to leave community organizing for a reason I might never
have acknowledged had I not been thin-skinned and
burned-out: as an organizer, I was trying to take people to a
place where I had never been myself-a place called
community. If I wanted to do community-related work with
integrity, I needed a deeper immersion in community than I
had experienced to that point.
I am white, middle-class, and male-not exactly a leading
candidate for a communal life. People like me are raised to
live autonomously, not interdependently. I had been trained
to compete and win, and I had developed a taste for the
prizes. But something in me yearned to experience
communion, not competition, and that something might
never have made itself known had burnout not forced me to
seek another way.
So I took a yearlong sabbatical from my work in
Washington and went to a place called Pendle Hill outside
of Philadelphia. Founded in 1930, Pendle Hill is a Quaker
living-and-learning community of some seventy people
whose mission is to offer education about the inner journey,
nonviolent social change, and the connection between the
two. It is a real-time experiment in Quaker faith and practice
where residents move through a daily round of communal
life: worshiping in silence each morning; sharing three
meals a day; engaging in study, physical work, decision
making, and social outreach. It is a commune, an ashram, a
monastery, a zendo, a kibbutz-whatever one calls it, Pendle
Hill was a life unlike anything I had ever known.'