Some of my older children have never been inside a physical bank. They know how to use ATM machines, write electronic checks, and carry smart cards, but think a trip to the bank is like a ride in a horse-drawn buggy.

Yesterday I walked to a branch bank, waited in line, and chatted with the teller as I deposited a check. I did that because it is still important to me to walk around the neighborhood now and then and talk to people. It isn't efficient, but it does provide the interface I need to feel part of the local community.

I learned to build community for myself by doing things like that as I grew up. That's what feels "normal" to me.

The patterns of community that feel comfortable to us, learned in early childhood, remain templates of "normal" for the rest of our lives. We do everything we can to replicate those patterns in our intimate and work relationships in the physical world and in cyberspace.

People in organizations that are morphing aren't simply resisting change when they try to retain the patterns of community that feel "normal" to them. They are acting out of lifelong behaviors that are almost as deep as life itself.

We are inundated this week with news of the deaths of important people - Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Victor Frankl, the author of "Man's Search for Meaning." We hear little of Victor Frankl, more of Mother Teresa, and endlessly of the Princess. These "death-events" are being transformed by the media -- including the Internet -- into archetypal "lives of the saints" that tell a deeper mythic truth about all of our lives: the roots of compassion are deep in our own suffering, and that compassion is the well-spring, pattern, and sustaining power of community as well.

Our patterns of community are learned first in our families of origin. Imprinting is deep, indelible. An Australian email friend recently wrote that we are imprinted in the first few years, spend the next twenty refining the pattern, the next twenty trying in vain to change it, and the next twenty coming to terms with it.

The Princess' brother noted that Diana's feelings of unworthiness, incubated in an environment of mutual loathing by her parents, were the source of her identification with and compassion for the destitute and outcast.

Winston Churchill too had a lonely childhood and fought off depression -- he called it his "black dog," that followed him at every turn -- by charging headlong into life whenever he suffered a major reverse. At every dark passage of his life, he responded with creativity and a burst of energy. The lifelong battle against depression for Churchill - as for Lincoln, who fought a similar battle - generated a capacity for stirring words that led a civilization through its darkest hours. Churchill and Lincoln were both speaking first to themselves when they articulated their visions on behalf of their nations, then to the world.

We always speak first to ourselves, and if we are lucky, our words define a possibility for others as well. Teachers teach what they need to learn, clergy preach what they need to hear. The root of compassion is the pain in our lives that enables us to connect with others at the deepest levels of our shared humanity.

My father died when I was two years old, but his absence was more present in our family than many who were still alive. When I look back at my careers of teaching literature and writing, then serving as an Episcopal priest for sixteen years, now writing, speaking and consulting, I know that all my words were and are an effort to fill the resounding silence of his absence with symbols of possibility and promise. My passion to create meaning is an antidote to the threat of meaninglessness lurking always in the shadows, ready to spring.

I have seen as a consultant that a corporate culture usually issues directly from the personality of the CEO. The dynamics inside the organization often replicate the dynamics of the CEO's family of origin. The best leaders understand this and allow their weaknesses to become their strengths by compensating for the blind spots that are part of their heritage.

When CEOs describe the landscape seen from their desks, they are always describing themselves. The challenge of consulting, as in marriage or family counseling, is not to see what's happening but to say what you see at the right time, so the information is helpful. CEOs often sound like families or couples who want to change or fix something external to themselves, when in fact nothing can or will change until they experience a contextual shift that immediately is felt throughout the organization. Anything else is a short-term fix that does not address the source of the problems that will keep happening.

To understand the world, we must first understand ourselves. Then, like the Hubble telescope when it first went into orbit, we can compensate for distortion and build a clear picture.

How we pattern our relationships with others -- how we build community -- is how we live and work in cyberspace. The words we have always spoken are the words we click and send.

Princess Diana needed to be held and comforted, and she held and comforted others. Churchill needed to speak words of light to his own darkness and spoke them to the darkest hour of western civilization. Frankl needed to survive Auschwitz and discovered in the depths of his soul a resilience, dignity, and capacity for heroism that became a map for the journeys of a million others.

Our weakness is our strength and the bond of our common humanity.

The task that confronts us in cyberspace is to allow ourselves to discover and create together symbols of real community that hang in the virtual world like stained glass windows through which light suddenly brightens, a moment of inexplicable splendor among wall-sized windows defining a luminous space. They hang suspended in the thin air, we hang suspended among them. The depth of our mutual need becomes ground zero for our mutual fulfillment. At the moment of ignition, the promise becomes the fulfillment of the promise. We engage in spite of ourselves -- in spite of our childhood -- in spite of everything -- in joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

September 6 1997