Trust And Community

Recorded Prelude: "I Am a Rock" by Paul Simon, copyright 1965

About twenty years ago (it seems like a hundred, sometimes) I gave a program here at Northern Hills Fellowship on Marshall McLuhen. (Remember him? He was the one who coined the expression "the medium is the message"). Only, the talk wasn’t so much about McLuhen as it was about Community, about the Fellowship as the medium for our interaction, for our being a kind of extended family. Then I went off to grad school, but I didn’t forget the Fellowship, and returned a few years later. This group had become an important part of my life. In 1976 I gave another program, mourning the decline of "the greening of America" and my dimming hope for a larger feeling of community.

Since then, I have discovered that the "new age" promised in the "Greening of America" has not died, but is alive and even thriving in some places (perhaps in spite of its inevitable commercialization). One of these places is in a small part-time community in Toronto, based on some principles put forth by psychologist Jack R. Gibb in a book entitled TRUST: A New View of Personal and Organizational Development. His hope was to give a theoretical foundation to new kinds of communities, and he sponsored a number of weekend workshops around the continent in the 1970s. Ongoing communities sprang up in the wake of his efforts, and a few of them are still going.

Of these, I know only about the Toronto group. Existing continuously for 16 years, it has developed into a mature and integrated demonstration of Gibb’s "trust theory", and is an impressive source of support and caring for its participants. Although it is not a religious group, its fervent adherence to trust, openness, realization and interdependence (Gibb’s basic trust theory variables) reinforces spiritual and humanistic values that U-U’s can readily identify with.

I have often thought I’d like to do another program at Northern Hills, on the same general theme as the other two. And as I have experienced the profound feeling of "home" (whatever that is) at TORIs, I’ve wanted to share it with you.

TORI (spelled T-O-R-I) is an acronym for Gibb’s variables: Trust, Openness, Realization and Interdependence.

The Toronto TORI community is a model for what I consider an ideal community, with a minimum of structure and rules and the most possible interaction, dynamic and fluid, caring and supportive. Made up of families, couples, singles, single parents with their children, people of all ages; it’s virtually a cross section of society. Of course it is unique; its character comes from the hundred or so individuals that keep it alive. There’s no membership or dues, just a mailing list of over three hundred interested people who receive a newsletter every month or so.

On the surface, its purpose is as simple as friendship: to bring people together. Many of its regulars maintain their connections between TORI weekends, and there’s a telephone tree to keep them informed about spur-of-the-moment activities and important events. It’s more than a social club, however. It is the manifestation of an Idea about relationships and how people can interact and at the same time enhance their individuality. Rather than requiring conformity to some preconfigured plan, TORI encourages participants to feel and express their own real natures. Men, women and children all testify to its transformative power, without resorting to the jargon of mysticism or omniscience.

Many of us there have expressed the frustration at trying to communicate just what TORI is. So I’ll simply relate my introduction to it.

I moved to Michigan about ten years ago, to take a new job. That first winter in Ann Arbor, I remember sitting in my apartment, thinking that if I died, nobody would even miss me for weeks. I did a lot of driving back and forth to Cincinnati.

Something I learned in those lonely months is that "home" has a feeling. I guess it’s a link to roots, to people who have cared. It’s a gut feeling of worth because I belong, somehow, to people, even those I’ve left. I suppose, at some level, I knew that, in 1967, when I talked here about the Fellowship being the vehicle for something besides a collection place for shared religious values. For some people, "family" conjures up the same feeling. Maybe it depends upon what kinds of experiences one had as a child.

That’s what community does for me; it gives me a self. It doesn’t define me, in the sense that I don’t know what or who I am aside from my group. But in my deepest parts, the places in my psyche that tell me whether I’m a worthwhile human being—whether I count—somehow community provides that assurance. I can risk being me if I have that not-always-conscious confidence that "me" is acceptable to people I identify with.

But I didn’t get it in Ann Arbor, I got it here, in this room. What I learned up there in Toronto, and since then even in Michigan, was that community is not something you just have or you don’t have, like the family you were born into, a lucky accident. You can create it, you can set it up so it happens. It doesn’t have to take a lifetime, either; if you’re lucky it can be done in a weekend.

And I learned that a lot of people have thought about community and tried to fabricate it, tried to find that key to feeling that "I belong." Scott Peck discovered the yearning in people as he traveled around giving talks after writing his books like The Road Less Traveled. Jack Gibb looked at it from an organizational viewpoint, searching for a "formula" for effective interaction. (I’ve been assured that Gibb didn’t emphasize the academic aspects in his workshops, however—they were very experiential and personal.)

Mine was a personal thing. It was a long time before it became an objective. When I moved to Ann Arbor, the first place I went to was the Unitarian church. They had an active singles group called Singletarians, and there were meetings for coffee and conversation, brunches, parties, dances, and outings. I’m not an easy mixer, and I hung around on the periphery for a while.

There was also an independent group who met in the church, called Expressions. Mostly singles, many of them were the same people who participated in Singletarians. They had a discussion format every two weeks (I believe there was a similar group here in Cincinnati, called Interaction), a hundred or so people, breaking up into small groups for an hour of discussion, then mixing and dancing. I hung around there, too, helping out with the chores and gradually meeting people. These were a little bit like communities.

I had a satisfying job, and I gradually began to feel at home. But something was missing. I was still pretty lonely. I had left people back here in Cincinnati who were not easily replaced. I finally started my own support group, and that really helped. Most of the people I knew were single, divorced, and most were as lonely as I. The support group went on for several years, and gradually broke up as the changing needs of the members left us with less and less common purpose. I left when it seemed the group had become nothing more than a social club.

A friend introduced me to the TORI group in Toronto, at a small gathering in someone’s home one February weekend. I tried hard to feel at home, and people were friendly enough. But they all knew each other, and I was just another new face. At least that’s how I felt. They hugged a lot and talked about feelings and relationships and seemed very close. It’s hard to go into an existing group. Anyway, I felt isolated and lonely as I usually do under such circumstances. The trouble was, a weekend doesn’t give you time to wait for someone to befriend you. I finally got so tense that I went for a walk, and came very close to just walking away, walking down to the train station to go back to Ann Arbor alone. Nobody seemed to care whether I was there or not.

But I didn’t. I’m not sure why. I went back into the group, and got up the courage to tell someone how I was feeling. And a miracle happened.

People listened, and asked me what I wanted. What I really wanted was to be held and rocked, feeling like a poor lonely four-year-old who missed his mother. What I managed to articulate was that I felt outside the group and wanted in, somehow. Someone suggested a "people pile", with me in the middle. Surrounded by warm bodies and warm words, my isolation evaporated. The rest of the weekend I was euphoric.

Since then, I’ve experienced the full range of emotions in those weekends. I seldom miss a TORI, even though Toronto is a five-hour drive from Ann Arbor. Even though I see those people only about ten times a year, they are more like family to me than I have ever experienced in my adult life. I’ve opened myself up in those gatherings in ways I didn’t know I could. I’ve comforted people in pain and I’ve celebrated their joys.

I’ve found, though, that I can’t go there expecting anything. When I do I’m disappointed. Expectations somehow get in the way of experiencing what is there. I’m not the most spontaneous person you’ll ever meet. But when TORI works for me, it’s because I flow with it.

I was drawn in by warmth, but that wouldn’t have sustained my enthusiasm. There is a foundation there, a deep sense of what we all need from a group and so often seek in vain.

I’ve tried in the past to describe just what TORI is, but somehow the words don’t do justice to the experience. We don’t have time this morning for you to really experience it. But I’ll give you a framework. It’s all based on Gibb’s four variables.

Trust is the big one. It’s easy to explain, but not always easy to do. I go into the group trusting myself, mostly. I can handle whatever happens. Me, who is terrified of conflict and tongue-tied in confrontation. Groups are the hardest experience for me that I can imagine. In most groups I seldom speak. I think my mind moves too slowly, or I rehearse what I’m going to say, and miss the moment to say it, or something. But in the TORI group somehow my guard is down, and I feel (usually) that I can be me.

Trust means also trusting others with my feelings. If I’m really open, I’m vulnerable to attack, to criticism (my great fear), and to rejection. I have to decide that whatever happens, I can handle it. I may suffer, but I will survive. The risk is there, but the possible reward is immeasurable.

All of this would be fantasy stuff, except for one more aspect of trust. I have to trust the process. In the simplest terms, it works. You can take a group of people and put them together for a weekend and if they can let go of their private agendas, whether they know what they are doing or not, they will become a community. (I’ll say more about that later.)

The next variable in Jack Gibb’s theory is openness. To the extent that the individuals really share themselves with each other, they will connect. To the extent that they go from ideas to feelings, they will connect. To the extent that they really listen to each other, they will connect. There is nothing in all this that says they have to be alike.

Realization is the next variable. That means "becoming real", or authentic. It means dropping the facade. It also means realizing one’s potential, becoming what I have in me to be. "Finding oneself" might be another way of putting it. To the extent that I allow myself to be real, I can touch others. To the extent that I allow them to be real, I can know them.

And the final ingredient necessary for community is interdependence. I must let go some, and allow others to do part of what there is to be done. I have to take up my share, assume responsibility for myself as I tune into my needs. I can’t make the group go in my direction, either. People who are accustomed to making things happen in other groups often feel frustrated in a TORI group, until they learn to let go.

That goes for parents, too. Several parents and older children have said that they feel much closer to each other at TORI than they do at home, because there is less acting in roles, and more relating as people.

In a TORI, there are no rules ahead of time. Nobody is assigned any task. We shop for groceries, we cook and serve meals and we clean up after ourselves as we individually are motivated to do it.

Talk about trust! For someone who is accustomed to eating at regular times, who likes his space reasonably neat and who gets very uneasy when things are not planned, TORI is an experience in trust. The fact is, we eat very well, most of the time. A few people will go out to the market on Saturday morning and buy food for an unknown number of people for the weekend. There are no reservations. We depend upon our experience with the group to come up with a cost for the weekend that will pay our rent and our food. If someone comes who can’t pay as much, or for that matter, can’t pay anything, they are welcomed. And we trust the process.

That’s not to say that nothing ever goes wrong. I’ve been to TORI’s where in the final minutes of our being together, the person who volunteered to collect the money announces that we don’t have enough to pay the rent. So those who can, come up with enough so that we can leave the place with our reputation intact.

I’ve seen a Thanksgiving afternoon when somebody suddenly mentions that nobody has done anything with the five turkeys yet, and the kids are getting hungry. We became a very busy group.

Fortunately, the group has built up a small cushion of funds so that we can cope with financial crises such as, for example, when only seven people show up for a weekend and we have a contract with the owners of the retreat center for at least twenty. This happened one snowy weekend in February.

The crucial thing, I’ve decided, is acceptance. There’s a state that can exist between people that goes beyond affection, beyond physical or emotional attraction. I used to place acceptance on a scale between love and enmity, maybe just above tolerance. Now I think it’s on another plane, another dimension. It has to do with respect, with reserving judgment, and (if I can use a word I have a lot of trouble with) spirituality.

In Transactional Analysis they used to describe the state of mind most successful in living with other people as "I’m OK, you’re OK." That’s acceptance.

The process I’m talking about here is never finished. A community never becomes finished, either. It’s important to remember that. It takes trust to get through the inevitable rough places.

My central question about this is: if a group of people, without any kind of formal structure, no membership, no dues, no "commitment" that anyone on the outside could perceive, if this group can thrive and feel as good as I feel about us, why can’t any group that already shares ethical and moral values, a building, a reputation, and a history, have that kind of mutual trust, openness, realization and interdependence?

I recently attended one of Scott Peck’s community building workshops in Lansing. It was three days long, and we were told we would learn how to make a community. The first two days they told us only that they expected us to discover how to do it by the end of the second day. We had been given a one-page description of the process, but some of us hadn’t even read it. And when we asked theoretical questions, we were gently put off. The facilitators did tell us that they’d give us some feedback now and then, but they wouldn’t tell us how to do what we had come there to do.

Scott Peck describes the process as beginning with "pseudo community", when people are polite. Sometimes it feels very good, but if you’ve felt the real thing, there’s something missing. At some point, the politeness wears thin, and "chaos" sets in. People try to convince others, change others, teach, preach, attack, sulk, withdraw and otherwise erect barriers without listening, without really respecting. Tension rises, even active hostility. Then, when it seems the whole thing is coming apart, first one person then someone else, and gradually most of the group begins to "empty" themselves of their defenses and their judgments. No one has explained that very well. What it feels like at first is fatigue, and then an immense sadness, as though we’ve begun to recognize how far we are from each other, and how meaningless our discord really is. At that point, community happens.

It’s as though there has to be a crisis before the community itself can come into existence. And it can’t be forced, or contrived, or planned. In the group I attended, a half-hour before our quitting time, I don’t think anyone in the group thought we’d make it. Tension got so high it felt as though we’d explode. People were angry, crying, and pleading with the facilitators to help us. And then it just happened. One young woman described it as an orgasm. "You can’t make it happen," she said, "you have to just let it." The release was so powerful many of us were in tears, tears of a different kind.

The third day we processed. There were planned activities to help us reconstruct some of what we had gone through and understand what we had experienced, individually and as a group.

What I experienced in that workshop was very much like TORI. In fact, the reason I went was because I recognized the process in Peck’s book A Different Drum.

Peck admits that sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes the mix of the group or some other factor interferes enough that it just doesn’t work, at least in the time allotted. Jack Gibb, on the other hand, is more optimistic, although he isn’t so specific about what community is. He simply says that a community will emerge from whatever mix there is.

Sometimes I think we’re all daydreaming teenagers, we’re all lonely and isolated when we don’t have our family close enough to notice if we drop dead. Why do the holidays make so many of us sad?. What’s that string connected to our gut, stretching out into the past so far we can’t even see the other end? Family is more than a defined bunch of people, it’s who we are inside. if we don’t belong, somehow we don’t have a right to exist.

I’ve been away from Cincinnati for almost ten years, and I’ve fallen in love and fallen out of love, I’ve gotten jobs and I’ve lost jobs, I’ve bought new cars and I’ve watched them rust away to junk. And still I feel that string stretching back ten years to "my people", some of whom I haven’t talked to all that time, yet with whom I feel a bond that’s somehow tied to who I am.

So what did I learn—or rather, what am I learning—that I didn’t know before? That I have grown up with a longing for connection with people, a longing that feels fundamental to me as a human being. I’ve learned that I’m not alone in feeling this longing, that others have written about it and others respond to my expression of it with the same kind of wistfulness. I’ve learned, too, that the longing can be satisfied at times by being with people in an atmosphere of trust and open sharing. I’ve learned that it’s possible to create that atmosphere, to set up the conditions under which it can flourish, without resorting to contrivance or manipulation.

And from these kinds of experiences I’m learning how to interpret what goes on inside me. The feelings have always been there. I’m trying hard to understand myself, because understanding puts it into perspective, lets me make peace with it. I’m getting a little anxious about how little time I have left, and how much there is for me to make peace with. And at the same time I recognize that, as the young woman said, "You can’t make it happen," she said, "you have to just let it."

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