Proclaiming community history

Grounding an individual in his particular culture and the history of the community as a context for his decisions. The catalytic effect is a self-story which enables an individual decision in relationship to the human wisdom of the community.

An integral part of grounding decisions historically to give a temporal and world-wide framework for the individual's decisional relationships to life.

Tactics include: heritage research to recover significant historical events that a community has experienced; heritage education to transmit ancestral and community story to an individual as a frame of reference for the creation of his own self-story as an individual and as a member of the community; ethnic arts to re-incorporate into the whole community those distinct ethnic gifts which would enrich the whole community; community celebrations to commemorate an individual's life events; and destinal story to recreate man's story in the givenness of the individual as related to the total past and total future allowing him to decide his thrust in history. An example is the alienation of young people who move from rural to urban areas, until they are able to re-create their own particular history in relationship to the urban life of the community.