From Division to Shared Vision with Reverend Charles Gibbs

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener

Hello, welcome to the Living Love podcast. My name is Beth Tener. Today, our theme will be strength in connection, where we can feel the polarization and these forces that tend to divide and split us apart. These patterns keep coming up, like antisemitism and racism. How do we break these cycles of distrust and violence? Some of these are hundreds or 1000s of years old. We know there’s also cycles and patterns at every scale from community up to global that create and sustain peace. What does it take to see these cycles that go the other way towards more trust, solidarity and strength in our connection, in our unity? This feels like a critical question.

This podcast today will center a remarkable story to learn from, from the world of religions. If there’s any area that’s been the root of so much human conflict, it is religion, older than nation states. There is the religious persecution between religions and wars that start over that, and also the roots of colonialism and the way Christianity and missionaries created destructive patterns of indigenous peoples and cultures and their knowledge and land.

We will look at how are different religions of the world are coming together to overcome those past traumas and divides, and create stronger unity at different scales from communities to more global. I’m excited today to be talking with Reverend Charles Gibbs. He is an Episcopal priest and a poet. And he’s worked for decades building bridges among people divided by war, religion, language history, and past traumas. Charles was the founding executive director of United Religions Initiative, (URI) and he worked for that organization for 17 years, working with people around the world to grow this global grassroots interfaith network. It cultivates peace and justice by engaging people to bridge religious and cultural differences and work together for the good of their communities and the world. It now has over 1000 interfaith cooperation circles in different communities around the world in 110 countries. And people throughout this initiative are collaborating on different action areas like environment and education. This has touched the lives of millions of people.

For me, as someone who thinks about these questions of bridging and getting people to cooperate across fragmented silos and parts of our community, I work in the US in areas of like climate action and local food. It is fascinating to talk with Charles as he’s spent his career working in international peace and development and interfaith and intercultural cooperation. There are similar methods and questions in a different context than I’ve worked in. What I find so fascinating in the conversation is to see the co-arising of similar forms, and practices. Their expression looks different, but we can learn by connecting these different streams of wisdom and lessons.

I had the pleasure to meet Charles through work he was doing after he retired from URI with Catalyst for Peace, which is a foundation that worked in partnership in Sierra Leone with a group called Fambul Tok, which means family talk, and they did peace and development healing work after the civil war there. And then a multiyear process of community re-development, bringing forth the leadership of women, creating inclusive governance in the communities. It’s quite a story. And actually, the next episode with Libby Hoffman, who Charles worked with, will feature that. Charles was Senior Advisor and Poet in Residence. Each time I worked with them or had a chance to come to one of their gatherings, Charles would often start it with a sacred opening. It was just a beautiful presence and wisdom that he brings to each gathering and conversation. I look forward today to having you get to know and learn from Charles’ wisdom and experience in our conversation.

Charles, I’m so grateful to welcome you into this conversation today. And thank you for being here.

Charles Gibbs

My gift and privilege, Beth. Thank you for inviting me and for the light you’re shining in the world through your podcast.

Beth Tener

As I thought about all the things we could talk about, and there were many, I was reflecting on your life experience. You’re probably one of the more experienced people in the whole world of working across religions, across culture, with helping people turn from the cycles of turning on each other, and moving out of historical conflicts and trying to turn towards each other or trying to find some common purpose. That is the heart of what I’d love to talk to you today: what you’ve learned and what you’ve seen in witnessing others making that fundamental shift and what it takes. Maybe we could start with you sharing the story of the United Religions Initiative, URI.

Charles Gibbs

The beginning for me was when I was at a clergy conference in the Diocese of California in March 1993. My bishop, Bill Swing, in his time sharing with the clergy, talked about a call he had gotten from someone at the UN, who said, we’re coming to San Francisco for a week to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the UN Charter signing in June 1995, would you, Bishop Swing, as part of that celebration, host a one-hour interfaith service at Grace Cathedral. The UN rep said, “we’ll bring the nations. Will you please bring the world’s religions?” And he said sure, and couldn’t sleep that night.

He realized that the nations had, for 50 years, dedicated themselves to a shared vocation expressed in the UN Charter, to work for peace and wellbeing for all people. And they were celebrating that with a week-long party and inviting the world’s religions to come. And he asked, ‘Where are the religions similarly working together? For the good of all people?” In other words, how did we earn an invitation?

And his answer was, we haven’t. The nations of the world are acting in a more moral way than the religions. For him, the prompt was something more than a one-hour interfaith service is being asked for, and in his imagination, that something would be an analogue to the UN, in the world of religion. After I heard him talk, I waited until everyone else had left and I went up to him and said words that would change my life really dramatically. I simply said,

“I’d like to help.”

After the service, we agreed, something has begun that we need to continue. And we started a chartering process that would carry through June of 2000, when a charter was signed. The chartering process was part writing the words of a charter. But more importantly, it was creating through consultations around the world, a global community, who owned the charter, who believed that it wasn’t something out there in San Francisco that was being offered to them as a gift, but it was something they actually helped create. There was a global “we” of people of just amazing diversity, who came together to imagine a possibility.

Beth Tener

As I spoke with Charles, I was so curious to hear, how did they get to this global “we,” who could come together around a shared agreement around the charter. He explained that they had a global gathering every year. They knew they had to get out to where the people were and lived. They would have regional assemblies of three or four days in length. And we spent some time delving into how did they structure those, how did they create the space where people could meet and connect at the human scale of conversation that could allow them to find that shared possibility.

Charles Gibbs

And then those years, I was the one person who went to every one of those regional gatherings all over the world. And again and again, I can still picture walking into a room. Our first year, we did one in Buenos Aires for people from Latin America, we did one in Oxford for people from Europe, and one in New York City that drew heavily from the international NGO community at the UN. Walking into those gatherings when they were beginning, and you could feel the nervous tension in the room, because people weren’t used to sitting with people of other traditions. And they weren’t sure why they were there. Except they’d been invited by local people. We always worked with people who knew the local setting, knew the regional setting, and could bring all their wisdom and experience and insight into helping to figure out how do we craft three or four days together that will work in this cultural or in these cultural contexts.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that could happen. In Argentina, we were in this beautiful art center that happened to overlook the graveyard where Evita was buried. There was a sense of great moment, oh my gosh, here we are. We had about close to 100 people from a wide variety of religious backgrounds, indigenous people, at that point in Argentina, they weren’t acknowledged, ‘we don’t have indigenous people here.’ People were arranged at tables so that each table had a maximum diversity. So you had no choice but to encounter people of other traditions.

We got started, and we always began with an appreciative interview, one on one. So people could actually get to know each other around questions like, imagine a time when you felt most alive, most effective in the world, you felt you were part of something that accomplished some end that you were proud of. And it could be little, it could be big. Or, I’d like to know a little bit more about your religious tradition or your spiritual tradition. Would you share with me the greatest gift you’ve received from your tradition?

Beth Tener

I find that method I use so much in my own work. Starting with the story and the storytelling and the small group. I’d love to hear you talk about how did that like small dialogue… Did you feel it soften the room? That’s often what I notice…as soon as you get the storytelling going, and the appreciative theme, it really changes the tone, right?

Charles Gibbs

Yeah, as soon as people paired up and conversation started, it was like a switch was flipped in the room. And the energy was transformed from this nervous, uncertain energy to just rapt engagement. In that conference in Argentina, that had just happened, when three of our local organizers, came over and said to me words that I would hear countless times in my years with URI, “we have a problem.”

I said, “Okay, what?” and they said, “well, one pair is a Muslim doctor and a gay pastor. And Muslims don’t accept homosexuality here. And we think there’s going be a real problem with this conversation.” Let that conversation stand for countless ones where two people who knew each other only as others and didn’t necessarily have a good opinion of the other, suddenly were sitting down together. And I said, “well, let’s just wait a minute and see what happens.” And about four minutes later, one of them came back and said, “It’s okay, they’re laughing.”

These two men who would never have even talked with each other before actually developed something of a relationship. And later in the gathering, when we were asking people to imagine membership in the United Religions, and people were free to volunteer particular perspectives on what they wanted, the Muslim doctor said,

“I would like to meet with anyone who’d like to talk about this from the perspective of who would be excluded.” Because he felt as a Muslim, that maybe people wouldn’t want Muslims in this. Well, when that table constellated, sitting around that table were Muslims, two gay pastors, and about four indigenous people, all of whom felt at risk of being excluded from this larger whole. And when I looked at that, I thought, that is a conversation that has never happened in the world before, that these groups have found solidarity, sadly, around a feeling that they would be excluded.

When they reported out, the pastor spoke first and said,

“You know, we had a really great conversation, a hard one trying to explore this. And we felt that no one should be excluded because of their religious or spiritual tradition. But we were unable to reach an agreement about whether people should be excluded because of their sexuality. And I’d like to invite my Muslim friend to say something about that.”

And this Muslim doctor basically said, “we had a great conversation, and I feel I have a new friend here. And I have so much more to learn, and I need to learn. But right now what I need to say that as Muslims, we can’t get to the place where we would say, yes, people who see themselves as homosexual, should be included.” And there was a grace in that and a sadness. (Yeah.) And yet, it exemplified the difference between developing a relationship and seeing a human being and hurting because of a position you hold because you realize it’s hurtful to someone else. And being stuck in a position and just seeing the opposition.

Beth Tener

Yeah. And the acknowledgement, ‘I have more to learn.’ I mean, that’s in one meeting, I guess, what you would invite them to get to that place and acknowledge that.

At this point in the story, as I talked to Charles, I had really understood what they were starting to see as they brought people from very different experiences and points of view together in conversation, as they started to get to know each other. I asked him what they did next in terms of getting to this higher purpose, statement or charter that they could all agree on. Because often when we get people with different points of view together, we’ll put the most inflamed issue right in the center and get into an us/them polarity dynamic that splits things apart. And certainly, the media often likes to amplify this in the political process. They took a different approach based on a method called appreciative inquiry. And we’ll be putting in the show notes on the Kinship website examples and links to learning more about this method. It’s one I use in my work a lot as well. And it’s one that anyone can bring into their next meeting, at work or in your community.

Beth Tener

I’m curious, how did you find the… I don’t know…I keep going back and forth… is it the common ground…I also see in the way you talked about this almost like common vocation. How do you think about that bridging work? What is it that allowed you to take so many disparate people in the chartering, which got you to a common, high level, common purpose? Share with us how that part worked.

Charles Gibbs

Well, we had the great privilege in the early days of appreciative inquiry to work with two key figures in its early years, David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, and their methodology matched our intuition. We wanted to work in a positive way, we wanted to work from visions of what was possible, not from what are all the problems and how do we solve them. And so our gatherings were, in the chartering time, were all structured as to use the term of art, appreciative future searches. And we would bring people together to get to know each other on an individual basis. And on that, build a shared vision dream of what might be possible if we could work together. Part of that was, we invited people to build a timeline, not to express everyone’s expertise as historians, but in your life, the events that stand out, what are things that might dispose us, as a species, toward a big step forward in cooperation right now that might make an organization like this possible? And it interested me that everywhere in the world, there were unique parts.

But there was a coherence around, number one, we are witnessing the migration of religions and spiritual traditions all over the world. That there’s a Tibetan Buddhist community in Buenos Aires, for instance. You have neighbors, who are these traditions, even if you don’t know your neighbors?

Beth Tener

So it’s not tied to geography.

Charles Gibbs

Exactly. There’s a possibility and an urgency. We need to know how to live together because we’re together all over the world now. Another was the evolution of technology, particularly the way we could connect at distance – that was unprecedented. That was a big piece everyone identified. And the last one that everyone, everywhere in the world identified was the emergence of women in leadership roles in every area of human endeavor. It didn’t surprise me when it came up in some places, but for instance, in a culture that is at least stereotyped for its machismo like Latin America, to see this overwhelming consensus, that the leadership of women was one of the most hopeful signs, because I think there was a recognition that the unique experience and wisdom women bring to the table was desperately needed to counteract a huge imbalance of male dominance.

Beth Tener

That reminds me of the quote from Rumi, who he writes, “listen to the new stories that begin each day.” It was as if around the world you were listening for the stories in the timelines…and the way we make meaning of these. Certainly, religion is so much about holding these stories and these traditions in the scriptures. I love how you are able to listen for and find this emerging story bubbling up in so many places, and named probably through different languages and different lenses. Those three, I love the way you just framed that. I mean, that could apply across a lot, not just religion, but any kind of connecting we’re trying to do right now.

Charles Gibbs

Absolutely. After we would raise up a common dream, then the question was: what could we, this group, do now to start living into what we want to create? And people would come up with a wider role, and we want to focus on the education of our young people so they grow up with a different experience of their religious and spiritual neighbors. We want to address the huge challenge with what humans are doing to the environment. We want to find ways to speak collectively into the issue of poverty, and on and on. And you’d see small groups of people who, when they started the day before, weren’t even sure they wanted to speak to each other. All of a sudden sitting together passionately exploring how we could collectively work to address even one environmental challenge.

Beth Tener

This resonates so much with what I’ve seen in my work. You activated that by the way you introduced them and connected them and then it like it naturally bubbles up. I sometimes will laugh, in a meeting like that, there’s so much conversation and I’ll have to say “will you please stop networking?”

And it makes everyone laugh, but you give people the chance and they come together. It’s like this innate human drawing together in the right context. It takes a lot of violence to divide and conquer, right?

Charles Gibbs

Absolutely. And we deliberately worked to bring people out of their heads into their hearts to start with. And we didn’t focus for the most part on theology, maybe there’d be a group that would want to do something, “Let’s mine our traditions for what they have to say about peace.” But instead of debating theology, like whose understanding of God is the right one, which is a losing proposition no matter how you encounter it, it was, “what can we do together?” And when we started doing together, a natural curiosity arose. What is it about your tradition as the Sikh, or as a member of the Kolla people in Argentina, that has you want to do this work? Then you start learning from each other and discovering that even though the words may be different, even though the theological, cosmological envelope may be different, the essence is the same.

Beth Tener

Beautiful. You mentioned there was a lot of work to get to the common charter. Could you share the sentence? Is it just a few sentences or a sentence you could all agree on?

Charles Gibbs

First of all, it took four years. I’ll jump to the end and then come back. The sentence that took four years to write that begins the URI charter, with these words, “We people of diverse religions, spiritual expressions, and indigenous traditions throughout the world, hereby establish the United Religions Initiative, to promote enduring daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence, and to create cultures of peace, justice, and healing for the earth and all living beings.” Those words are very different from the words we started with four years earlier. And yet, they aren’t very different. And let me just try to quickly give a sense of what I mean by that. The vision underneath the words was the same. The challenge, the invitation, and this goes back to what I was just saying about different theological envelopes, different language systems, the challenge was to find words, that an amazing diversity of people could find themselves in.

Beth Tener

This question of how do we find words and a common vision that an amazing diversity of people can find themselves and live into? It’s such a beautiful question. And as I spoke with Charles, he talked about how they’d had thousands of voices speaking into this charter, which included a preamble and some principles, and then that one purpose statement, which you heard. And he described, after several years of this work, bringing a lot of representatives together from global gathering, where they were trying to get a final agreement on this. And they used a method of green, and yellow, and red cards. So green is good. Yellow has concerns and red is no can’t go with it. Charles described going around the circle and reading one part, green and yellow cards all workable, the next part of principles, mostly green and yellow, workable things, and then I’ll bring you back to the story where he describes where they read the one sentence, and then what happened.

Charles Gibbs

And there was a sea of red cards. And this is, after three years of working on that. I literally fell out of my chair.

I was sitting on the floor looking at people’s knees under the table and thinking, “I don’t know if I can do this. Do I have it in me?” But I got back up on my chair. And after lunch, we gathered the people who felt passionate about the purpose statement, there were about 30 of us. We sat in a circle. I said, where I’d like to begin, is let’s just go around the circle and hear from each person what is most important to you, that it be in the purpose of the URI if you’re going to be able to find yourself there.

The first person who spoke was an Anglican bishop from Canada. A man named Michael Ingham. And he said, “as an Anglican bishop and as the person I am, what’s most important for me is that God be in the purpose statement. Because if God isn’t there, I really can’t find myself there.” Everyone nodded. Yes, that makes sense. Understand, Bishop, thank you and we move around the circle and get opposite Bishop, England. And there is Venerable Jinwol Lee, a Buddhist monk from Korea, who said, “for me as a Buddhist, what is most important about the purpose statement is that God not be there. Because if God is in the purpose statement, I can’t find myself there.”

I thought, okay. You can’t get more oppositional than God, not God. But still everyone was nodding. They heard what venerable Jinwol Lee said, they understood it and accepted it. We got around the circle. And I thought, you know, this could be the end of it. But it wasn’t. Because by then, people had come to respect and love each other and to care about our common venture. And no one was willing to believe that we couldn’t find the words that everyone could share. It took a lot of work, a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the next year. And we were very close to going off the edge of a very high cliff a few times. The community got, at times, very polarized over the internet on a listserv, it’s got to be this, it can’t be that and all this. And yet, by everyone’s commitment, and I would say by the grace of the universe, we found the words that allowed Bishop Michael Ingham and Venerable Jinwol Lee, one to see God and the other to see not God, and to link arms and move forward to create this global community.

Beth Tener

I just want to mirror a couple of the elements of that – bringing it back to the time we’re in, particularly in the United States right now. The way that caring enough to find a common vision that everybody could find themselves in. In this moment where there is so much exiling each other or saying, if that’s in then I can’t be. What I see here is the way they hung in and cared about the common venture, at some point saying that’s the common venture is so important to me that what I need, or how I came in saying what I needed, can shift on behalf of the whole. That impulse feels so important right now.

Charles Gibbs

I would agree. And the other thing I’d say in relation to that, Beth, is that in work I’ve done, in Sierra Leone, I’ve become quite enamored of the expression “small, small.” It’s so easy to see the enormity of the challenges, the enormity of the divisions we live in. And to think that somehow we have to, with a wave of a magic wand solve all that. And yet, I’ve come to believe really strongly that it is the “small, small.” We have to ask, what is it that I can do? What is it that we can do in our daily lives and build a pool of bridge building?

Beth Tener

Yeah, and I’d love you to talk Charles, I, one of the things I saw in your writings about URI is: “you helped make the good, more visible.” I love that phrase. It sounds like the global level of trying to bring everyone together with regional gatherings. And the small small in the work is also the local, right? The local interfaith circles. Could you share the model and how this could then grow? How do we make these structures that can grow?

I think people say “I will write to my Senate or get Congress to do something or how do I get the CEO to do something.” That’s how change happens. In my experience, and seeing the work you’ve done with URI and in Sierra Leone, it’s actually replicable small scale local, that then connects and goes regional, national, it’s a very different orientation.

Charles Gibbs

And I would say, first of all, I think it’s all needed. I wouldn’t say, “Do this, don’t do that.” I think different people have different callings, different vocations. And when we first began imagining this organization, there was a lot of coherence around not aiming at the elites. At that point, most interfaith engagement on an international level was with religious and scholarly elites. We said, let’s work in the grassroots, because there’s enormous potential for change. And, not incidentally, there are a lot of women in leadership roles in the grassroots. And if you get up to those religious and scholarly elites, there weren’t very many women at that point. Sadly, in some of those circles, there still aren’t.

When we brought people together, another point of coherence, pretty much all around the world, people said, we want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We want to belong to something global. But we don’t want a global headquarters bossing us around. Because we know better than anyone else what the work is to do here, we know what can work, what can’t. Yes, we have lots to learn. And we’re open to learning. But we want to be able to lead our own effort here.

So the organizational structure we came up with, we developed a local unit of interfaith organizing, called a cooperation circle. Cooperation because each group would be a unit of interfaith cooperation. A circle because you are peers when you’re sitting in a circle. We wanted it to be easy to create a cooperation circle. As we imagined, the minimum would be seven people, there would be no maximum, it could be as big as someone wanted to. When I was there, the biggest one had over 200,000 members. But there were a lot that were seven or 10, or 12. But in those seven people, there had to be at least three different religions, spiritual expressions, indigenous traditions, represented

By the way, that little list religions, spiritual expressions, indigenous traditions, came out of our consultations. There were lots of spiritual movements that didn’t consider themselves religions. And a lot of indigenous people who said, we’re not a religion, and we aren’t a spiritual tradition, we have our own cosmic vision. So we tried to make a door big enough that anyone could walk through it. And these local units, according to the charter, had the right to organize around any issue at any scale, and that any manner they chose, as long as it was consistent with the core vision and principles of the organization. What that created was an amazing energy by people who some existing organizations just said, “Wow, we can join and be part of a global network. Other places, there’s nothing like this going on. We’re going to make a group and see what can happen.”

If I could give one example of the latter that to this day inspires me: There was a woman in the Philippines named Marites Guingona Africa, who heard about this effort, and said, I would like to be part of it. I want to create one of these cooperation circles. And then all of a sudden, she hit a brick wall, because as a Roman Catholic in a Catholic majority country, she realized she did not know anyone who wasn’t Catholic.

So then what? This dates it when she got the yellow pages, started looking through the Yellow Pages for Metro Manila, looking for other religious communities and started a personal outreach, until she found a group of people from different traditions who were open to getting together and learning. And they first decided, if we’re going to be a force for peace out in the world, we need to do our own inner work. So they started doing that in an interfaith context, learning about the teachings and practice from different traditions that predispose people to be peaceful.

When other people started hearing about that, they said, Gosh, could you help us with that? And so they started doing workshops. And then they said, Well, this is pretty good. But we live in a very challenging city with lots of people in desperate problems. What if we really tested ourselves and tried to put this to work? And they chose one of the poorest and most violent communities in western Manila, to begin to get to know, to see what might be possible. And they went in and would have meetings with different community leaders. And sometimes during the meetings, everyone would have to hit the floor because of the gunfire around.

But, the people, they met with many of them said, yes, we want something like this. So local leaders came together and they started working together, started addressing some fundamental shared community needs. And eventually, the government got wind of this. One of the things that this community didn’t have was any kind of a grocery store. So they started on a small scale, putting together a little commodities place, and the government got wind of it, and gave them a commitment for three years with each year an evaluation, and clear goals they would need to make. They met the first year’s goal in six months.

It grew like that. And this group, the Peacemakers Circle, eventually was doing peacebuilding workshops all over the Philippines. And, as is often the case, when you are doing peace work in conflicted communities, and the communities start being less conflicted and less violent, it’s easier to turn to economic development to the well-being of the members in a proactive way, rather than a reactive way.

And it was all because one woman said, I’d like to do something, and was brave enough to admit what she didn’t know, to reach out in good faith. I’m sure she had to, being in a country where her religion dominated. I had to so many times, as I traveled as a white Christian male in a world where if you were a white Christian male, most doors would open to you. And the image was not necessarily a positive one. And again, and again and again, all over the world, I would begin remarks by acknowledging the harm done by people who looked like me, and apologize for that. And say, I want you to know that there are a lot of people who look like me, a lot of people who look like you and look like everyone else in the world, who believe it’s time to stop that way of being and to come together as one humanity and see what we can do together. But I come not bearing truth, I come bearing a deep respect for you as who you are, and questions about what you see as possible and how we might work together.

Beth Tener

Wow, Charles, I just want to honor that way of acknowledging and showing up. And I’m sure it’s not something that people saw often, and probably set a different tone from the very beginning of each meeting.

Charles Gibbs

Well, I think you’re probably right, on both counts. I know, it opened people’s hearts, because they really weren’t used to white Christian male from the outside coming in that way.

Beth Tener

I’ve been thinking about bringing more imagination to the social change sphere and the work we’re doing. We all know this white supremacy, European kind of colonizing top down “we have answers for you.” It’s almost like we unpack each part of that. If we’ve been showing up in a supremacist way coming in from the outside, the opposite of that is show up with humility, right? We show up talking, how do I show up listening. We show up with answers, how do I show up asking questions.

I love the way that story also just returned back to this. The way that it’s a seed – like you walking up to the bishop saying, I want to help. And just that impulse of one person, that it does start in the grass, it starts on the soil, it starts with a seed, and what can actually grow from that. It’s just that we need eyes to see that that’s how life changes.

Charles Gibbs

For me, a beginning to be able to do that was to recognize that I come from a particular place. I grew up in a particular context that shaped me. And I can’t not be that, I can’t not see from that place. But what I can do, hopefully, is recognize that the same thing could be said for people anywhere in the world. And part of what I need is to not lead with my context as if it’s the most important thing, but to invite deeper engagement with the context of other people.

Beth Tener

Beautiful and I think we’ll be coming to a close. And, Charles, if you could tell us, share a little about your work and the current things you’re working on or ways people can, if they’d like to learn more about your wisdom and what you’re currently doing. Anything you’d like people to be aware of, or how to find you?

Charles Gibbs

I have a website that I need to reengage with, but it’s RevCharlesGibbs.net. And it has some of my writings on it. Some readings, some of the workshop sorts of things I offer. And hopefully in the next, within the next year, but maybe less a new book of poetry. My work with Catalyst for Peace for six years, was a senior partner and poet in residence. In URI, I got to work all over the world, very broad, but it made it hard to go deep in any particular place. And with Catalyst for Peace, I’ve had the great privilege of going deep in Sierra Leone. I actually just returned yesterday from a trip there. So even though I retired a second time from Catalyst for Peace last October, I’ve been reengaged. And now my title is senior partner and in Sierra Leone, the poet in residence was added back.

To see a country that’s emerged from civil war, the birth of a peace mother’s movement that is helping to transform the country, moving into community-centered economic development, Ebola hit and knocked the country for a loop, coming out of that a belief, the people need to claim their futures, not an outside aid organization. So they developed a people’s planning process. And this gathering, I was just there for, had sitting in the same room, the Vice President of the country, and people from local villages sharing a vision for how Sierra Leone can lead the world in a process where people from local villages form their visions, and those cascade up to create a national development project. And to see the Vice President listening attentively to the people of the country talking about what they’re doing. And to see the people of the country feel validated by having the Vice President, Cabinet ministers, people from Parliament, sitting there listening to them. It was absolutely electric. I’ll continue to be engaged with that, on some level.

I am at heart, a spiritual leader. And one of the joys I’ve had is exploring through a wonderful organization called ServiceSpace, a project called Sanctuary of the Heart, imagining how we might in the virtual space create a home of spiritual belonging for all people. We had a three month pilot that opened into a 21 day engagement, an interfaith compassion engagement, where each day people receive teachings about compassion from a different tradition and then engaged with other people around what that meant to them. And, I took off for Sierra Leone, so I need to reengage to see what next possibilities there might be there. But those things are at the heart of it for me, as well as being a grandparent to two 11-year-olds, parent to a 40-year-old and a 33-year-old and the son of a woman who just turned 100. I cherish family.

And I say both that I have my birth family. But then in that wonderful phrase from Sierra Leone, “wi na wan fambol, wi na wan fambol.” We are one family, and for me, that’s the global family. We share an identity as citizens of the earth. We all belong here, no matter where we are. And no matter how you understand it, whether it’s through a religious spiritual tradition, indigenous tradition, we are science, we come from the same place, we have the same origin. And I believe in my heart that if we can claim that we are citizens in the earth, and we all come from the same place as a common identity, we can look at our amazing diversity not as something to divide us, but as diverse expressions of an underlying unity, and ask how do we help that underlying unity, to manifest itself through this glorious diversity?

Beth Tener

That feels like a blessing to end on. Wow, so thank you very much, Charles. Incredibly, my heart is warm and buzzing, and so inspiring to hear what, the good that is already underway that has happened. And that has, you built the structures with people all around the world that’s holding us and only growing it further, right. Thank you so much.

Charles Gibbs

And thank you for showing up and doing this and all the other wonderful things you do to help bring people together and help everyone understand the light we can be.

Beth Tener

We have resources for you, so you can try this at home. In the show notes on the Kinshiphub.net website, we have links to Charles Gibbs’ website. There is an article called, “Opening the Dream,” which I highly recommend. It has more stories from Charles. It also has a section about those regional gatherings we talked about at the beginning, and the wonderful appreciative inquiry kind of positive questions they use to get people connecting with stories. I have stuff on there about appreciative inquiry if you want to learn more about that method, as well as links to some wonderful videos from United Religions Initiative, and Service Space that Charles mentioned towards the end.

The next episode is featuring Libby Hoffman from Catalyst for Peace. Charles mentioned that story right at the end. She is an incredible leader who has a new book out, The Answers Are There. We’re going get into conversation about how they did this work, accompanying people in centering the needs of people in communities and having them lead. I look forward to seeing you next time.