Reverend Barbara Child’s Reflections from Chautauqua, Summer 2023
Chautauqua Institution is a not-for-profit, 750-acre community on Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State, where approximately 7,500 persons are in residence on any day during a nine-week season, and a total of more than 100,000 attend scheduled public events.
Some folks here will remember that much of what I had to say about summer at Chautauqua last year was about the knife attack on Salman Rushdie and its effects on the Chautauqua community. Thank goodness it is possible this summer to focus on other things.
One of the things I am happily focused on as I write from Chautauqua in late July is the program here called Chautauqua Dialogues. Again this year I am a facilitator in this program. We invite anyone who is interested to come to a drop-in group at any of the well publicized times and places around the grounds to engage in conversation about the ideas that have especially resonated with them in any of the presentations they have attended so far during that week. We facilitators are keen on having people share and listen and respond without upstaging anybody or putting anybody down. It’s all about engaging respectfully with other people’s ideas, however much they may differ from one’s own. But there is another truth: In a Chautauqua Dialogue circle, personal experience gets short shrift.
I love imposing the discipline on myself that the Chautauqua Dialogues program requires – and I am increasingly aware of how different its philosophy and focus are from those of the small group programs at UUCB that I have known and loved for a long time – the Writing as a Spiritual Practice group that I led through more than 80 sessions and the Chalice Circles program that I serve as ministerial consultant to the Executive Team. Personal experience – reflecting on it, sharing it, learning from it—is the heart and soul of both of these programs.
After last summer I went to the UUCB pulpit to share my reflections on the attack on Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua in August. Now I am looking forward to returning to that pulpit August 27 to share much happier reflections about what I learned on my summer vacation this year at Chautauqua.
Rev. Barbara Child
revbchild@aol.com
