Empowerment and Affirmation... and Community

Recently I was invited to present at the leadership conference that my religious community hosts. It's geared towards young woman who attend high schools that our sisters minister at or that are sponsored by the province. My topic? Empowerment: Recognizing and Calling Out the Gifts of Others. It includes with an affirmation ritual, where the participants identify each other's gifts or areas of growth.

Around the time I was working on the PowerPoint and content for the talk, I was reading Jean Vanier's Community and Growth. Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, an international community that includes the severely handicapped. They take care of their needs, but more importantly, they form relationships and a kind of family with them. Vanier writes both beautifully and practically about life in community.

When I read his sections about using our gifts in community, I was struck by how important individual gifts are to a healthy community life. His perspective shaped my talk; in fact, the importance of individual gifts in community is one of my main ideas.

I'd like to present some of Vanier's thoughts, which I'm using in the presentation. They're lovely and reflective.

• About competition: If a prize is offered to the first child in a group of Canadian Native Americans who can answer a question, they will all work together and shout it out at in unison. The reason? If only one wins, they're separated from their community. The community chooses to stay together.
• On the way to love people: To love people is to recognize their gifts and help them to use them fully 
• Community is like a garden: the living things in the garden give each other life, like in community
• Community is like an orchestra: Each instrument makes beautiful music alone but better music together. 
• Everyone will find their place in community according to their gifts. They make each person unique and neccesary.
• Talents vs. gifts: Talents are skills that make an individual stand out, and often only help that individual. A gift can be a quality, such as compassion or being welcoming, and aren't always linked to a function. Gifts are given freely to build up community and the members in it. Talents can become gifts if they're used this way. 
• When we know that we are loved and accepted in community, we are free to be ourselves and to offer our gifts. 
• When people are using their gifts, it is important that the community prays for them to be more open to inspiration and more of an instrument of God. It's important, too, that the community welcomes these gifts with love and gratitude. We participate in each other's gifts.
• Christian communities aren't places to escape reality. They are places of resource, to help people grow towards freedom, so they can love as Jesus loved them.