Cornerstone Community
Where Community is the Heart of Recovery

 

 

Tom Copp's talk at our Open House, May 2008:

Good evening! I would like to welcome you to our home – the Cornerstone Community. And that’s what we are – a home, a family, a community. Officially in the literature we hand out we say that Cornerstone is a community of caring where formerly homeless men who are regaining their physical and mental health and who want to live drug and alcohol free can rest, heal and grow towards a positive future in the loving, accepting, patient environment of home. We hope that you will feel the welcome environment of our home tonight as much as we do.

Tonight I would like to briefly tell you why I believe we do what we do at Cornerstone. In my faith tradition (we are inter-faith here – we accept, respect and honor whatever faith tradition one is drawn to), we believe that every human being bears the image of the divine – no matter what they look like or have done – no matter how tarnished that image has become – all bear that image. In speaking to the UN recently about human rights, Pope Benedict referred to the “innate dignity of every human person.” One of my favorite authors, Rachel Remen, calls it the “unborn wholeness” within each of us.

This belief about each human has two meanings for us …

1. Every individual is of infinite worth, is a divine treasure/gift – and should be treated as such. And so we want to be especially attuned to those who have been ignored, overlooked, rejected, marginalized or oppressed by the dominant culture or society or family … Those Mother Teresa referred to as “Jesus in his distressing disguise.”

C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory): "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. … There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit…”

2. All of us are connected. Because we all bear this divine image, we have an intrinsic connection to each other – no matter how isolated we become or try to become, not matter how different we are, we are connected. Therefore, wholeness and healing comes through community where our intrinsic connection is nurtured – being with people who are working at loving and accepting one another, who are developing trust in each other, who are opening to each other, who try to share as deeply with each other as they can at the moment, who are willing to deal with conflict with each other in nonviolent ways, who will lovingly confront each other, who will celebrate each other, who enjoy each other (we do have a lot of fun around here), who respect and honor each other and work together. We believe in community and its power for healing and wholeness.

That’s why we strive to be a community not a just program. That’s why my preferred title is “community leader” rather than executive director (though we often have to refer to me as ED in our dealings with some funding sources). That’s why we refer to our live-in staff as “community builders.” That’s why we put much value on eating together – especially at our community night. That’s why we are not trying to be experts and consumers but instead fellow members of a healing community with different gifts. That’s why we say that relationships are our specific therapy, and listening is our core practice.

We believe that it is through nurturing this community/home environment that healing and growth happen. In speaking about how serving is different from fixing in her book My Grandfather’s Blessing, Rachel Remen writes the following:

“When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust in their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time.”

That’s the essence of what we try to do here at Cornerstone – to nurture each person’s unborn wholeness through the crucible of community and relationship.