Amoebas

This picture doesnt have anything to do with what follows. Its an old one and I like it.

Last time I was in supervision, about a week or so ago, Paul gave me a metaphor that I have been carrying with me and thinking about ever since. He said that organisations - all of them, marriages, families, parishes, dioceses, companies, nations, whatever - were like giant jig saw puzzles, each member being a piece and each member fitting into the space that is most suited for it. Each member meshes with the pieces all around and makes a contribution to the whole pattern of the organisation. But the pieces are fluid; they are plastic; they are capable of taking on an infinite variety of shapes, like amoebas. So an organisation is like a giant jig saw puzzle made of amoebas. Change the shape of one amoeba piece and all the other pieces around it must change to accommodate the change, and the pieces that touch the newly changed pieces must in their turn change, with changes being transmitted right across the puzzle to the very edges. Of course influence goes both ways: the pieces shape and influence the puzzle and the puzzle shapes the pieces. And when a new piece is introduced there will be enormous pressure on that new piece to change to fit the space that is allocated to it. There will also be enormous pressure to resist the change of shape that a new piece must necessarily bring.

Of course the picture is made all the more complex when we realise that we, all of us, are simultaneously pieces in a large number of different, seemingly independent puzzles; so our family picture changes, we consequently change, and this brings a resulting change to our church or our classroom or our social club.

The astute amongst you, and I know that is all of you, will realise that this is a metaphor illustrating the basic tenets of family systems theory, and for many years the insights of Edwin Friedman's Generation To Generation: Family Process In Church and Synagogue have been foundational in the way I have dealt with parishes. But Paul's metaphor simplified it for me and helped me understand some of the dynamics of our diocese and the way I have related to it over this first year or so of episcopacy.

There's nowhere I really want to go with this, other than to share it. I left Portobello, last week, to drive home through a Westerly gale and drenching sprays of salt water enlightened and reflective: the expected result of all good supervision.

Comments

Elaine Dent said…

I don't know where you find the time to post given all you have to do, but I am glad you make the time. I'll ponder the amoeba thing this week.

16 May 2011 at 22:08

ElizH said…

Makes me think of "the Dance of Intimacy" by Harriet Lerner.

16 May 2011 at 22:14

Barbara Harris said…

Does this mean that there is no Absolute, no Rock in this ever changing sea ? Where is
" the stillpoint in the turning world " ?

Barbara

19 May 2011 at 09:14

Kelvin Wright said…

I am talking about organizations here. Organizations are systems. They are continually in process. So no, they can have no absolute, no rock.

The still point of the turning world is quite another matter

21 May 2011 at 19:43

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog