"In a world where most people do a job not only unsatisfactory but also deeply stressful, with all its pressures, in a world where nothing is rarer than something that looks like a community, we unload all our needs on a report or expect that they are met by the family. And then we wonder if the relationship and the family come apart under so much weight (...) For tens of thousands of years no family has ever been self-sufficient. Each family had a functional unit, part of a larger functional unit that was the community - the tribe or the village. The tribes and villages were self-sufficient, not the family. And not just all worked together, but played, prayed together, so that the weight of the report, the significance was not confined to the family, especially a romantic relationship, but it was spread across the whole community. Until the Industrial Revolution, the family has always existed in that context. "
These words were written J. Hillman (one of the greatest living psychotherapists) and M. Ventura (writer, journalist) in their book interview in 1992 "One hundred years of psychoanalysis and the world goes ... getting worse. "
But this was also the proper sense of the collective work in Arkeon. What Peter sums up very well in his last beautiful post when he says: " But what made this job special for me was the fact that people and families are allowed to share with the others present that this fragility and beauty. Recognizing this as a gift. And an even greater gift, to share it. So the ceremonies. That for couples to whisper, say, at times shouting in tears, the love in public, winning a natural and modest embarrassment, had not the price. And what about those kids get up to heaven, in gratitude for life, to God and our families are back to Him? "
Arkeon was above all - at least for me - that space of intimacy between the people who created a community of people, but not blood. And I saw many families, married couples and parents and children and grandparents, who in that space could meet other people like them who through their own problems, sometimes showing them a chance to respond differently. A pedagogy through which people learned empathy for the language of love and life, as well as the children learn the language of words and share a desire for imitation.
At this I thought a few weeks attending the wedding of a young cousin. After a very simple and very beautiful ceremony, the priest called upon the altar of the four parents of the couple, explaining that the marriage was celebrated also thanks to them and asking them to leave their message to the newlyweds. Nobody expected it, least of all parents. The two mothers, as often happens, have accepted the challenge and were allowed to open one's heart with a few simple words of hope and responsibility, "we started 40 years ago ... now it's up to you." The fathers, as often happens, they have instead hidden in the silence his feelings, holding back from embarrassment.
Many have criticized the priest, so you should not embarrass the people ... and perhaps they also are right. But from my side I heard it differently. I heard that the priest had asked parents not to look at crowd the benches, but their children on the altar, to examine not the opinion of the people but the ingenuity of their children and to expose himself for some and for others, to make the community around them, to declare that two spouses do not but they are just one link in a long chain, which transcends his own family.
I feel sorry for the silence of those fathers who have not found a way to speak either for themselves or their children.
And I felt the destruction of the experience of seminars Arkeon, raw and imperfect as they were, as an affront to life and its possibilities.
In recent years I have often wondered how it is possible that people who knew all this could have ... Forgotten? These days I spoke with a dear friend of long standing that regardless of myself and other paths, she came to Arkeon years ago, with a teacher different from mine, I am fascinated by this experience. And after the events occurred, without denying anything of what was done, however, has developed a position that I think I can define it more bitter criticism. Bitter not because of the nature of work, as well as for the contradictions highlighted by his master in its own way of behaving in relationships. After a long telephone call to its final sentence was "... and these were people who had to take us somewhere?".
What I said, and I always thought, is that no one took anyone anywhere, but simply that everyone was using that experience to be on its way. And, indeed, precisely "the inadequacy" of some teachers - like his - were proof that the results were the fruits of labor of the students, not masters. Taking the phrase of the Gospel is still cited in the post of Peter: "Their faith saved them ...." In the seminars called "custody" and even if you said it was the award to the teacher, this was not the instrument ... the expectation being true to life. This does not mean that the teachers did not have a role ... but means that the fruits or absence of fruits for each descended upon himself by his own choice and that the shared experience became that opportunity that each gave to himself and to others, being able to transcend their personal history, they can decide whether to live a life shadow of its heritage and its justifications or live in the light of a future possibility to build, where the past is not a chain but the experience through which I made ready for tomorrow.
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