I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
SAR 7: Be in Community
- Homeless people are, obviously, homeless. Gang members and orphans, anorexic girls and migrant workers are all, in some sense, also ‘displaced’. They may have a disordered lack of correspondence to the bodies, the families, the countries they live in – literally, lacking in location, or a sense of place. They may be lacking in the kind of ‘place’ given within the hearts of others – parents, family members, friends around them may reject them, thus ‘dis-placing’ them, or casting them out of the ‘heart-space’ we all must have to survive.
- Henri Nouwen wrote that one of the essential movements of the spiritual life is the movement from loneliness to solitude. We are, each, alone before God, and must come to grips with that alone-ness – our smallness, our insufficiency to bear our own being – before we can move toward building community that involves the conscious gift of self. Without the ability to be at peace with self, to be alone and at leisure with self, the basis for formation of community is compromised. We end up using the other person(s) as a replacement for the self, or to distract us from self.
- Speed affects every relationship I have. When we are all operating according to different schedules, and hurrying this way and that to fulfill our obligations, we get tense, and we move past each other hardly seeing one another. The demand for speedy interactions also makes friends less and less likely to be able to spend real, long, slow time together, to write long letters, to have the kind of deliciously inefficient conversations that characterize amazing friendships. It’s all very sad, I think.
- Sound cannot be heard unless it is contained within some sort of space where it can resonate and develop. Sound carries to the ear, where vibration resonates through a person, or is uttered from within a complex series of vocal resonating chambers before it emerges. People, too, need context, and cannot develop in a vacuum. People need ‘place’ within other people where their being resonates and reflects back to them as a revelation of self. These loving (or, sadly, unloving) reflections add together with one’s own sense of self to give a richer, truer (if loving) or impoverished, false (if unloving) self-image.
- My being has been formed within my mother’s womb, my childhood home, the hearts of friends all the way from childhood to the present day, the places where I studied and worked and sought entertainment, the pre-Catholic-conversion churches and the Catholic Church, the groups I belong to like AVI, Living Poem Society, Catholic Creatives Salon, Sursum Corda, etc….. I have received deep healing from Christ for wounds to my being incurred within a mother who was ambivalent about my presence and ill-equipped to offer me ‘hospitality’. I have needed healing for issues dating back to a non-Christian, hostile childhood home. Every ‘place’ I associate with my ‘becoming’ has been imperfect, in some way, of course, and has affected my formation for good and for less-than-good! God seems to have turned it all to good!
- God, Himself, required ‘place’. As a truly human being, He needed actual location of the kind I just described – place in which to be, and to become, more fully realized: Mary, our hearts, the Church, a tabernacle. When He said, “I will be with you always,” He spoke as a person who knew that ‘symbolic’ companionship is not sufficient. For human beings, we need the real presence of the persons around us, and the actuality of physical location for our bodies in order to thrive. We are not ‘virtual’, but real!!
- The Sabbath day is, itself, a sort of ‘place’. It is an antechamber of heaven, and a place of encounter with the heart of Christ. When we step into it, instead of merely acknowledging its existence, we are brought into the most spacious accommodation for our own becoming. There is a sense in which, on Sunday, we may enter the ‘mansion’ Christ holds open for each person’s soul, ‘try on’ the mantle of our own perfected being, take a dip in the ocean of mercy. This is a holy, peaceful, home-like context where we are brought effortlessly into greater conformation to our own being, and made more ready to bear the weight of glory in eternity with God.
- When we learn to harmonize with others, we must ‘place’ our own voice into unity with theirs. If I withhold my voice, swallow sound, refuse to let my notes out into that common ‘space’, then I can’t adjust and blend with the other voices.
- Disunity is a pain to keep up! It wearies us because we are meant to be in unity with others. We have it exactly backwards when we think that establishing unity with others is the hard work. It is much harder on us to fall into self-protective, isolationist habits that leave us without others to help bear us up. Though unity and commitment and relationship does all take time and effort, it is amply rewarded by the sense our burdens are shared and our joys multiplied. I think one of the great ‘fatigues’ of life today is the weariness of maintaining self apart from others.
- Feasting in ‘real life’ prepares us abundantly for the Eucharistic feast! I wish more people understood what it means to truly feast with companions – to dwell together, to share our intimate needs for food and presence and heart-space with true friends, to celebrate the highest values together, to open our homes to one another, to bother with the creation of an ‘event’, a ‘solemnity’ of community that is beautiful and extravagant….then we’d get more fully what the liturgy is. As an ex-protestant, I have a sense of Christians saying, “No thanks, bread will be enough for me,” when invited to the sumptuous, overflowing table of the Lord. Feasting would teach them a great deal! Hopefully, our awesome Catholic Feast will help us see that life in community is about this sort of whole-hearted, abundant participation in the realization of God’s kingdom into the world.
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