Searching For The Falconer
This is an essay I won an award for 25 years ago. I have been looking at the poem which it is based on today and will have more to say about that in the future.
SEARCHING FOR THE FALCONER
By Christie Shannon
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Yeats, writing a hundred years ago, describes the essence of American life today. In a time of unparalleled economic growth, amidst such luxury and comfort as no other age has known, we look desperately for leaders. Prophets or presidents or any voice loud enough to be heard: we long for a falconer to define our direction and give order to our flight. It is, however, not leaders that we need, but citizens.
To most of us today, citizenship is no more than a box to be checked on legal forms. This passive concept of citizenship has little power to offer our nation and less to offer our lives. But in fact, the role of citizenship can be active and strong, rich with power and possibilities, bringing focus to our lives and hope to our nation. But to claim the gifts of healthy citizenship, we must learn them through community.
A small group of people were fleeing from their country which was at war. Among their number was a woman with a child. The people took turns carrying the baby. Several days into their grueling journey, an old man collapsed. He said he was too exhausted to continue and pleaded to be left behind. The group faced the harsh reality that they had to leave him, and walked on. Suddenly the young mother walked back to the old man. She bent over him, placed the child in his arms and said, “its your turn to carry the baby.” She walked away.
The mother did not look back.
The old man looked at the infant. Laboriously he got up, clutching the child, and followed the group to freedom.
This is the power of community. Only when necessity requires us to give to others are we in a position to receive those gifts which we most need ourselves. Our search to fix what is wrong in our lives will end not by building stronger defenses around what is ours, but by breaking those defenses down and learning not to be alone.
George Gallup, at Princeton Research Center, identifies “a sense of community” as one of the greatest needs of contemporary Americans. This doesn’t mean more clubs, more meetings, more committees. It doesn’t mean quiet streets with well kept lawns. Community is not a geographical entity or a gathering of people for a common cause. True community is about relationship and vulnerability. It is about knowing people on a personal level. It is about needing and being needed. It is about accepting responsibility for lives other than our own. These are not experiences our culture easily provides.
As families weaken and mobility increases, more of us grow up never having experienced the most basic community of all – family. Without this base experience, we not only grow without learning the skills of healthy citizenship which only community can teach, we also grow without knowing that this absence is the source of the emptiness we feel at the core of our lives.
With lives saturated by a media designed to entertain and not to inform, we are taught to live in fear of our neighbors and to see others as enemies. I recently sat in a classroom and watched a video about self-defense. The video instructed women to avoid contact with strangers at all costs. We were informed that if a man approached us and asked us the time, we were to throw up our hands, jump back and scream, “Stop! Don’t come any closer! Get away from me!” So completely have we internalized the rhetoric of fear that in a class of twenty-six college students, only two of us noticed anything unhealthy about this approach.
America has gained great strength from the power of a consumer economy. It is to this economy’s advantage to emphasize individualism. Americans are urged to think only of themselves. This year’s Christmas ads encourage us to, “Buy a gift, Get a gift!” We are pushed to believe that buying ourselves a new dress qualifies as a charitable act, because our local super-store donates “a percentage of every purchase!” to charity. The message is as clear as it is seductive: The only thing that ought to cost you anything is the indulgence of your desires.
Even as it encourages individualism in consumers, business – driven by maximizing prophets through uniformity – offers us lives in which individuals are irrelevant to our economy. Personality is driven out of the market place, and more of us spend our lives in jobs which require bodies but not people. As supermarket chains replace the neighborhood ma and pop grocery, Ma and Pop, who knew their customers by name and tailored their business to the needs of their neighbors, are replaced by anyone who can wear a uniform. The personality of workers becomes so irrelevant that we are annoyed when the lady at the check-out counter presumes to become more than an extension of her cash register, and comments on our purchases or her grandson’s soccer game.
This same uniformity, encouraging mass production, leaves us divorced from the source of our products. Ground beef wrapped in cellophane speaks nothing of a fifty year old farmer with leathered hands, up all night, laboring to save a sick cow. It speaks nothing of human or animal, removing from our lives the awareness of connectedness, the bond of need which only gift and sacrifice can build.
We learn to be citizens by living in community. There we must think beyond our own desires. But community has a price, and it is a price we are reluctant to pay.
The destruction of community has been at our own hands…As much as we yearn for Community, we yearn even more for the social and economic prizes individual mobility can bring.
So how do we teach a nation the skills of community? How do we teach citizenship as a virtue, a responsibility and a gift? We long for more compassion and less loneliness. We pray for more respect and less violence. But the river of our culture teaches individualism and fear and we are swept away in a current so strong that we cannot conceive of fighting it, so fast that we haven’t time to try. The task overwhelms us. But it is possible and it is happening right now in quiet corners of our country. We will improve the health of citizenship by allowing people to experience healthy community on a local, personal level. This change does not rely upon national movements, but local ones.
Western culture is too comfortable with itself to change overnight. It is more realistic to think about the spiritual needs of family and self as a starting point for social transformation than to begin thinking we can change Hollywood.
A town, a school, a block, a classroom: people learn community in small, personal places. This is about living with relationship and vulnerability, where people can learn the power of knowing other people, relying on other people and being responsible for other people.
Any of us can create community in our lives. Families living on the same block could gather once a week for dinner, alternating who provides the meal. Academic departments could require majors to meet twice weekly, studying together and tutoring one another. Extended family could share the responsibility of caring for children. Individuals could commit to staying in a marriage, a neighborhood, a church and working to improve. A volunteer for Big Brothers could be involved in a child’s family not just for a season but for life.
We are spinning out of control, struggling to find a center that will hold our lives together. We think we need leaders. No, we need citizens. We think we need revolutions. No, we need community.
The most radical political act we can do is to create true community, a place clearly visible to the world, a place in which people honor their enemies, tell the truth, keep their promises, suffer for justice and thereby testify to the amazing creative power of community.
Citizens are people who know others on a personal level, form relationships in which they need and are needed, and take responsibility for lives other than their own. They are the people who possess the only tool powerful enough to heal us. We learn to be citizens by living in community. America’s healing will begin as each of us chooses life in community, community in its ordinary, undramatic, local manifestations.
It is not leaders who will save us. It is not prophets or presidents, production or politics. It is citizens, shaped by the experience of community, who will be our falconer. It is citizens who will define the direction of our lives and give order to our nation’s flight. It is citizen. It is possible.