Being Community

 

During this pandemic time, some things have become clear. Gathering for meals, worship, or coffee—we won’t take that for granted anymore.

At a deeper level, I believe that our need for community has become clearer. We are not meant to do this alone! As God said, “It’s not good for people to be alone…” While many of us love being in the woods or on the water, we NEED community. Perhaps the most crucial aspect of belonging to a faith community is the community part.

Looking around at the faces gathered on Zoom— for a worship service or a small group discussion— I’ve found myself wondering why community is so crucial.

* Being community, for one thing, is simply BEING THERE. We all need to be deeply part of a community so that our absence will be missed. While we can “watch” a service, a meeting, or a lecture, it’s different from seeing others’ responses and hearing their thoughts and questions. We all need to meet with a gathering in which we’ll be missed if we’re not there, one where our lives are linked so we can care for each other.

* In a spectator society, we might forget that the earliest church was so strongly communal that any ‘you’ we encounter in the New Testament should read ‘you all.’ We need to belong somewhere to thrive, perhaps even to survive.

* In community, WE KNOW each other. When I look around our Sunday gathering, I see faces, but beyond the faces, I/we know the stories. We look at the faces in those little boxes, and we see those we know may be struggling— because of a loss, the anniversary of a loss, or a diagnosis. We know those who express themselves easily and those who can’t. We KNOW each other enough to (not just like) but love each other.

* Community also forces us to belong to those to whom we might not choose to belong. From Bonhoeffer to C.S. Lewis, Christian thinkers wrote about the church as a school of love, in which we practice loving those who we don’t understand, or who annoy us. The senior tempter in C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters counsels his student about his ‘patient’ in the church: “When he gets to his pew and looks around, he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.” Community provides us with the school of love that we all need.

* Community also gives us accountability. Our individualistic society gives us the idea that if we don’t like something or someone, we can just move on until we get fed up with the next folks—instead, in community, as in marriage, we get a chance to grow DURING the hard times.

I remember hearing an interview with a monk, who, when asked, “What is the hardest part about being a monk?” replied, “Other monks.” Being community is always demanding; during COVID-19, it may be more necessary than it ever has been. Hanging in there is crucial to all of us, and it is the strong call our faith makes to us that calls us to be part of a community.

Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.