The Cracks in our Community (part 2)
stubborn cracks
I'm a sucker for a vision of community.
I don't think it's just me, or uniquely me, but I also do think it's me. When I read a book by Hauerwas, or even this recent one by Werntz, and you catch this glimpse, this hope, this idea of all that a community could be. Not a perfect one, even, just a functional one. A picture of the body of Christ functioning in a relatively healthy way, in spite of the brokenness and the sinfulness of each and every member.
I think it's an almost universal human longing, to have other people know us as we are and love us as they know us. We are social beings, and we want to be in relationship to other human beings. We have joy in the others who are like us and yet not us. We want to know them, and we want them to know us. More than that, we want them to like us. This is at the heart of so many of our dysfunctions - our desire to be affirmed by others, our attention seeking, our hiding and shielding ourselves, our walls and our facades. When others know us and reject us, we feel deep pain. When others don't want to know us, we feel unvalued and unappreciated. When we perform in order to be loved, we worry because we associate that affirmation with our façade, and feel the constant double pressure - that we must maintain the performance, as well as fearing the rejection of who we truly are.
When we are known and loved, we find deep joy, and we flourish as human beings. And when we don't, we don't do so well.
So of course we want to be in communities. We want to find those networks, or create those networks, precisely where we are in deeper relationship to others, knowing and known, loving and loved. And when we don't, we wonder why? Is it me? Is it them? What can I do to make a community like that?
This is why I'm a sucker for those pictures of church as community - I know I deeply long for that kind of community, and I recognise that those connections have been far fewer in my life than I've hoped. And yet, it's always easier to paint an ideal of church life than it is to live it out. Because for all our talk about human frailty, weakness, busyness, and sin, when we actually front up to a Sunday gathering, or a midweek one, or whatever, and try to deal with the actual people in front of us, and bringing all our own baggage along with us too - it's a lot harder to "do community" than it ever sounds like on the page.
Nor is it as simple as "well, if you want to live in a vibrant Christian community, be the change you want to see in the world". Yes, hiding in there is a grain of truth, but it's buried in a pile of sand. You can't build a community of one. You need others to get on board. They need to not only want it as much as you do, but be willing to make the sacrifices to make it work.
I don't really have any more answers than I did last time I wrote about this, but I do have three simple things that I'm trying to do. I have this theory. And it’s that in losing the exalted status that table fellowship, that eating together, used to hold, we have lost more than we realised. There are few things that bind us like the simple and daily act of eating, together. This, and I am attempting to reorient more of my relationships through the simplest attempts to direct our thoughts beyond the immediate. And so, two questions and a practice that I have been trying all the more lately:
"Are there some things I could be praying for you?"
"What's God been doing in your life lately?"
Let's eat together.