Peter CostelloAre We Together? Community Life in Action by David Gibson (Cluain Mhuire Press, €20.50 / $27.50 from Amazon.com)
Like a marriage, life in a religious community can be fraught and difficult at times. But as with most couples, members of religious communities learn to live through the difficult moments to find times of positivity.
How to do this is what is addressed by David Gibson is his book, which his own community the Irish Christian Brothers has published. For the present he a member of the of Congregation Leadership Team of the Christian Brothers in Rome, but behind this posting lies years of experience as a psychotherapist, teacher and workshop leader in countries around the world.
His specialism is Transaction Analysis. Many readers may recall the popular best seller by Eric Berne from the 1960s, Games People Play. This was a popularisation of the ideas of TA, and proved very influential. He had been a psychoanalyst but became disenchanted, as many do, with the demands of the Freudian system. He outlined his ideas in a more technical book Transactional Analysis and Psychotherapy in 1961 as an alternative, and from this derived his bestseller in 1964.
Here Gibson explains the approach very clearly in his book. He is concerned with the dynamics of communities and groups – so what is said here applies in ways walks of life. In an office there are fraught inter-relations too, but workers can go home at the end of the day. Families and communities have to learn to life together.
Purpose
It might seem to some that this book allows little room for religion in a religious community. But this would be to misunderstand its purpose. In the concluding chapters ‘TA and Spirituality’ and ‘A Case Study’ he demonstrates exactly how the religious community can benefit by applying the technique, which will enable to them to realise their potential.
The community or any group needs to address the issues of the individuals before it can realise and release its own full creativity. We all follow a life script, Berne suggests, some confusing and unhealthy, derived from choices in childhood; others liberating and creative, the result of growth and change.
Unlike Berne’s best seller, though, this is intended as a work book, to enable the community to come to terms with the system.
Impressive insights
All through the book there are impressive insights into those constraints that bind us all from communicating and cooperating with others. By realising the existence of these constraints a religious community is on the way to making its whole.
“Are we together?” is the question David Gibson poses. All too often we are not. But we can be. And as he realises that many communities of religious are now an ageing community, the implication is that it is never too late to start.
Of all the many psychological books that have come our way for review, this is one of the most impressive. It cannot be too highly recommended.