Joy Mulumba Blog

By the term “over” I’m actually thinking of the mathematical symbol “>”, and despite the fact these words have lots of resonance in Christian cosmology, I’m hoping they would carry over in corporate, nonprofit, educational, healthcare and etc. milieus.

Rather than establish their meanings in Christian cosmology (and I’m not confident that I can do justice to all of the nuances in the context of this post), I will just present 2 scenarios from the corporate and nonprofit milieus to illustrate the meanings I want to assign to communion and creation today.

Corporate scenario: A project manager presents to the engineers on his team the new product they will be working on for the next year. His flat tone, tired eyes, and lack of gestures is a contrast to his warm voice, intense gaze when he’s playing basketball and while these behavioral signals are noticed, they are overlooked in the interests of moving the project one step at a time. The project manager quits the company halfway through the project without any clear explanation from the upper management and the team speculates using both his behaviors and expertise to attempt to make sense of it.

Nonprofit scenario: The director of a black led nonprofit in a poor neighborhood has secured a partnership with a foundation to provide ongoing mentoring to young, black women in the field of robotics and coding. During her presentation to the board, her flat tone, tired eyes and lack of gestures are a contrast to her warm voice, playful demeanor they have witnessed when working with the young, black women. The board overlooks these behavioral signals in the interest of the exciting new project. The director ends up leaving the organization one year into this new program and everyone speculates about her behavior and expertise to make sense of it.

With these 2 scenarios, you can easily extrapolate similar scenarios with a nursing supervisor in a cardiac unit and a principal in charter school. The intention here isn’t to be exhaustive in naming all of the dynamics: personal, professional, political, economic and social dynamics that would lead to these types of exits, and instead to focus on the tension between communion and creation in the workplace.

At this juncture, I will use here the cringe word ‘product’ and mean any tangible, useful service or item any institution or individual creates and ‘communion’ to mean relationship that are leave lasting impressions in the heart or mind of anyone.

The pattern that I have noticed in those aforementioned settings in which I have been is that the product is more often than not centered in lieu of communion. On surface, it does make sense for a product to be pursued more than communion more often than not, it’s just that lasting product is impossible outside of communion.

This principle is rather obvious in all caregiving activities involving the vulnerable among us where the quality of the interaction is intrinsically expected rather than a surplus. This expectation isn’t spread to the rest of other industries that are not directly human facing, but the humans involved in those other industries did spend the first years of their lives seeking to be known, felt and seen by the adults in their lives.

I will end here by stating that this broad brush about how communion being greater than creation in any setting is not about shaming or dismissing the humans involved in making the computer, chair, table I’m using to type these words or even communicate with the entire world just via this medium. It’s rather to point that essentials should remain essentials as we keep seeking the next thing whether you are creating or communing.