My heart has been holding many things during this Advent and Christmas season. I could even borrow a scripture reference and say I have been "pondering them in my heart." So where to begin.
I will start with my mornings. I always begin my day with my favorite morning news show. Since Thanksgiving this show has been both a delight and a source of reflection. I have noticed this growing trend to share with us the deals for spending our money. Now, I cannot say if that is good or bad, just that it is where this "holding in my heart" has begun. They end the show (or close to the end) with this, so our last thoughts are not on the community they form or relationships or critical stories that should cause us to go "Hmmm." Instead our thoughts may be on the best deal...I have learned that all things must begin well and end well. If they do not begin well, people tune out. Where things end will be people's last impression of the event. What good happens in the middle can be lost because of bad beginnings or endings. So to have a show end on spending, I take from that, day after day, week after week, the message that the show, the network, the advertisers, are conveying is that our worth, our value, our growth as a culture depends on our spending, our consuming the resources of the world.
So then my thoughts take a wider view and I wonder if we (myself included) haven't gotten caught up in this extravagant lifestyle of spending, of having, of discarding, of spending again. Suddenly I am caught up short when I realize, it is only the affluent cultures who deal with this phenomena. Even in our poverty in affluence we see the "need" to have the latest or the best of...
Before I go too far on this tirade of spending wonder, I stop and ask myself, what if...what if we chose to be different. What if we looked to what truly matters in the world and were extravagant in how we lived that out in our lives. So I guess this could be another place of contention, that for one person or another what truly matters is different. Since this is my blog, I will share what I believe truly matters. If you have been reading my blogs, you probably already know what truly matters to me, community. So what does a community need to thrive? It is the question on my heart as I am part of a leadership team at my church to create that vision and work to develop the ways to grow us into that vision.
Begin with the basics. Shelter, food, clothing, and the means to supply shelter, food and clothing. What brings a community together? Common needs? Common interests? Common threats? The reasons vary in every instance. I cannot help but think of the great philosophers and sociologists and psychologists who have tried to understand and create communities based on their theories. Then I recall the one I follow, Jesus Christ. God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created community, created the universe and had one underlying word, love. So if the common need, common interest is love, what would the common threat be to that love? My first reaction is selfishness. When our love is turned inward to self gratification, we make choices that harm ourselves and those in our community. My second reaction is power and control. When we seek personal control or personal power within the community we make choices that do violence to others and harm ourselves. Yet each of us is human and self preservation will cause us to make choices out of fear, so our choice will be selfish, our choice will be to garner power, our choice will be to attempt control to lessen the threat. Also those who covet power and control recognize our tendency towards selfishness and foster that with temptations for our personal pleasure that in turn gives them more power and control as we strive to acquire what we covet.
With all this said, I stop and marvel that God continues to love us. We are such broken creatures. We cannot see God's vision for our future because there are too many veils we need to remove and we are reluctant to remove even one for fear our fragile hold on reality will break. We cannot imagine how the world would look if we saw it through God's eyes. Or maybe we can. Maybe we have peaked around those veils and seen and realized how much we have to let go of for God's world to be the only reality. And still, God love us and desires for us to be reconciled to God and to one another. For God so loved the world, for God so loves the world...if we could only love the world as God loves us.
Back to how then do we live out our lives in community with God and with the world in such a way as to honor God, honor one another, and honor all of creation? I believe it begins with learning to do this by making even our smallest decisions with that question in mind. For example, where we shop for food, the packaging around the food, the bags the food is placed in for us to bring home, the chemicals in the food to enhance its marketability, the growers, and the distributors all are impacted by our purchase or our decision not to purchase. I know I do not often carry those big questions with me into the grocery store and yet I should.
I realize I have done, even in this blog, what we do that pulls us away from one another. I moved into issues rather than spoke of connections. I am not blind that the issues are just as connected. It is the transformation of community that is important for me, transforming us into the image of the Body of Christ. It is those connections of tissue and fiber, of muscle and bone, of nerve and blood that need to honored and healed. So healing begins with understanding the disease or the injury. Sometimes it is simply not disease or injury but the movement of time and age. In the community I have been called to serve, we are aging. It is the primary disease we are facing, yet the soil has been turned and new growth is emerging.
It is our aging that I have also held in my heart because I believe God is speaking to all of us about aging and community. I have seen it done well. I have seen it done poorly. I have seen it done in community and I have been witness to aging and dying in loneliness. I believe that a healthy Body of Christ has all aspects of the creative process within it. We have new birth and we have death and we have new birth and we have death. We experience the growth of the cycles of life in community. When any of the phases are missing we are broken. I can see a community that embraces all aspects of life. I see it with gardens, sewing circles, kitchens, classrooms, potter's wheel, and in the center a place to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I see the wise elders watching the young. I see the craftsmen out in the community making homes safe, warm, and dry. I see stories told. We are called to live in the world and be witness to how God would have us live.
One final note, I am not saying we separate from the world or its values because if we do, then the world is truly lost. God became flesh and dwelt among us. God loves the world and desires we love the world too. It is how we live and work in the world, our connections, our community that God would see transformed.
More ponderings to come.
Allow joy, allow love, allow God,
One of Many
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