francisco General. She handed us a taxi voucher and we left.

It took quite a bit of persuading Mike to get him into a taxi, and when we got to the hospital, we stopped to get sandwiches because he was reluctant to go inside. By the time we got to the wound clinic, the doctor had already gone to lunch.

We waited patiently until the nurse called us to ask some initial questions. I was looking at my friend, his wounds, and the pain he was actively in, and noticed how frustrated he was getting by the nurse’s tedious questions.

• “Do you smoke?” “yes”
• “Has anyone recently asked you to stop smoking?” “no”
• “May I be the first one to suggest that you stop smoking?”

Mike had had enough and stormed out of the hospital. The nurse and I spoke on the phone as we made a plan for Mike’s return. Talking to Mike outside as he smoked a cigarette that he had found on the sidewalk, he said, “Okay, I’ll do it for you.” Eventually, we walked back into the hospital, Mike sat down with the doctor, and had his legs examined and re-bandaged.

The doctor said that these wounds were serious and that Mike should plan to return to this hospital twice a week. I wondered in my head how realistic this was since Mike did not have a phone and tended to live moment to moment, sleeping most nights on concrete sidewalks often without even the cushion of cardboard.

I still felt proud. Mike had asked me for help, we had navigated the system together. We had gotten him care. I imagined we might catch a taxi or bus back to his neighborhood and get some food together to celebrate. I was out of touch with how emotionally and physically painful this experience had been for Mike, as he stormed off and disappeared.

The next time I saw Mike was a couple weeks later, and his wounds did not look improved. Over the ensuing years, we would frequently hang out and we would occasionally seek treatment for his legs from low-barrier medical providers, but never again from the hospital. He eventually got a small apartment and miraculously is still alive, has both legs, and is someone I look forward to visiting when I travel back to San Francisco.

Taking us back to that afternoon. I felt so confused. I thought what I did was good for my friend, but how could I be sure? I knew I was absolutely exhausted from the experience and lacked the stamina to go through this adventure frequently. I had learned about homeless services and medical systems, and about attempting to accompany someone. I would have felt so alone in my confusion, but Bianca Huerta from the Faithful Fools made space to sit down with me over some Vietnamese food to talk about the day. Providing me that space to vent and reflect on what I learned meant so much to me. I felt myself letting go of the intensity of the experience and gaining some perspective through her listening ear and gentle questions.

Over time, I came to realize that I had been bringing Mike on my journey of what I thought he needed at least as much as I had been accompanying him. He followed through on getting care in large part because he cared so much about me, But I still don’t know if that day had a positive or negative impact on his overall health.

During my time with the Faithful Fools, there were many such experiences of great intensity followed by opportunities to reflect together, and to see what we could learn. My biggest takeaway is that providing space for gentle reflection is one of the most important factors for growth and transformation.

It was Bianca from the Faithful Fools who first introduced me to Robert-Harry Rovin’s WRITE ON, an intuitive writing program they hosted on Thursday afternoons, and one that transformed me into a writer and a poet.

More recently, WRITE ON has become a component of Kind Fools, a program of Community Canvases, which we are building right here in Buffalo. Over the past year and a half, we have had well over 500 participants in our writing workshops, where people deeply witness themselves and others. People are invited to get in touch with what is true for them in this moment, to express it through writing, and, to the extent they are comfortable, to share it with others.

One of the biggest surprises to me is how frequently people are willing or even enthusiastic to share what they write. One of the ways that we create a deeply safe space of belonging is that we invite people to offer reflections on each other’s writing, but we instruct and model that these reflections be purely authentic positive and encouraging. In actuality we are less commenting on the writing and more validating each other‘s truth and how listening to it makes us feel.

We are creating a culture of transformative presence, and there is an abundance of stories of transformation that occur within this space. Examples include a young writer for whom these groups were a return to writing poetry and a beginning to songwriting, who is now regularly performing at Caffe Aroma. A person living at the intersection of physical disability, poverty, and mental distress, who found a supportive community within our workshops. This led them to write their first book of poetry, and to make real progress, along with us, toward their goal of recovery. Many of us, who have used these opportunities to write about our childhood experiences using the powerful perspective of our adult brain, have let go of some of the stuckness we feel in our memories.

There is something holy in the trusting space that we create together. It feels like deep witness. It feels like the circle we held with those Buffalo Public School students.

About a week ago in the Parish Hall, we facilitated a program called Kind Conversations, where we shared a specific training in deep listening and reflection created by a nonprofit named Resetting the Table. As we enter into an election season that is full of excitement, anger, fear and pain, I want to encourage you to listen. As we listen to people with whom we may think we disagree, and we reflect back to them in a way that demonstrates that we fully understand them, We can sometimes generate a small amount of receptivity that allows them an openness to additional perspectives. And isn’t this the type of transformation that we need?

Do you want to write with me? Please join me for an upcoming Kind Fools’ WRITE ON! workshop