You are to become holy by
the life you live in the world; God’s created material world from which you
cannot escape without lessening your chances of becoming fully human. The world from which you must escape is the
worldliness within your heart that sets up your unreal self in false
independence of God.
George Maloney, SJ
“Alone with the Alone” pg. 179
It
became clear to me how much all of us are involved in the on-going struggle of
determining who we are in our relationship with each other. Our culture bombards us with efficacious
signs that have imposed their negative influence upon us. How many of us still feel that part of our
responsibility and image rests on being a rugged individual, one capable of
standing on his/her own. Are we not
continually expected to take control, decide for ourselves what is best? Have we somehow been fooled, and lost our
freedom in our pursuit for affluence, power, possessions; yes, and even the
quest for happiness through freedom 55?
When I
was twenty-eight and in hot pursuit of such things, I wondered why the freedom
and happiness that I sought was missing from my life. I was very fortunate at that time in my life
to find something that would change my focus and start me down a new road. This “something” of which I am speaking was
becoming a part of Christian Community.
How did I find that being a part of Christian community was life changing? Somehow, deep within I knew that God was
calling me to be a part of something bigger than myself. He was calling me to grow in charity and
wisdom, and this is not something one does in a vacuum. It must be done in conjunction with others
who share a similar faith, a similar mission.
As
written in the Vatican II documents, “Church in the Modern World”, we read:
“God did not create us for life in isolation, but for the
formation of social unity. So also it
has pleased God to make us holy and save us, not merely as individuals, but by
making us into a single people, making us members of a certain community.”
Without
community, there is no Christian Life.
Why is this? It is because,
through community, we experience the strength that comes from God. We experience His grace. We share together Eucharist, spiritual food
that sustains us and helps us to grow.
In fact, we become Eucharist for each other, through the friendship and
common faith that we share. We
experience, as we work together, a sense of mission, a need to share our
community experiences with others.
“Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am with you.”
When I
first became involved in Christian community and gave it an option of
preference over the other things that I was pursuing, I told myself; wouldn’t
it be great if the people of the world could experience what we do in Christian
Community? Wouldn’t it be great if all
our families, the people we work with, or those in our neighbourhoods could see
the value of being a part of Christian community? But as one becomes more involved in
community, you begin to realize that we come with baggage, we come with
misconceptions of what community really is.
As a result, we discover that community may not be the peaceful place
that we originally thought it would be.
We discover that it is a place of struggle. I connect very much with the words of Jean
Vanier in his book “Community & Growth”:
"I have always wanted to write a book called “The Right to
be a Rotter. A fairer title is perhaps,
“The Right to be Oneself”. One of the
difficulties of community life is that we sometimes force people to be what
they are not. We stick an ideal image on
them to which they are obliged to conform.
If they don’t manage to live up to this message, they become afraid that
they won’t be loved, or that they will disappoint others. If they do live up to the image, then they
think they are perfect. But community is
not about perfect people. It is about
people who are bound to each other, each of whom is their own mixture of good
and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.
And community is the only earth in which each of them can grow without
fear towards the liberation of the forces of love which are hidden in
them. But there can only be growth if we
recognize the potential; and so there are many things in us to be
purified. There are shadows to turn into
light and fears to turn into trust."
To
recognize the potential that exist in community, I believe we have to examine
community from a contemplative stance.
By this I mean, we must move beyond the established concepts and ideas
we have of community that are deeply buried in our psychics, and begin to
experience community from that quiet center that exists within ourselves. Our secular culture and church have given us
all kinds of images of community. They
have been conceptualized and analyzed from many different directions. Unfortunately, I've been a witness to the
hurt, trauma, and confusion that have been caused by those who try to create
community using out-dated concepts and ideas based on models that are no longer
relevant or understood. It is only in
contemplation, returning to our quiet center that a new model can be
experienced that will meet the needs of our contemporary time.
One of the obstacles that I see in relation to establishing community is our
failure to see beyond the talents we possess which define the role we are to
play. It’s not to say that identifying
talents and defining roles are not important in community life. But by becoming
overly identified with our perceived role without also exploring the inner
essence of community, its underlining sacredness, its ability to transform and
fulfill our most basic human needs, we may only open the way to believe we are either
perfect, or a disappointment; depending on whether we see ourselves as succeeding
or failing in the fulfillment of our particular role. When this happens, we are a community tied to
ego consciousness. This is community
where hurt, trauma and confusion will reign.
Again,
Jean Vanier hits the center of this problem in “Community and Growth”:
"People cannot
live as if they were on a desert island.
They need companions, friends with whom they can share their lives,
their vision, and their ideals. So it is
that people come together, not because they live in the same neighborhood or
are related, but because of a mutual sympathy:
They come together around ideas, around a vision of man and society, a
common interest. Some of them meet
occasionally. Others decide to live
under the same roof: They leave their own neighborhoods and relations,
sometimes their work as well, to live with others in a community based on these
new criteria and this new vision.
At the same
time, they want to bear witness to those values. They feel that they have some good news to
offer the world, news which brings greater happiness, truth and
fulfillment. They want to become the
yeast in the dough of human society.
They want to work for peace and justice among all men and all nations.
Some of these
groupings are geared to action, to a specific task and struggle. They pool
their capacity for action. Other
groupings are more geared to the way of life, to the quality of relationships
among their members to their life and their welcome. These are the two poles of community: the
goal which attracts and unites, the center of interest which provides the “why”
of life together, and the friendship which binds people, the sense of belonging
to a group, solidarity and personal relationships.
A community is
only a community when the majority of its members is making the transition from
“the community for myself” to “myself for the community”, when each person’s
heart is opening to all the others, without any exception. This is the movement from egoism to love,
from death to resurrection; it is the Easter, the Passover of the Lord."
In
order to see community as that place where the majority of its members are
making the transition from “the community for myself” to “myself for the community”,
this movement from egoism to love, we need some contemporary images that will
help us to understand that which cannot be put into words. Jean Vanier says: “there can only be growth
if we recognize the potential”. Without words or concepts to describe exactly
what this underlining essence of community is all about, we need images that
will speak to our experience so that this new images of community can be
recognized and desired.
The
images that we currently use are good.
They can be found in the Gospels in the parable of the Talents (Mathew
25-14:30). In this parable, the number
of talents given to each servant is not the issue. The issue is more the inner attitude or disposition
in respect to what has been given to the servants by way of gifts. The two servants who were given the ten and
five talents operated from a disposition of love and trust. Their gifts bore fruit in the world because
love and trust was their overall attitude towards life. Love and trust will always result in one
moving out from “self” into community, or as Jean Vanier would put it, moving
from “community for myself” to “myself for community”. The servant who was gifted with the one
talent operated from a disposition of fear and mistrust. His attitude was: “I had heard you were a hard man,
reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered; so
I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground”.
This servant does not even recognize his talent as a gift. A closed heart filled with mistrust and fear
can never be a part of community without a radical change of heart. And because love by its definition requires
that what we have be given away, the little that this servant possesses will be
lost unless a change of heart takes place.
Another
image of community can be found in St. Paul’s letters, particularly in 1
Corinthians 12-12-30.
“Just as a
human body, though it is made up of many parts, is a single unit because all
these parts, though many, make one body, so it is with Christ. In the one Spirit we were all baptized, Jews
as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to all
to drink.”
In this description
of the body made up of many parts, each part with its individual purpose and,
at the same time functioning in unison with the whole, we do gain greater
understanding of the inner workings of community. But do these images go far enough? Do they meet the needs of contemporary society
in understanding the great potential that lies in community for growth, for
salvation, not only individually but also as human family? Society’s increasing movement towards
individualism, separateness and isolation would indicate that we are not seeing
the potential. We are focused more on
the benefits that flow from personal ambition, success, filling the emptiness
we experience within by exterior things and pursuits. We are
seeing at the level of the ego, but failing to comprehend that love requires us
to move into a deeper level of seeing.
We are becoming more focused on “community for myself”, and not moving
towards “myself for community”.
Three
things are required in order to enter community at this deeper level. First, individuals and society in general
must be able to see that our current ways of viewing and participating in
community based on an outdated model are not working, and is also bringing our
human family to the brink of its own destruction. Secondly, we need a mechanism, technique, a
technology, or a means that will assist us to move from our current perception
of community based on the old model to the new model. Thirdly, since the new model of community
cannot be conceptualized in the mind at the level of mental ego consciousness,
we need to find and be comfortable with other means of expressing it, to give
it life.
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