Re-Creating Us

Personhood and Members of Each Other: John O'Brien

• John O'Brien • Season 1 • Episode 2

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When words carry the weight of our deepest experiences, they have the power to shape our reality. John O'Brien is a thinker who has profoundly influenced our understanding of the language we use to describe the lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through our conversation, we unearthed how stories  breathe life into words, emphasizing the need for deliberate and accurate language to communicate the true essence of personhood and experience. We examined the philosophy of personalism and its transformative effect on person-centered planning.

The tapestry of community is woven through relationships, a theme that resonated deeply in our dialogue with John. We discussed how simple acts of recognition and acceptance can be the catalyst for friendships that transcend the superficial bonds of society. Reflecting on the narrative within "Members of Each Other," our discussion ventured into the intricacies of communal membership and the hurdles faced by individuals with developmental disabilities in forming meaningful connections. We acknowledged the enduring power of assistance and companionship in historical contexts and its continuing relevance in fostering inclusive societies today.

We recognize  the significance of ongoing dialogues in our collective endeavor to create a community that honors the varied gifts every individual brings to the table. 

John's recommended reading:


Dave Hasbury:

Recreating us is a neighbor's international production. Neighbor's international is committed to an asset-based focus of co-creative change, developing the capacity to welcome the diversity of gifts, knowledge and experiences available in each one of us. John O'Brien is a listener, a writer, a teacher and a sense-maker. For more than 50 years, john has been an ally, friend and guide to people who care about how we can make it possible for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to be supported, to live as valued members of family, neighborhood, community and society.

John O'Brien:

When we introduce the idea of person, we introduce the notion of mystery. People are not problems to be solved, they're a mystery to inspire wonder.

Dave Hasbury:

I'm Dave Hasbury and in this conversation we explore the language we use to reflect the vitality of experience and what happens when language loses its connection with the experience and stories that inspire it. We look deeper at the language of person and the philosophy of personalism and we discuss the experiences that inspire John and Connie Lyle O'Brien's book Members of Each Other. You are one of the people who has been more intentional and more precise about language than almost anyone that I know. It seems to be both an interest and an importance that you put on the words that we use and why we choose them, and all of that In my view. As somebody who's been reading and watching and listening for a long time, I think I find the stuff that you write, unlike things that other people may write, that there is a certain timelessness to them. They don't age in terms of, they don't seem like, oh, that's kind of out of date now For me. They actually kind of just hold it.

Dave Hasbury:

I think part of it is you pay attention to where language comes from and you bring us back to that Most of the stuff. I remember being at a Toronto Summer Institute one year when you actually just raised the whole idea for the group about the etymology of words and looking up where word comes from and finding out, like its origins. Now I do that all the time. I take a look at stuff and see where it comes from and what its original connections were, and all that. Anyway, I'm really glad that you're on this conversation because I think it's an important thing. In fact, actually recently in one of our conversations you talked about the whole idea of endangered language. I wonder if, before we even do much else, you can just talk about a little bit about what you were thinking when you phrase that term for us in the conversation we were having with others.

John O'Brien:

I think one aspect of being human is seeking meaning and the ways that we might express what's meaningful to us. In our experience, I think, we turn to language to help us sort out situations when we get in difficulty, and vocabulary, which is sort of what you're talking about for me, is always embedded in a story or a narrative or whatever word you like to use for what helps you, what gives you context for the struggle to find words for things. And there's a step before my curiosity about the right words that I think is really important. I'm an amateur as far as the field of developmental disabilities go. I was schooled as a philosopher or schooled in philosophy I don't think I've ever made it to the philosopher stage and I found myself working with people with disabilities by accident, of circumstance. So I'm not a researcher. I wasn't trained to write papers for the American Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. I was taught to pay attention to experience, and so the step that comes before looking for the right words is finding the right people, and what I've noticed is that almost anybody can be the right person, but that there are always circumstances where people are moving the edge of what we're doing forward deeper into a territory that I find valuable, and so my first step is to find somebody to listen to, and often that's the place or always that's the place where the image or the phrase or the possibility comes alive, and so lots of what I write is reflection on those generative statements, images that come from the experience of people who are living the struggle for a better life by all the pressures of social devaluation and social exclusion.

John O'Brien:

So when the words have life, when they reflect actual experience, they have power, which I'm trying to find a way to reflect and reflect on.

John O'Brien:

What happens to lots of those words is they become abstract. They're like a balloon that gets blown up with too much helium and starts to float around and sound funny. So words, like person-centered planning, have life in some contexts, and in some contexts they're just filling out a form, and the more intention mindfulness is lost from what we're doing, the more strange, the more the word floats away and then it kind of runs out of steam and it's like a balloon that collapses and falls back to earth. There's a German sociologist called Ui Puchsen who wrote a lovely book called Plastic Words, and plastic words, in his understanding, are words that get taken up into bureaucratized science that lose their life and turn into our now kind of milled like, or extruded like bits of plastic, and I think that's an easy thing to happen. And so I keep looking for places that are alive and then trying to listen into those places to discover people's stories of their struggles, of their achievements, of their puzzlements.

Dave Hasbury:

Well, and I think that's why so much of what you've written actually remains as reference points for a lot of people who continue to try to explore the edges, because it's been rooted in the story of real people that becomes recognizable to people.

Dave Hasbury:

People start to recognize that this is related to somebody that they know or somebody that they love or somebody that they support.

Dave Hasbury:

But I wanted to just step back for a second, because you touched upon something that I was hoping to ask you about, which is you have been committed to this journey of being a novice or I forget the term that you used for the developmental intellectual disability reference but you've stayed paying attention for a very, very, very long time, and you're somebody who could have chosen many, many different places to put your attention. This is one, and I've actually noticed and watched over the years how, as some of us get, our attention gets grabbed by other things that seem interesting. You always bring yourself back. You don't necessarily bring others back, but you always bring yourself back to where your commitment lies, and I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what was that early accident that you ended up making a commitment to for decades. What was it that happened, that you found some vital experience that kind of grabbed your attention and said well, I'm going to pay attention to this.

John O'Brien:

Denise Levertov.

John O'Brien:

The poet wrote a poem that if I'd been prepared I would have looked up, but the first line is something like when we have seen the worst that humans can do, it cracks the shell.

John O'Brien:

And I came into this work in 1968 when the situation of people with significant impairments in institutional settings were in the direction of the worst that we could do, and I had a chance to be part of supporting some people to get out of those circumstances and into something that was immeasurably better and immeasurably short of the best that we have done. And I remain concerned about how easy it is to forget about those people, to pretend that the institution no longer exists, when in fact we have lots and lots of people, including children, finding their way into institutional settings. We have all manner of services that are immeasurably better than the old fashioned institution, but galactically far away from what is really possible and achievable, and people keep their minds to it, and so I have been stuck in that way. The other way, I suppose, is that I have probably found more ways to fail at influencing people than anybody else or anywhere else and I am obsessed about this pretty consistent failure.

John O'Brien:

People are sometimes complimentary about what I have got to say, but if you look at the actual impact of lots of it, I have done that up to very much. That doesn't bother me, probably as much as it should. As much as it should so much as it keeps me curious. And so I keep looking around to see who else is doing something that might help, that might reduce my next failure, make my next failure more interesting. So that brought Connie and me into contact with John McKnight way back in 1973 or so. I think that has turned into quite a fruitful relationship for lots and lots of people.

John O'Brien:

So I am always looking for who is trying to understand the way organizations work and change to see does any of that have a place? If I were a more gifted storyteller, if I didn't have all this complex stuff running around in my head that finds its way out onto the paper, I would probably be more influential and have. If it wasn't hard to read what I wrote, I would probably be more influential and have fewer failures. But given that that's what I am cursed with I keep looking for, is there another angle on this that would give us a little bit more purchase Sure.

John O'Brien:

And that's what part of what brings me to my fascination with. What is the power in this word? Where is the? Is there any source of life in these words?

Dave Hasbury:

Well, I know that because I've heard you share before about the failure to influence and, at the same time as all of that, there are many people who have been influenced by the way you think.

John O'Brien:

Oh sure, I don't discount that. My point is only the actual impact on the lives of people with disabilities. That's where the failure happens. It's not so hard for people to say that's a really good idea, but when it actually comes down to figuring out how to translate that into something, yeah, and.

Dave Hasbury:

I stuck, yeah, and I see that, and so what I kind of hear and what you're saying is the worst of situations that you visibly and viscerally experienced in those early institutional experiences that you had. It was very vital and you can still see the resonance of it.

John O'Brien:

It's not just the bad part. Yeah, it's witnessing what happens when people even have a minimum of human connectedness and the minimum of environmental conditions that allow a person to act like a human being. Yeah, yeah.

John O'Brien:

It's in an odd way, it's how easy it is. Yeah, there are obviously some people that struggle with impairments that are very complex and difficult, but it is remarkable. And so it's that flash, it's that moment when things shift for a person that hooked me. Hmm, not just the awfulness of it, sure, and if I think it was, I think if it had been just the awfulness, I don't think I could have lasted.

Dave Hasbury:

Hmm, it's really interesting.

Dave Hasbury:

I was in a conversation earlier today with somebody who works in a support organization and had been working side by side with somebody to prepare a presentation on natural language speaking so that it's not about special and disabled and all that kind of stuff, but just ordinary language to describe people's lives.

Dave Hasbury:

And they were working alongside and invited somebody who experienced that part of life to participate in making this. And at the end of it the person said, um, he looked at her and said did you know that I'm a person? And she kind of was taken aback by it and said of course I know you're a person. But she said in the middle of it all she realized that this was an 80 year old man who had spent the bulk of his life under care systems and that no one had actually spoken of him or treated him in that ordinary way as a side by side person to person experience. And it was a real wake up call for her to kind of go wow. And for me it kind of resonates with what you're saying about how small and simple things are that can make huge amounts of difference.

John O'Brien:

But just having the attention to, to pay attention differently and to act out of that attention differently so and that's the other thing that you see or that we saw a couple generations ago in the experience of institution survivors.

John O'Brien:

The people who survived had somebody who recognized them as a person. And for the more, for the less impaired people, the people that kind of wound up in the institution for who knows why, not doing very well in school and having a difficult family or get in trouble with a law or whatever, people bonded with each other. People came together and kind of formed gangs, people that treated each other like people and the hell with the rest of the people that don't see us that way. But more impaired people who were more dependent, where the death rates were frighteningly high, the people who survived had somebody who saw them as a person and treated them as the person. Even within the terrible limits of the understaffed, underresourced, not enough to eat too cold in the winter to about in the summer, maybe no clothes that are reliable. Even in those circumstances, what comes up is somebody saw the person, somebody saw the person's face.

Dave Hasbury:

And even without language. At that point it's just an experience of being treated in a way that recognizes something called personhood or humanity or whatever. That is so almost entirely preverbal.

John O'Brien:

Regardless of whether we're capable of speech or not. That speech is an alternative to some kind of more embodied set of channels to recognize each other. It comes before words, not instead.

Dave Hasbury:

Yeah, well, this whole idea of person is one of the things. I was hoping to have a conversation with you Because of something that recently came up that you were involved in. You got invited by folks in South Korea to do some thinking about person-centered planning and all of that kind of stuff, and you wrote a little paper about the language of person and person-centered and I wonder if you want to. So you say in that paper that for me, person takes its meaning from the philosophical tradition of personalism and then you list some of what that means. Could you talk a little bit about that, about what personalism is and the philosophy of personalism, and what are some of those core elements that you were bringing forward to the South Korean folks as they were thinking about person-centeredness, person-centered work?

John O'Brien:

Well, personalism as a philosophy is a movement in European philosophy that begins to develop when the world is beginning to experience the consequences of the rise of fascism and up through the period after the Second World War, when the world has been turned upside down and inside out by World War One and so much of what people had imagined was the case about humanity was destroyed and people were trying to figure out what has meaning. What is the human project all about? How do we get in these? How did these terrible things happen? And so a number of philosophers lots of French, at least the ones that I learned from from different angles began to try to appreciate what was distinctive to humans, not distinctive in the sense that it sets us above each other or the planet and its creatures, but what is the gift of personhood and what conditions allow the person to thrive. And a lot of this was developed in Catholic social teaching, and the current hope continues to work from that point of view. And so, as I think I said as well in the little paper, not everybody would agree with my source for this or where I learned about it, but where I learned about it was by no means exclusively religious root, but was the root in who are we really and what do we owe each other, and those seem to be questions that concern all of us and that people with disabilities and other people who are vulnerable to social exclusion are particularly vulnerable to or particularly at risk of. And that doesn't mean that people don't find effective ways to resist. People do. That's one of the amazing things about us as humans is, no matter what we have to work with, we can find a way to make a life, and make a life that has good in it, much good in it, sometimes, even when the outside circumstances look bad.

John O'Brien:

So there's a substantial body of thinking about personalism.

John O'Brien:

For me, it boils down to something in practical terms that's pretty simple and that does run against the grain of a lot that is common in our culture, because ours is a culture that, from my point of view, greatly values autonomy, the single person by themselves making it or not making it in competition with others, and that gets expressed in things like a desire for independence and choice.

John O'Brien:

That translates into a pretty superficial understanding of what choice is what autonomy really means, and so you end up with the person-centered planning as make a wish activity, looking for things that are good things to look for trip to Disneyland, a chance to go to the beach, whatever good experiences, good things to be doing but not anywhere near the depth of who any person is and we don't. We spend our lives, I think, trying to work out who we are and what our contributions can be and what it is that brings meaning to our lives, and I think one of the hallmarks of truly excellent supports for people is that the same idea animates relationships there. We're looking for, for your gifts, for your potential contributions to the common good, and so we believe that there is a common good, not just a sort of odd lot of atomistic individuals fighting for their share of consumption.

Dave Hasbury:

Well, in your paper you, coming out of the personalism thing, you say the person is a word that points to these aspects of being human, which are we're inviolably dignified by our existence, not by what we do or what interests we serve. We're relational beings, we're irreplaceable in our uniqueness, we're moral actors and we thrive when we can be responsible for our freedom. What was the importance of sharing that perspective with the folks in South Korea who were asking you about person-centered planning?

John O'Brien:

Well, if we're looking for what we mean by person, if that's what we mean by person, then we will be trying to figure out how to order our place in people's lives.

John O'Brien:

If we are committing a person-centered plan, conspiring to commit a person-centered plan, will, when we come out of it, look back and wonder what was the relational dimension of this? Did we do this as if this was just a personal lump, as seen through the eyes of a group of people who are authorized agents of the system? Or, and in some places that group of system agents is called a circle of support. Right, and that's okay. Except those people aren't going to help you move house you know when you're and they may not even align with helping you get your own house because they got other things to connect to. So we commit offenses against the reality of our interdependency and we pretend that if you are in some sense dependent, you're less than us who are independent, who can check all the boxes on the skill of skills for independent living list. And if we are serious about the concept of person, or the idea of person incorporating the notion of uniqueness, then what have we discovered? Even a little tiny bit about what this move, what makes this person themselves as distinct?

John O'Brien:

from everybody else, or are we just kind of filling in the form on somebody that we figure we've got figured out? We know who you are, we know what you need. You are transparent to us, the notion of when we introduce the idea of person, we introduce the notion of mystery. People are not problems to be solved, they're a mystery to inspire, wonder. So where's the moment? If we've had a good experience with our planet, there'll be a moment of wonder, of awesomeness a word that's completely destroyed now, but awe is what person inspires, right? If I catch a glimpse of a person, that is an awesome mystery. That's there sitting with us and we have the privilege to appreciate what that uniqueness might mean.

John O'Brien:

We're moral actors in terms of the common good, and so, again, if we're planning doing something called person-centered, planning with a consciousness of person, this consciousness of person, then we're looking for that person's obligation to the common good.

John O'Brien:

It really isn't okay if the person's current situation is one in which they're withdrawn, in which they're disconnected, in which they're not a part of anything, in which they're not belonging to any effort to make things better, and that doesn't have to mean people are spending hours and hours slaving away at something. It means very simple things about the way people are with the people that support them and the way that everyday relationship goes. It means what difference are we making in our neighborhood? And it introduces the idea that we actually have an obligation to the common good and that's not something that you pronounce on, wave your finger at or whatever. It's just if we're not seeing people feeling their gift with the confidence and the support that they require to act on that gift, then we're nowhere near person-centered planning. Anyway, that was a sort of. That's the sort of thing that goes on in my head when you ask me why I did that.

Dave Hasbury:

So what? For me there's kind of a flow to this that brings me to one of my favorite works that you published with Connie, called Members of Each Other. It is really one of my favorites in what you've written and again I feel that particularly the first good part of the book actually remains with that kind of timeless quality to it. And I love one of your openings from Wendell Berry's character, burley Coulter. He says the way we are, we are members of each other, all of us, everything. The difference ain't in who's a member and who's not, but in who knows it and who don't.

Dave Hasbury:

And for me the word person only makes sense in the context of member, like there is obviously a solo existence. I mean there are people although we're not social. We're not solo beings, we're social beings as humans. And so this whole notion of member for me is another concept because another realm of thinking about, and I use as a reference point whenever I do something like a person-centered plan with a group of people. It's always about who are your people, however small that body of people is and however strong or fragile the bonds are between people who are those people.

Dave Hasbury:

And I remember being at Toronto Summer Institute again one year that Connie was with us and she shared a story of a woman that she had just met. I think it might have been at a conference or something, I can't even remember exactly. And it gets back to the earlier thing. We talked about how small stuff things can be, and Connie simply treated the person with a generous honoring you know just the kind of openness to her as a person and it almost immediately became Connie becoming her friend because of this experience.

Dave Hasbury:

And so there's for me, there's this thing about not only is personhood an important element of who we are, but membership is as important as the person, and it's actually where the mystery plays out. You know it's like the mystery plays out between us. You know it's that kind of thing. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what brought you to the place of that whole framing of that. The title of the book has always stayed with me members of each other. And just what were the, what was going on at the time that led you to the idea that this would be something that would be worth sharing with the world?

John O'Brien:

Well, we have to acknowledge St Paul as one of the sources of the concept of members of each other. Burley is quoting the epistles of the Ephesians pretty much in rural Kentucky tobacco farm language.

John O'Brien:

Right now we're. It's an interesting time right now because we're we're interested from the point of view of public policy. We've gotten interested in loneliness. We've gotten interested in people who aren't members.

John O'Brien:

Right, the surgeon general of the United States a couple months ago issued advisory about loneliness and how to overcome it, and one of the concerns that has been very lively in the developmental disabilities world has been the question of people's relationships and for a while we framed it exclusively in terms of loneliness and there got to be some debates and things that were puzzling to Connie and me. Could a paid person be a person's friend, for example? That to be a still is sometimes something people worry about. That notion that I talked about before of starting from experience makes. That puts that question in a different light, because in fact there are friendships between people and people who are paid to support them, and whether there should be or shouldn't be it doesn't matter, because that's not what a friendship is. And of course that takes nothing away from the potential for people being abusive friends or for people being artificial friends or for people to pretending I'm your friend and not having that be a real friendship. So we were looking in that members of each other book. In the various chapters of it, we were looking at this question of membership from different angles and in the context not just of friendship as a treatment for loneliness or friendship as a good, as part of what us humans need in order to thrive, and as something that's contextual in terms of what's how you're seen, how you're treated, what you have access to.

John O'Brien:

We can identify a lot of things that make people with disabilities hard to meet or hard to pursue a friendship with right, and the first one is if people believe it's impossible, right, if people just and there was a time that there was a there were several controversial publications that in the editing process, were really hard to get through because reviewers would say this is completely fair, a fairy tale. This presumes that this non-disabled, this severely impaired person and this, you know, sort of upscale person could be friends. That can't be, that they can't reciprocate, they can't. You know, there's so many things getting away and part of what we were trying to do is just find some angles to look at the thing so that we could get a little bit different handle on it, and one of the most powerful things that we explore in some of that book is the power and the terror of asking

John O'Brien:

so we looked at some of the work that had been done with rescuers of Jews in the second world war and the sociologists who had studied many of the people who were memorialized in Yad Vashem the people that that saved people, the Gentiles that saved people discovered when they listened to the stories that the most common reason that people did it was that somebody that people took people in at the risk of their own lives was somebody asked, somebody just said would you help this person or would you help me?

John O'Brien:

And not everybody said yes, but people said yes, and people remained many times faithful to that, to that response, and so we began to think about how to be sure that we recognize the power that people with disabilities have to recruit people into their lives if we can figure out how to get them in contact. So we both know people with significant impairments in verbal communication and so forth who are powerful recruiters of other people, who who can bring people in if you can just get all the stuff out of the way that keeps their keeps them from making contact with somebody. And I think what's particularly beautiful is that it isn't necessarily will you help me, it's will you join me? Can we do this together? Can we get involved in this? I don't know the surgical dancing thing together, or sure project to close the institutions together or whatever it is. And we've done such a poor job at pushing back at this, these disconnecting forces that we've, that many, many, many people with disabilities have just gotten on with creating their own memberships with each other.

John O'Brien:

Sure the hell with the rest of us in a sense and I think that's a good thing that has a real downside, and the downside is it takes away the reminders of interdependency, the reminders of the power of undoing other ring. That happens when people struggle to create inclusive settings right. So to me, the only thing that's problematic about people coming up with their own connections with other people that are like them in the sense of sharing a similar experience of disability, is, I mean, to me that again is another testimony to the to the power of relationship and the need for it and the desire to reach out for it, but it also disadvantages the rest of us. No particular reason that people with disability should be doing the hard work, but, on the other hand, the common good, the journey to the beloved community, requires the courage for people to put themselves in new and different situations and relationships.

Dave Hasbury:

I think of. I mean, like there was just something about this phrase members of each other and the way Burley Coulter references it and you speak of St Paul's, it's almost like a pre-existing condition. The membership is actually. That's the starting place, and these invitations into things are actually opportunities to manifest it, to actually experience what already exists and has this kind of mystery quality to it because we wouldn't have thought about it. But there is an experience when you can come together in difference and uniqueness and all that kind of stuff and come to a realization that we are, we're just members of each other, like there's a visceral thing that happens in those moments that you can. So I can only imagine that the people who said yes to the invitation found themselves in the reality of members of each other kind of thing, and that fuels that One of the things that you said in that book.

Dave Hasbury:

It says unless citizens exercise caution, the concept of social support will obscure a necessary fact about the foundations of civil life. We will forget that we are members of each other and that the quality of our lives depends on remembering this in daily action. Do you want to say a little bit about that and what you see in terms of, because some of this is we've set up these systems of social care which are a different form of relationship. There are people within that who form just genuine relationships, but the system has got its own structures and definitions about what relationships are all about. So do you want to just say a little bit about this kind of social support.

John O'Brien:

Well, I think it's part of the what some people are now calling the poly crisis that we're in right now. And to go back for a minute to bully Burley Coulter, his creator, wendell Berry, has written a series now it's, I think, upwards of 17 or 18 books about what he calls the Port William membership, which is a fictionalized version of this part of Kentucky where people farmed, grew tobacco, and part of what those books are about is the loss of context. Right, that changes in agriculture, changes in scale and method of agriculture, create situations that don't bring people together, that don't create membership. You could not farm in this part of the world before machinery showed up without neighbors helping each other out, right? If you didn't do that, you were clearly an outsider. Right? You showed up for each other in all kinds of ways in the context of daily life and what Wendell Berry has written about in several books of quite beautiful essays. He's a kind of controversial guy, but I think he's got. He writes beautifully and has really powerful points about what we've lost, what we've taken away with industrialized agriculture, with policies that drive people off the land, and so what he's trying to figure out with some of his characters in his books is.

John O'Brien:

Can you even think about this precondition that you're speaking of when people are so, when things are so derationated, when people are so atomized, when people's connections, when the church is increasingly smaller the church buildings might be big but the occupancy is really small and is trending down when we've got this odd crisis of caring right culture of rejection of caring? Washington Post yesterday, day before yesterday, article about we can't find volunteers now to help operate children's nutrition programs, we can't find nurses, we can't find teachers, we can't find teachers' aides, we can't find people in the field of social care. Doctors are quitting left, right and center. People seem to be in flight almost from being in situations where they're called on to, where we're called on to care for each other, and that seems to me to be a really significant dilemma. And part of what we were trying to do was to learn something about by writing that book. To learn something about, to learn something about what are people doing about this.

John O'Brien:

So some of the book is kind of more conceptual, or words, words, words, words. Some of it is. Here's what some people are doing. Here's what some people in Pennsylvania were doing back when we wrote the book to bring people together, to gather people on purpose, to see a gathered circle of support as the foundation for any kind of significant improvement in people's quality of life. Here's what some people are doing around citizen advocacy. Here's what options in community living is doing about having a community builder. And here's what John McKnight and Kathy Larimer are up to in South Chicago with trying to build off a neighborhood organization base.

Dave Hasbury:

What are your thoughts about that whole idea of what people have done?

Dave Hasbury:

And, again, the getting back to the awesomeness of who a person is and the member precondition.

Dave Hasbury:

So often these things get done because somebody is seen to be outside of community culture, all this kind of stuff, and it often can get translated into a doing for somebody who's less fortunate kind of thing. But it always strikes me that the we who are inside, not the outsider we're actually missing something. We're actually missing, and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that in terms of the orientation to what this work is. If it's really about kind of realizing the members of each other precondition, how do we have to think and act differently in that, given that we have these systems? Like, one of the things about the systems of social care is that they are entirely built around the notion of increasing the perception of someone's deficit, of what they don't have, in order for them to be supported. And so how do we approach this? In a way, that's about the gets more at this mystery element, gets more at this members of each other element that changes the way we see and therefore changes the way we act.

John O'Brien:

I wish I knew, but I do have a thought or two. One of them is part of what we were up to with the members of each other book, and probably almost everything else I've ever put in words on paper is to change our perception of purpose. What if it weren't remediating or caring for deficiency? What if the problem we were trying to solve was was moving toward the beloved community? What if our purpose was to build community? And what if we recognized that one of the fundamentals of building community is hospitality, that hospitality is a fundamental virtue that makes it possible for us to be human, be persons. What if we took it seriously that we should welcome strangers?

John O'Brien:

As for the Greeks, you know the classical Greeks they had a story of the God showing up at somebody's door and if the people weren't hospitable, they were ended. They no longer were alive when they said no to Zeus when he was knocking at the door and the guys of a beggar. And obviously there's the Judeo-Christian injunctions to welcome the stranger and the recognition that in the stranger we may encounter, we may entertain angels unaware. So what if that were what we thought the problem was and we needed to partner with people who were at particular risk of social exclusion because of being seen as less than a person or as other in some threatening or puzzling or dangerous ways, and people who experience impairments that require some accommodation in order to participate. What if that was the problem and again that's where my multiple failures come in is trying to figure out some way to send that message that our systems of social care could respond to.

Dave Hasbury:

Well, I could go on on this and I am sure I will call you again for more conversations. For example, in members of each other, you actually go on to bring up Ivan Ilych and John McKnight and the whole systems of social care and what happens to freely chosen relationship, communal experiences, when those are interviewed. It's kind of the equivalent of Wendell Berry's what happens when we make all of our farming machine oriented and what happens to all the relationships. So I'd love to talk to you more. You also, in that book, go on to talk about the linguistic roots of friend, and I'd love to have that conversation too, just about friend, because it's language that gets tossed around all the time in a very thin veil kind of way, and yet it's a deep concept of friendship that actually has been a binding force in our human experiment.

Dave Hasbury:

Well, john, thank you so much for spending this time and, like I said, I can only imagine that I'll be calling again for other conversations along the way. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for future episodes exploring more aspects of what it takes to recreate a more inclusive and dynamic experience of us. Please subscribe to our podcast at your favorite podcast outlet. Recreating us is a neighbor's international production.

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David Hasbury

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