"The Anglican Communion has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ's Church from the beginning."
- Geoffrey Fisher, 99th Archbishop of Canterbury
Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, martyred for Christ in 156
"O happy fault! If we weren't sinners and didn't need pardon more than bread, we'd have no way of knowing how deep God's love is."
- Louis Evely
"Avoid, like the plague, a clergyman who is also a businessman."
- St. Jerome
"Slander is worse than cannibalism."
- St. John Chrysostom
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
- Jaroslav Pelikan
"The Jesus of Suburbia is a lie."
- Green Day
"It's true romance is dead I shot it in the chest and in the head"
- Fall Out Boy
"Don't just adore the Eucharist, enact it."
- William Cavanaugh
"If you can be talked out of your faith, you probably should be."
- Roger Ward
"Don't ever deny someone the luxury of being human or broken. That is not a luxury you yourself can afford to lose."
- Sarah Cunningham
"It is better that the United States be liquidated than that she survive by war."
- Dorothy Day
"Wherever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure vanishes from the Christian Church. With its recovery will come unexpected power."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Tuesday, April 05, 2005 Community: Risking Love
Community is still hard. It is healing, redemptive, rewarding and exciting, but it is still hard. Understand that I don’t mean the “Okay everybody, let’s have community” thing that can be a new religious commodity or marketing ploy (See “Love,” in A is for Abductive by Leonard Sweet, et al). Real community is what you get when people dedicate themselves to loving one another. It’s often messy, uncertain and fearful, but it’s a process that can be trusted. When we do this, we are willing to hurt and be hurt, willing to argue, and willing to hit bumps along the way.
While God desires the complete restoration of each individual human life, the Master doesn’t do this work primarily on an individual basis. He restores us as a corporate entity, the Body of Christ. If we’re going to be Christians, if we’re going to be healed and whole, we must share our lives with one another. We have been called, and are being equipped, to carry the light of Christ into the dark and fearful places in our friends’ lives. This vocation requires dedicating ourselves to friendship for the long haul, and fully receiving all that comes with it: joy, compassion, and transformation, but also the certainty that we will be hurt.
If we are close enough to one another to offer love and healing words, we are close enough to hurt one another. This happens in any number of ways: through misunderstanding, unmet expectations, failure of communication, and any number of things. When we do get hurt, feeling rejected or maligned, we may even rebel against the love of God and our friends, resorting to bitterness, gossip, backbiting, and again the list goes on (Look at Paul's epistles if you want longer lists).
However, the community’s goal cannot be to set up barriers to make sure we do not hurt one another: that kind of fearful response will only grieve the Spirit and hinder love’s redeeming work. We must instead choose not to live in fear, and accept the certainty that this will happen, and decide how we will continue to be together when it does. When slighted, will we speak up and take responsibility for the way we feel? Will we deal directly with conflicts and be honest about our shortcomings and fears? Can we, in the midst of feeling rejected and uncared for, choose not to reject in turn? Can we affirm love for the other even in the face of one’s own perceived disaffirmation? Can we listen to one another, and be willing to absorb the pain of conflict?
In forgiving one another the sins we commit against each other and the community at large, we absorb the brokenness of our sinful humanity in the name of Christ. This is not an easy or glamorous task. It rarely feels warm and fuzzy. But it is a necessary part of redemption, for reconciliation is God’s fervent desire for his people.
Bonhoeffer warns us against loving “community.” The real work is found in loving the people in the community. If one loves community and not the people who are in it, as soon as one person’s weakness or sin interferes with the ideal, that person will be hated. We must sacrifice the ideal of community on the altar of our love for our friends.
Kyle Potter, MTh (Oxon)
Catechist for Adult Formation,
Saint Patrick's Church
Missioner to Georgetown, Kentucky
Anglican Mission in the Americas E-mail me
Library Technician for Research Assistance & Cataloging
Department Liaison for Religion, Philosophy, Sociology & Theatre
Instructor of Christian Theology
Ensor LRC, Georgetown College
"The Church claims to be the most comprehensive human society there is - the new human race in embryo. And it claims this because of its belief that it is established not by any human process grounded in and limited by events, cultures and so on, but by God's activity." - Rowan Williams
4 Comments:
good, good, good, good. And hard, and good, and worth it.
Kyle,
Truly good stuff here. As Blogger doesn't support trackbacks as far as I can tell, see this URL for my post on yours:
http://totheabbey.blogspot.com/2005/04/kentuckians-strike-again.html
Peace
Well then, that's
http://totheabbey.blogspot.com/2005/04
/kentuckians-strike-again.html
Thanks, fellas!
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