Introduction: Reclaiming Our Humanity
This introduction begins a triad, a 3-arc blog series on Reclaiming our Humanity. This series stands as my own response to myself, and recent posts I have written naming various ills and evils of our world. I began with broad strokes in “The Trifecta of Evil” and picked apart 3 specific issues last week as I explored “Our Deep Systems of Inhumanity.”
I document and name the pathologies and toxicities I see within myself, my culture, my world. Facing these hard things is a first step in reclaiming our humanity, and our re-entry into a healthy and generative place within Creation. Denial and nostalgia are significant obstacles to our spiritual and cultural growth and development.
We will be well served to more deeply understand the systems around us, how we encounter them, what we can do to affect them. We must engage the powers in order to transform them, we must engage the powers to recall them to their highest purposes. We must stand free of their control over us, the use of fear and momentum, expectation and convention, to dictate our behavior. For we have all we need to build generative and life-giving systems.
Reclaiming our Humanity: Systems are People
Reclaiming our Humanity: Systems are Place
Reclaiming our Humanity: Systems are Built
Reclaiming our Humanity: Systems are People, People are Systems
The most listened to album at my house growing up was “Free To Be You and Me,” a musical and spoken word project for children by ‘Marlo Thomas & Friends,’ a cast that included Alan Alda, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and many others. I was born in ’71, it was released in ’72, the tv special was in ‘74. I honestly do not remember my life without its presence.
One of the songs, “Parents are People” sung by Harry Belafonte and Marlo Thomas, has been an earworm all week. It’s catchy -here is the YouTube link to it in its entirety. [Here] I keep singing the last chorus, “Parents are people, people with children. When parents were little, they used to be kids. Like all of you, but then they grew. And now, parents are grown-ups. Grown-ups with children.”
I love that a message from this particular song that I accepted without thought, and didn’t re-examine until others found it shocking, is that parents were once little kids themselves, and that SOME grown-ups were parents but maybe not all were and that this was fine.
As I grew up, I came to more fully understand the complexity of parenting. I am without my own children, but am Aunt Jessie to 6 nieces and nephews and have worked in ministry with children and young people throughout all of my adult life until very recently. (I suspect it will be back in some way at some point.) One of my most profound learnings as a youth minister was the realization -the revelation really- that my ministry was with the parents of the youth as well as the youth themselves. I needed relationships with the whole family system -or at least more of it than I had previously understood- in order to function well.
Our family of origin, or lack thereof, and the subsequent communities we join as we age inform our ‘place’ in a family system, and there is a great amount of study and interest in family system theory. It is the smallest unit we tend to hold in common in some capacity as people, and generally an active system in our lives.
Broadly, the fairly generic term ‘system’ is used here to describe an arena in which intersecting factors play out to find a place of functioning. Ecosystems are an immediate go-to example from the climate realm. Seemingly far external factors can shift the balance of a natural ecosystem, and built or semi-engineered systems require continuous maintenance. It may or may not be possible to bio-engineer alongside Creation in healthy and generative ways. I do believe that we can move alongside rather than overlay or apply but either way, respect for the systems we build, nurture, interact with, and encounter is crucial.
Sung to “Parents are People”
“Systems are people, people with problems.
When problems were questions, they used to be fun.
But then they grew, and systems spread.
And now, People are systems, systems with problems.”
Family systems theory, and the many other schools of system theory thinking, are important constructs to accept and comprehend. They are incredibly difficult to step out of, and to do this at all can require great privilege and resource access. For example, an adult child in a family system may be seen as the problem person and expected to behave in certain ways. If that person begins to draw boundaries based on changes from their own growth and development, this can be disruptive to the existing family dynamics. If the family support be depended upon by that person, they may retreat back into old behaviors in order to secure assistance. Domestic violence situations can hinge on the participants playing set roles, and many of the interventions in this realm involve disruptions via changes in expected behavior.
But as a constructive and progressive theologian, I am wary of the systemic driving the conversation. We tend to define a system and then freeze it where it is, a description for all time, rather than see our systematic construct as its own dynamic sphere of influence. Systematic theologies are always interesting and never fully true.
I first came across systems theory as a working concept when considering a graduate degree in behavioral psychology. I was an undergraduate student but had been invited to join the psych department’s Teaching and Research Assistants for lunch when I was on their side of campus, and did often. I spent hours listening to many a debate I barely understood, but I quickly grasped the concepts of systems, and their synergies. Synergy isn’t a term coined by business or advertisers as one might assume. The notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts is a fundamental tenet of math, of science, and affects medicine, physics, engineering -all the things. It just sounds poetic and whimsical.
I’ve learned that systems theory is not a way to isolate mechanics into constructed hypotheticals, nor is it, at least not only is it, a way to perpetuate control. Most of my interaction with ‘systems’ as a teenager and young adult had been in those realms -constructed research or indoctrination. But in these new conversations, systems were simply a way to see interlocking and overlapping factors more clearly, in a more layered way. Regardless of the issue being discussed or the intervention being adapted, there was a general awareness that all things were acting within systems that touched and affected other systems, that no factor was ever isolated.
The systems that we develop, the ones that organically evolve or the ones that are built for a purpose, have their own life. Perhaps the synergy of a system, and its power and momentum, are derived from the collaboration and connection of people. And the people within a system are its best disruptors and guides. Have you ever thrown clay on a potter’s wheel, or seen it done? The form that is built is created by forces in tension, by pressure applied from within and without while the primary mass spins.
Systems are like this. Their momentum provides its own force, its own tension, but any system I could name is actually made up of individual people. The will and intent, purpose and actions of those people themselves can have a very real impact on the systems in which they operate. Systems can feel impenetrable and unchangeable but none are. All systems are dynamic in some way, and have soft spots where change happens. Not grasping this -and yes, sometimes it must be snatched and claimed- is a large part of how we feel helpless and trapped.
And sometimes, the system no longer serves, and cannot be re-formed, or as Walter Wink would say recalled into its higher purpose. These systems must be dismantled and their functions rebuilt into new systems that do serve a generative and abundant life.