I remember a college professor once telling us, “Fellas, if you highlight everything, you’ve highlighted nothing.”
Well as I read this chapter I had to avoid the temptation of highlighting every line. Charles Moore, a pastor in the Bruderhof community, takes community life with the utmost seriousness. It is his life.
He starts with the essential questions:
*WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO CONNECT?
*WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FORGE RELATIONSHIPS THAT COUNT?
*HOW DO WE REALIZE A LIFE THAT IS GENUINELY INTERDEPENDENT AND SHARED?
Moore asks these questions because as Christ followers, forming real community is what we are called to do:
“Jesus prayed that we might be a community, that his followers would possess the togetherness and love and unity that he and the Father have for each other.”
In order to form such a community, there are certain givens:
*Time: Members have to be willing to spend substantial time with each other, to rub shoulders with each other, to pray together, to put up with each other, to work together.
*Space: “Unless we are physically present in each other’s lives in the same physical, social space, community will only be skin deep.
*Sharers of the Word: “. . .governed by the Word and seeking to obey it together.
*Sharers of possessions: Community members move away from the mentality of personal ownership and strive towards shared possessions. On a spiritual level, they share the “possessions” of the burden of their sins and weaknesses with each other.
Moore sums up simply and profoundly, “The Christians’ love for one another was not in words but in deeds—real, physical expressions of care and service.”
I suspect that Moore would have some suspicions with a group like our EOC. He states that if folks aren’t proximate to one another, there can’t be real community. I get his point as a committed member of the Bruderhof community. I visited one of their communities years ago and was impressed by the intensity, authenticity and joy with which they live authentic community life—they are all in!
At the same time, I think Moore really challenges us, and other communities rooted in the New Monasticism and Monasteries without Walls, to look at our community living and ask how authentic it is.
No, we don’t live in proximity. But we can constantly reflect on how well we are doing at giving time to each other and how ready we are to be there for those who call upon us, to share burdens, to hold each other accountable to life rooted in the Word and expressed in concrete action.
Moreover, as a member of EOC, I can ask my membership in the Community is bearing fruit in the way I live my life at home, with the communiy(ies) to which I belong: Do I strive for authentic relationships, rooted in the Word and in the truth which flows from the Founding Document and from living the Vows? Do I make real space for those in my home community or only space that is convenient to my preferences, temperament and personal schedule? Am I making sure that I don’t just talk about Community, I don’t just talk about the Word of God, but I give real, daily “physical expressions of care and service?”
It takes work indeed!
“Connected relationships that are mutual and interdependent” is a phrase I take away from Charles Moore’s chapter. I think, for me, that has been an essential key to my satisfaction in community life, in its giving and receiving or at the very least, the hoped-for goal. Today’s culture can stand in opposition to these values, though we pay lip-service. The more we are connected the less it seems we are, we can easily become distant, with social media personas that perhaps do not connect as Moore envisions for community. Marriages, families and communities of many types all struggle to grow in Trinitarian relationship with each other.
My connection to my community members in my newborn life in the Charitist household is helped by companioning each other in prayer, daily prayer for the Order, its holiness and mission, even use of some social media with the “friends” we are and become to one another. Praying the Hours and the Founding Document all become intentional “momentos” of loving recall of my sisters and brothers in community, wearing the habit in ministry and worship weave me into the fabric of our neo-monastic experience. Currently, we are not residential, though provision is made for such if the Spirit draws members toward that experience. There are many differences between residential and dispersed community life. Some of us understand ourselves as hermits, anchorites, solitaires or as monastic in the world. While we share some foundations with residential monastics, how the structure is fitted together is very different in application, as it must be.
I think that our longing for “more” does not need to be necessarily understood as one more thing, or several things, to do in already busy lives of family, ministry and religious tradition among the various Charitists. The longing I believe has a much deeper spiritual root for our inter-connectedness through, with, and in Christ. The struggle to understand our longing “for more” is in good step with all of humanity, something that will be ongoing. Peace!