"Community" (pt. 1)

For those of you who know me well - you know very well how much I value and treasure community. And this very idea and essence has been the focus of much study and reflection for me of late, as I returned to Bonhoeffer's "Life Together" in a class I am currently taking. But I have been taken to a 'new' place in his thoughts and certainly a new place in mine through this study, conversation and reflection, a place that is at once foreign to me - yet wholly intimate.

This 'place' is me, alone. You, alone. Each of us as individuals. For instance, think about the corporate confessions that we confess each week within our faith communities. The one that I have grown up in and through goes like this,

"Most merciful God, we confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name. Amen." (Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 98. (c) 1978)

We confess here our inability or incompleteness of love for others. Or what we have or have not done for others. But we don't confess that which is most equivalent - our inability or incompleteness of love for ourselves. How can we "love our neighbor as ourselves" if we don't indeed love our own selves?

As I swim deeper into this bit, I am brought back to community and our understanding of it time and time again. I had a conversation with a friend about this very whirlpool for me the other day, and when I articulated that I am sensing this 'imbalance' and need to focus on self, she said, "Don't we in America already focus on self too much? Don't we focus on the individual at the cost of the whole?" I sat for a few minutes and said, "I am not so sure. I think that truly we mask our community as individualism. For instance when I was teaching, it was daily that I saw a young girl who was strong and spoke about being who she was, no matter what anyone said walking away from some of that in order to be seen as 'within' the group. For she knew, just as we all know, if you are not seen as "in" you have less power and position." We argued over this for sometime, and then I said, "Truly I think individualism in the US is individualism through community, with the community being seen as the individual - not the person themselves being seen as an individual person."

Now, I am not stating that we need to be about individualism, but again, for those of you that know me well, you know what I am going to say right now - I think it is about balance and/or tension. How do we live in the tension of being at once the 'individual' person that God calls us into, and the communties of 'individuals' who come together to live out the community that God has already established through Jesus Christ.

There is more running through my mind right now - and I will lay that out in the days to come, but for now I will leave it there. Kinda teetering on the 'edge' as it were - because in that teetering is a tension and a balance - both of which need to inform each other!

What are you thinking?