30 May 2010
Scary community
Community can hurt
A few days ago I shared a little bit from Jean Vanier’s Community and Growth. I intend to put a few excerpts up over the next little while because it is a book that has really helped me understand more of the reality of community.
As I have said before, the dream behind Fusion is that little communities of faith can help the big community.
The following excerpt shows why making the dream a reality is not so straightforward:
When people enter community, especially from a place of loneliness in a big city or from a place of aggression and rejection, they find the warmth and the love exhilarating. This permits them to start lifting their masks and barriers and become vulnerable. They may enter into a time of communion and great joy.
But then too, as they lift their masks and become vulnerable, they discover that community can be a terrible place, because it is a place of relationship; it is the revelation of our wounded emotions and of how painful it can be to live with others, especially with some people. It’s so much easier to live with books and objects, television, or dogs and cats! It is so much easer to live alone and just do things for others, when one feels like it.
As we live with people daily, all the anger, hatred, jealousies and fear of others, also the need to dominate, to run away or to hide, seem to rise up from the wounds of our early childhood when we felt unloved or abandoned or over-protected. All the dirt seems to come up to the surface of our consciousness from the tomb in which it had been hidden. We begin to experience terrible anguish because people are clutching on to us, asking too much of us, or simply because their presence reminds us of authoritarian parents who did not have time to listen to us.
This bit of the book really stood out to me because I could identify with it so strongly. Like I have said in another post, I think we are built to exist in the context of community.
It is in community we grow the most, but we grow because we have to confront the things that would stop that growth, and thats not always easy!
There’s goes my longing to return to Poatina!! Seriously though, the alternative of alienation and masks, of just living on the surface, are not states to apsire to. I like what you said in an earlier post about it being love for our brothers and sisters that makes community work – not love for community in itself. Subtle but so true. And that is a daily discipline not just a nice idea.
Jo
May 30th, 2010 at 6:01 pmpermalink