A Goodbye Message from Rachel Lyons
"You all have given me wisdom that I carry with me and treasure."
In May we said goodbye to our Program Director of the last three years, Rachel Lyons. Read her message to participants, partner agencies, and the entire Darst Center community below.
One of the activities we facilitate here at the Darst Center is called What’s My Role? It invites each participant on a retreat or a workshop to contemplate what roles they play in the collective work of equity, justice, liberation, and solidarity. Created by Deepa Iyer, the roles form a social change ecosystem that honors these different parts as interdependent, complementary, necessary. I had the privilege of meeting Deepa Iyer in 2018 at a Facing Race conference in Detroit, MI. Her evolving ecosystem and helpful reflection questions frame this shared work of justice in sustainable and relatable ways. Roles specified include weavers, healers, disruptors, experimenters, visionaries, and guides. She originally spoke about this ecosystem as a way to get off of the seesaw of outrage and numbness. Does one person do all of the roles? No, at least not well and not for very long. Does one person stay in a role forever? No, we all shift and grow and stretch ourselves over time. Can we fail within our supposed role? Absolutely! And then we can learn from our mistakes and course-correct, asking for help and guidance along the way. It’s a beautiful and abundant perspective to have in spaces where we are working to instill in young people and people of all ages that their role is important and has an impact. And that we as individuals aren’t here to do it all: we are here to do our role, and to do it with intention, dedication, and love.
As I wrap up over three years of work at the Darst Center this month, I come back to this image of ecosystem and evolving roles. I witnessed many curious students and retreat participants over these years exemplify various roles, like a visionary student from Loras College who saw a world without food deserts, a disrupter student from Totino-Grace who called people in around gender justice, storytellers from Santa Clara University, frontline responders from Christian Brothers High School, weavers from the 8th grade class at Catherine Cook School, and builders working for racial justice at Roncalli Newman Parish. I caught glimpses of bold dreams, seeds of courageous ideas, and deeply vulnerable reckonings of what our world is and what it can be. I have also mentored staff members and journeyed alongside them as they found their roles and grew in commitment to their part of this work. I shared in their moments of fumbling, distraction, and doubt, and I shared my own moments in those rough spots, too. As I move on from the Darst Center, I know no one is called to do their role perfectly, including me. We are called to love ourselves, embrace our role, affirm others in their roles, and get to work.
To each of you I have met during my time with the Darst Center: thank you for embodying the sacred values of human dignity, love, hospitality, justice, and freedom. From partner agencies here in Chicago to teachers and staff from all over who bring students to the Darst Center, . Let these words of a prayer from Rev. M. Barclay wash over us and call us to remember that “we are in this together, even when we don’t act like it.”
Because individualism is destructive
Individualism is destructive.
Send greed and selfishness away.
That learned refusal to acknowledge
your own need for help -
let it be gone as well.
When possible,
counter all impulses towards privatized survival
with acts of love - collective and expansive -
with caring for others and accepting care.
Remember we need each other.
Remember the needs of your neighbors (literal and metaphorical).
Remember the vulnerable.
Remember, we are in this together, even when we don't act like it.
People depend on your choices -
you depend on the choices of others.
This, a Sacred and terrible truth woven into our flesh.
So let this time be an opening
to all the sources of connection we have lost in this era of
pushing-down,
pushing-through,
pushing-away,
and pushing-the-pace.
Let all that is soft, all that is slow, all that is gentle,
all that is kind, all that is care-ful,
be welcome home in each of us.
We have such creative, powerful, generous and brave capacities within us.
We can choose to do things differently.