Our setting: We meet monthly in a mutual accountability group. We are on Zoom across four time zones. We’ve been meeting for about a decade now, including at a common geographical space when circumstances allow.
Nancy: … What do you need?
Viv: I just need to feel fulfilled. How that happens can change from day to day and moment to moment. I have no outcome in mind except to grow my edges.
Lola: What does “grow [your] edges mean”?
Viv: Eating a new pastry. Using a bath bomb. Looking at the sky. Creating. I’ve made art in my journal before but not made art of my journal before, particularly about spiritual accountability.
Lola: Why spiritual accountability?
Viv: It has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have something to offer and to learn. Lola’s belief that humanity needs to mature is linked to it. I believe it can help make the leap to a bigger perspective, a broadening of boundaries. For me, moving from a mindset of resource extraction – like seeing a cow and thinking hamburger – to a kindredness – one that sees raven in a congregation of which I am a member and redwoods as tree people…
The process we use is based on one adapted by Marcelle Martin and described in her book A Guide to Faithfulness Groups. It involves meeting regularly, for instance monthly, over time with a small, consistent group of people. The person who is focus – me in the above excerpt – rotates among the group members from meeting to meeting.
We open with a short check-in, move into an opening period of quiet centering, listen to the focus person tell of their current area of concern for 15 minutes, ask and answer any questions of simple factual clarification about what the focus person shared, and, following another brief period of quiet reflection, engage a period of 35 minutes of group members asking evoking questions and related responses from the focus person. The excerpt above is from a portion of that 35 minute time. Finally, we self-reflect on our time together to ask such things as, “Were we attentive to the focus person? To their best self? To that which is greater than us?”
This process offers us accompaniment, a welcome feeling when seeking to live outside of dominant society’s constraints. It, also, holds us accountable to that to which we wish to be faithful and committed.
In the excerpt above, for example, I was invited to share a substantive shift in how I have been living – from a more goal-oriented, project basis to one that attunes more wholly to life around me and experiences myself as a part of that flow. In the process, I received a greater awareness of this strange, new, more frequent sense of communion and, in trying to offer others a glimpse into that experience, came to acknowledge, accept, and honor it a bit more fully myself.
mystical friend 