Let’s be honest: We suck at community. Everybody wants it, and it seems only the lucky find it. If you do find it, the smallest conflict seems to blow it up. You can’t buy it, and you can’t get it delivered. It requires showing up. It’s not convenient. It is risky. Not only are we exhausted from loneliness and disconnection, but our society and democracy is falling apart as a result of our inability to do community. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way! This is a workshop that Pastor Marisa of Florence Congregational has been developing out of her years of experience as an activist, community organizer, and pastor. We’ll examine the invisible, structural reasons people find it so hard to meaningfully connect these days, and we’ll examine how popular self-help rhetoric actually undermines our attempts to form relationships. Then we’ll explore some practical opportunities to reclaim our human community, despite it all! The work of making and maintaining community isn’t complicated, but it does require building a tolerance for awkwardness and some gentle, honest self-understanding. 

You can do it. We can do it together. Come for a no-nonsense, humorous approach to becoming a community of rich and resilient connections. 

This is part of Florence Congregational’s Practical Spirituality workshop series, which is designed to offer useful and relevant spiritual practices regardless of one’s beliefs or affiliations. 

Suggested donation of $45-75, NOTAFLOF. It costs roughly $800 in labor and facilities expenses to present this workshop, so your donation above that makes it possible to continue developing new programming like this.