Think about a time when you were first in love. That dreamy feeling, like the whole world was singing to you, that you had found the secret of life, the universe, and everything, and the most wonderful person in existence was crazy about YOU! Thinking about how lovely it was to spend time with them, how much you were looking forward to seeing them again, remembering every detail of how they looked and what they said.
And then, trouble in paradise. You have your first argument or disagreement, and it feels shattering – even if it’s a minor issue that gets quickly ironed out. Because what that disagreement, that rift, feels like, is the first crack in a brand-new china dish, the first dirty footstep in new-fallen snow. It feels like something pristine and perfect has been lost forever, and however much you still love each other, that sense of pristine perfection can never be recovered.
I wonder if that’s how Adam and Eve felt, in the garden, after they ate of the forbidden fruit. Suddenly, their whole perspective on life, themselves, and God changed. They saw things they didn’t see before and maybe wouldn’t have wanted to see if they’d known. They realized they were naked. And they felt ashamed – an emotion they had never before experienced, and not a pleasant one.
The word “religion” comes from the Latin verb religare, which means “to bind again,” or “to reconnect.” Religare might have been used in quite ordinary contexts, of retying your sandal or adjusting the straps on your pack, because its root verb, ligare, is also the root of our words “ligament” and “ligature” – items that connect the parts of our bodies, our musical instruments, the pipes and circuits in our buildings.
But to re-connect: that implies that there was a connection in the past, one that got lost or broken, that we want to find again. After an argument, we want to reconnect with our loved ones, to re-establish those ties of love and trust, to assure ourselves and one another that the basic underlying foundation of love is intact. Adam and Eve probably wanted to reconnect with God, too, but they were afraid and ashamed.
Interestingly, though, after an argument with someone we love – especially that first argument that seems to tragically mar something beautiful and perfect – it’s at that point in time where we’re probably closer to having a genuinely strong foundation with another person or group of people than we were during that initial time of everything seeming perfect.
M Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, served as an Army psychologist, mostly on the island of Okinawa in the Pacific. He created focus groups for men suffering culture shock – to share with one another their feelings and experiences so that they could understand that they were not crazy or alone.
What Peck observed, in facilitating these focus groups, is that at first all of the men seemed to have great camaraderie, listening and nodding to one another. Sooner or later, two or more men would get into an argument or conflict, and sides would be taken. But in the groups that were willing to work through the disagreement, Peck noticed that afterward, there was a much deeper sense of camaraderie and rapport. Peck identified these two different phases of group work as false community and true community.
Most people, most of the time, really want to get along with others. Disagreements and conflict are stressful, and many of us avoid confrontation whenever possible. So even if we don’t really know each other all that well, or indeed don’t like certain people in the group very much, we will pretend to get along just fine. And that can work for quite a while.
Sooner or later, though, an issue will emerge that we can’t ignore. And that’s when the true work of community begins when we have to be honest with ourselves and one another about anger, hurts, deeply-held views, and antipathies. But if we are willing to do that, to sit with the unpleasantness and keep making an effort to stay connected, to understand and forgive, what will eventually happen is that our religare – our religion, our true community – will be much stronger and deeper than our original ligare – that on-the-surface connection we had at first.
A while back, I got into a discussion on Facebook as to whether it is possible for a person to be a Christian all by themselves – that is, if you follow the teachings of Christ, but don’t participate in a community of other believers, does that still count? Before I share how the conversation went and my take on it, let me take an informal poll. How many of you think that it’s possible to be a Christian entirely on your own? Show of hands. How many think you need a faith community?
I guess the conclusion is more or less a foregone one for this group because all of us make an effort to participate in this community every Sunday and beyond – and not just participate, but make a contribution, both financially and in terms of our time and talents. No church can last long if the pastor has to do every single thing! I’m not surprised, but I’m glad to hear you feel that way.
The conversation on Facebook started with one of my friends from grad school – she was completing a master’s degree at the Presbyterian seminary that is part of the Graduate Theological Union consortium, and she now lives as an expatriate in Germany. She posed a question wondering whether it’s possible to baptize oneself.
What I said was this: I would argue that one cannot baptize oneself, just as one cannot be a Christian by oneself. Becoming part of a community – the Body of Christ – is precisely the point. And from there we got into a whole discussion, including another friend of hers, about community. I pointed out that the commandments are “love God, love your neighbor.” Gotta HAVE a neighbor and be in relationship. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a church per se, but you do have to be in community. It’s not just about “observing the tenets.” Christianity is a school for love, and as Jesus said if you can’t love your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you can’t see? I also pointed them toward Matthew 25, and the works of corporal mercy that Jesus says are essential to being numbered among His sheep at the time of judgment. Being in relationship with others, learning how to love God by seeing God and serving God in others, are what it means to be a Christian. These things are not optional, even for rugged individualistic Americans. My friend brought up the desert hermits of ancient times, and I pointed out that even those folks had a community, although they did keep to themselves much of the time. They had a confessor they could speak to, once a year at least, as well as visitors and followers that came to learn from them. We wouldn’t even know of their existence if they hadn’t shared their wisdom with others. I think an actual community is essential, even if it’s just you and your spouse. Because we don’t
really get the deep learning of loving others with just the contact with our coworkers, service workers, neighbors, etc. You have to be in a place of learning, day in and day out, how to genuinely care for others with whom you will come into conflict. The people in this congregation don’t all take the same view of everything, and learning how to truly love each other as we are and let others love us is the most valuable way of learning what it means to be a Christian – I have come to believe this kind of learning is really what Jesus had in mind.
There’s also the accountability piece; if you’re reading scripture all by yourself, it’s inevitable that you will fall into error. As Anne Lamott has put it, you can be pretty sure you’ve created God in your own image if it turns out God hates all the same people you do! And finally, we need to be able to pray for others and have others pray for us. If you have one other person that you can ask to pray for you, you have a community! But if that’s all you have, I think you are missing out on the richness and abundance of community that Jesus means for us to have. In fact, I don’t see anything in scripture that supports solitary Christianity. But I think we in this country – perhaps white people especially – have lost sight of what it means to be a Christian. It doesn’t just mean being a good person. It means celebrating God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer in community. It means praying alone, yes, but also having a community of prayer. It means demonstrating to the rest of the world as a community what the values of the kingdom of heaven look like – mutual service and providing for one another, and working to further God’s justice and God’s peace. It means that every other Christian on earth is your brother or sister or nonbinary beloved, not just in a warm fuzzy feeling way, but in a way that means living in daily concern and care for one another as you would a biological sibling. Since there are too many people on earth for that to be meaningful, we form microcosm communities of praxis where we can live that out. In my view, truly being a Christian doesn’t mean you just go out and serve the poor (maybe volunteer at a soup kitchen once in a while), it means inviting the poor to be in community in such a way that they do not know want. In every church I’ve been a part of, when gardens and orchards start producing, everybody who has surplus harvest brings food to share. Most churches also have potluck meals periodically. But no one without the means to contribute is turned away. We feed each other. That’s the point.
You can be a good person and live a good life without religious community. But you can’t be a Christian without it. The whole point of everything Jesus had to say about salvation and the kingdom of heaven/God (here on earth, not the afterlife) was experiential, and something experienced in community. Christianity is not about belief, although a lot of Christians think that. It’s about another way of living: in community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together is a several-hundred-page meditation on this very point.
I also told my friend, and the other person who joined our discussion, maybe it doesn’t matter if you do that in Christ’s name or not, in which case you and your friends might have sufficient community to be considered Christian. It’s not up to me, anyway. But I think it does matter. Why claim the label otherwise?
When I was in graduate school, I became friends with a man who was a Jesuit scholastic, and in formation to become a priest. As one of the steps of his ordination process, Tim was ordained as a deacon in the Catholic Church, and to celebrate that, he and his family hosted a dinner party at a seafood
restaurant on the Berkeley side of San Francisco Bay, to which I was invited. When Tim stood up to offer his thanks to those who had supported him through his journey up until that point, he thanked everyone present for “loving him into life.” I was really struck by those words, and I was to hear them from other Jesuits as I continued to get to know that community.
I wonder if people who haven’t had this experience know what they’re missing. It really is a new way of being alive, to know in your soul and in your bones that an entire community of folks, however small and fragile, truly sees you as you are, cares about you, and misses you when you are not present. That these folks will take care of you if you need to be prayed for, or helped to get your computer issues resolved, or to borrow a pickup to haul a load. That they will think of you when they have extra asparagus, or zucchini, or cucumbers, or tomatoes. They will give you a call to see how you’re doing or send a card. They will drop what they’re doing to help or to listen when you are in need.
I think about how beautiful the community was that Harriet and I created with the kids at Olympic View church in Seattle on Thursday nights. They got to eat together around a table where there was always enough for everyone. They got to hang out in space where they could be their goofy selves and not worry about others making fun of them and trying to settle beefs with them. They got to feel what it was like to have a roomful of people listen to what was on their hearts and help them lift it up to God. They got to learn together how to live in peace with one another, and what it means to be in relationship with their Creator and with Jesus, whose sacrifice redeemed them. They got to be seen, and loved, and encouraged to be their best selves. They got to be seen as PEOPLE, not irritating teenagers or poor folks or Black. Seen with all those traits but also past them into their tender, courageous, beautiful hearts.
There are folks who can identify an exact date and time when they accepted the Lord or became born again. But I think becoming a Christian is also as much a process as it is a moment. And it’s a process of formation, of being formed in community. Of really, genuinely loving and caring about people who might sometimes drive you crazy. And feeling what it’s like when those same folks love and care about you.
I could share lots of beautiful stories about experiencing this kind of community, about the first time I had my feet washed at a Brethren Love Feast, by an eighty-year-old lady who then stood up, looked into my eyes, smiled, and gave me a big hug. About people who have reached out to me because they trusted me to help them with a theological question or a life crisis. Jesus told us that we need to visit the sick and those in prison, and I think a lot of times we think it’s because those folks need our company, but at least sometimes it’s because we need to see them. I have been at least as blessed by my friendships with those I visited in Okanogan County Jail or correspond with through the Death Row Support Project as they have been by mine.
And that’s a big part of it, too – that we no longer see other people as “the least of these” but as “one of us.” At my church in Minneapolis, it was not uncommon to sit in the pew between a homeless man and a lawyer who made a six-figure income. And when we passed the peace, those two men would not recoil from one another’s presence but would hug each other with genuine affection.
I once ran into one of the homeless members of our church on the street, while I was out shopping with a friend who didn’t go to church. I gave him a big hug and we chatted for a bit, and then after we had each gone on our way, my friend said, “Who was that guy? He looked scary!” I said, “Scary? That’s Paul!” I might’ve seen him as scary too, if I had first met him anywhere but church, but I could look at him now, even outside of church, and not see “scary,” or “grubby,” or anything else. Just
Paul. Paul who loves to sing. Paul who loves the Lord. Paul who loves me, as a sister in Christ.
Adam and Eve, and their descendants, including all of us, had a long, hard road ahead of them in learning to reconnect with one another and with God. Because of course part of the curse that came on our first parents’ heads was that they would experience unequal relationships and mistrust of one another. Which is why, as the Joni Mitchell song puts it, “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Back to a place where we can fully see, know, love, and trust one another as bearers of the divine image of God. But we’re not seeking that original connection, the ligare. We’re seeking religare – religion – true community with one another.
St. Paul put it beautifully in his first letter to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Doesn’t that sound wonderful? I’m here to tell you, it is. And this is how we get there: keep entering ever more deeply into community. Keep working through our differences. Keep serving one another and allowing yourself to be served. Keep widening the circle to include everyone and anyone who you’ve ever had a hard time loving. Keep nurturing the Lord’s garden, in the faith that it will likewise forever nurture you. Amen.
Bobbi Dykema is currently serving as pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. She is also on the pastoral team of the Living Stream online Church of the Brethren and serves on the steering committee of the Womaen’s Caucus. Bobbi is passionate about racial and gender justice, beauty and the arts, and reading scripture as a living document.
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