status games
Christ and the Rich Young Ruler by Heinrich Hofmann
I have arrived at the point that I don’t want to regularly attend churches or participate with meditation communities whose membership doesn’t meaningfully cross class lines. Diversity of all kinds makes groups more interesting and improves the quality of conversations, but class diversity feel like a particular linchpin. A few thoughts on why:
If you want to shake up your default assumptions of almost every area of daily life—what’s fun, what’s gross, what’s stressful, what’s impressive, what’s “on people’s minds,” what defines a good relationship, what makes a good parent, what makes a good party, how to handle hard feelings, where to go to lunch—I cannot recommend spending time in a mixed-class group of people highly enough.
The way our society is structured and reproduced, it can be easy to have nothing more than transactional conversations with people outside of our own socioeconomic class. But precisely because of this, a church or spiritual community that is not swimming against the stream of social stratification is not making a fundamental challenge to dominant culture, despite any self-conception to the contrary. We are not really transforming ourselves or the world if we are not changing the status games we play.
When you are in mixed status groups, how to give becomes much more obvious and natural. Affluent people are often quite financially generous with people they know. Folks who aren’t working for any number of reasons often give time freely to their friends. Resources can really move when people who have extra are in community with people who don’t.
Class lines are hard to cross and, so when you make it a point to reach out and warmly welcome people of diverse class backgrounds, it becomes easier to create a more diverse community along other dimensions like race, disability and gender identity.
I fully understand that many people consider all of the above political, not spiritual, and have heard a thousand versions of “our group is just focused on the teachings” or “the tradition” or the “inner life” and that politics is a separate domain. In the next breath, folks making these arguments will affirm that spiritual practice disconnected from the bare facts of daily life is empty practice. But what those “bare facts” are is strongly determined by your social position. And doing nothing to challenge that position will keep you firmly lodged in old perspectives and assumptions no matter how many hours you spend on your knees on or a cushion.
A key reason I was originally drawn to spiritual life was that the political organizers I encountered seemed bad at relationships and conflict and love. I also become disenchanted by “tradition only” communities after repeatedly seeing folks use practice to free themselves up to become more beautiful and successful completely in line with dominant culture. Genuine transformation has to flow in all directions, including the personal and the social. Otherwise you just get stuck.
