Gathering Communities

We gather together to work, to learn, to grow; we gather into communities, towns, universities. People everywhere, they live in groups, they live in families; they cherish their friends and they spend time together, supporting and enjoying their ways and their company. We get sick, we go to hospitals to help us recover.
What all these things have in common, with each of us in our everyday lives, is that inescapable fact that humanity, as a species, seems hard wired for gathering.

 Into groups we collect and revel. Together. It all seems so natural. Why, by working together, supporting and accomplishing worthwhile tasks, what could be better?
The person who lives stalwartly alone, who is friendless, who has very little or no community to speak of, that is a person often pitied and eyed suspiciously. We exclaim, "are they ill? Why are they such loners?"
This all makes simple sense. It seems so natural to gather, to enjoy the company of our brothers and sisters, our loves and loved here on earth.
Yet when the matter turns to named things such as 'religion', many of us recoil. Why? Well, it seems we don't think to belong after all. Some don't want to belong. Thus reinventing the 'spiritual' wheel is okay.

In fact, it's better than okay. It may be for these persons, the only way to demonstrate their will to 'pull themselves up by the bootstraps.' Many among us think, in spiritual terms, that there are aliens around us, to be avoided at all costs.
Infected with perhaps a strong sense of humanist enlightenment, a person with such notions eschews anything of community within the context of faith.

Yet if a faith community is true, existing for a higher purpose, for the common good, then it is, it must be and it will do something. Let me say this again: Churches, mosques, temples, ashrams and so forth exist because they do something for others.
If they do not, they they exist not for long. Communities survive and thrive because of the activities of each of its constituents. What each of us contributes to the good of all, is the community.

It is this fact that escapes many in the blog-sphere. Simply talking isn't sufficient, nor are kind thoughts or nice words and graphics. Communities must do something, and religious communities continue and persist for this very simple reason!
 Join the collective, engage in acts of social justice. Learn about yourself from another's eyes.
Help a friend. Be a community, be a support.

Love and Betrayal in Community

Fellow thinker of Maritain, French theologian, Emmanuel Mounier wrote in his book, Personalist Manifesto that "Capitalism reduces a person to a state of servitude irreconcilable with the dignity of a man; it orients all classes and the whole personality towards the possession of money; the single desire of which chokes the soul." He advocated for the idea 'incarnation,' that persons are necessarily composed of both body and spirit, that the spirit lives both within and without, that it finds its expression in community with others; vocation, that which fulfills ones' deepest spiritual longings.

It is this idea of community that strikes the heart of most
persons in their daily lives. While many easily think of community as their town or city, there are many more communities to which one associates: the school, the gym, the prayer hall, the job, the family and the home are a few examples. Taking the family, the smallest unit of community experienced by most on a day to day basis as an example, there is indeed a strong and central community existing in family whether it includes a marital relationship and children, or any such constitution with or without child.

Recalling the biblical writing John 21:15-19 where the Christ asks his disciple, Simon Peter, "Do you love me?" To which Peter replies, "Yes Lord, I love you." Jesus answers him saying, "feed my sheep... follow me." As part of the community of the Christ, Simon Peter affirms his love and devotion to the way of the Christ in this exchange. Later it is he who betrays the one he loves.

How can this happen? How does this happen in any of our lives? When is it a betrayal? When I say so, or when another in the community says so? Is betrayal a lack of everyday use of a person's help and labor in the ways that Personalist thinkers decry? Is this then betrayal as the Christ might see it? All these questions may arise in a community relationship, even one so small in size as two persons, and it isn't always so easy to sort it out and discern the truths for each individual.

Is betrayal between a community as small as two persons something like, "you didn't walk the dog, like you promised!" Or is the idea of betrayal something like, "you failed to tell me something and now I'm humiliated. I don't trust you!" Is trust necessarily a part of betrayal? Did the Christ place trust in his disciple? Was there an acceptance of one another at the level of the incarnation, as Mounier calls it? Are communities indeed composed of individuals who are both body and spirit, and if so, what if the persons themselves are not clearly aware of their (bodily-spirit) incarnateness? What then of betrayal; what could it possibly be based upon?

For example, if, in my community, we are agreed to conduct ourselves in a simple way without ostentation, and one of the parties goes out and buys electronic gadgets which then are used to distract or emotionally remove themselves from the community, but do not clearly recognize the effect of their actions, is this a betrayal? What if one, for their well being and for the truth which lies in their own heart, takes actions which affect the other(s) in the community negatively, is this betrayal? What is the other(s) responsibility to the common good of the community, even one deemed an offender?

In love, is not the common good served through the effort to understand and accept each and all? In this community, is there a place for forgiveness, the charity of love? May we, when we think our life is the worst, find one possible example, be it the Christ on the cross, Martin Luther King or Gandhi, perhaps? They were killed by those who disliked them or their message. Who betrayed them?

Building the Civilization of Love

Carl Anderson writes boldly in his book, A Civilization of Love, "there is no gap between love of neighbor and justice." Attempts to contrast justice and love, serve to distort them both. Within justice is the meaning of mercy itself. To pursue justice without love is to engage in revenge. Love is not about revenge. From the earliest time, religions have pursued the liberation of the self, and the collective from every type of oppression and evil; they have promoted in degree, the dignity of the individual.

Within the civilization of love, there comes the realization that love is not mere sentiment, it is not mere feeling. Love is action, it is active; it includes the necessity of vocation, so that a civilization founded upon the dignity and value of all Creation may be realized. The sharing of love is basic to human life.  A heart which 'sees' and directs itself accordingly is one of the first actions taken in a civilization of love; priority must be given to the formation and re-formation of human hearts-- all hearts. The heart that 'sees' is one that has learned to see its own history, thus it knows how to recognize the other. Indeed, when the moment arrives that the heart in charity recognizes an experience of love and gift, it can no longer be perceived without awareness of one's own history. That is, the awareness of the loves that came before us: our parents, our family, the Divine, who loved us first and most.

There was, at one moment, a great act of Creation that begot us from seeming nothingness; we were brought into the world. In the civilization of love, someone's love is revealed as the initial source of our existence. The heart now awakened is able to see with 'eyes'. With the heart, events are viewed not only from one perspective, but from the greatest perspective of the acts of a co-creator in creation. The one who is blind, who does not see, then lives as if the divinity rests solely within them. Others may easily be forgotten or omitted. And yet it is not divinely demanded that we, as individuals, produce a feeling, or any feeling that we are not yet capable of producing. In the civilization of love, all are called to action for hope that our sight shall illuminate the way of the other. This is what is also called charity.

Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta modeled her life upon this civilization of love. She called all to it; divinity and love are inseparable. She was well-seeing into the truth that loving one's neighbor was a central task of the heart in action. It is this which will form a better society for the common good, she wrote.