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By Iris/Sam Eichinger
This year’s Mahle Lecture began a two year series that Wesley Center will be doing with Interfaith Action of Greater Saint Paul. The theme this year was “Just Resilience: How to Stay in the Struggle for the Long Haul.” This partnership was started with Interfaith Action’s Project Home, a family shelter, was moved to the old location of a hotel close to Hamline University. With the amazing sponsorship of the Mahle family we were able to bring in guests from Interfaith Action to talk about how faith communities can use their storytelling to stay resilient in their good works.
Hamline’s Multifaith Alliance (MFA) spent this year working with Project Home to design their multifaith room, which will include a tapestry painted by the students. The tapestry depicts a tree with long branches and leaves with positive messages. The essential premise of this project is that the tree represents a shelter. MFA chose to not depict faces so the space could be welcoming for people of all faiths, but those who want to can imagine the people and animals that take shelter under the shade. The leaves were added on after the fact. They were cut out of green fabric and during the Mahle Lecture guests were given a chance to write positive messages and affirmations on them with markers. After the event, the leaves were sewn onto the canvas, completing the tapestry.
After dinner, Reverend Rachel McIver Morey and Sara Liegl from Interfaith Action gave speeches. Rachel introduced the idea of storytelling and how it related to resilience. Rachel noted three types of family stories: inclining, declining and oscillating. Inclining stories show a family that rises in success with every generation, declining is the opposite, and oscillating stories go up and down. In inclining family stories there is no room for normal failures and in declining family stories there is no room for success. This meant that people with oscillating family stories scored highest when tested on resilient traits.
Sara Liegl then told the story of Project Home and its history as a system that allowed families to find shelter in houses of worship, from being located at Saint Kate’s to their newest location in Bandana Square. She also talked about how the population of families needing shelters rose and fell during that time and how they expected it to grow significantly because of the effects of Operation Metro Surge. Rachel ended the speech by noting how the story of Project Home was oscillating and how progress that matters is long term.
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