Disillusionment is a good thing

It was nice to be back at the Poatina Morning Tea today and start to see people again.

Today I received a call about another person who might like to come into the village to be supported. One of Poatina’s gifts is the way it makes room for people who need an extra hand.

Its not always easy though, and sometimes we can get the priorities wrong.

I am enjoying wrestling with Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together”, and I found this bit particularly enlightening:

It is essential for Christian community that two things become clear right from the beginning. First, Christian community is not an ideal, but a divine reality; second, Christian community is a spiritual reality and not a psychic reality.

On innumerable occasions a whole Christian community has been shattered because it has lived on the basis of a wishful image. Certainly serious Christians who are put in a community for the first time will often bring with them a very definite image of what Christian communal life should be, and they will be anxious to realize it. But God’s grace quickly frustrates all such dreams. A great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves, is bound to overwhelm us as surely as God desires to lead us to an understanding of genuine Christian community.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live in a dream world even for a few weeks and to abandon ourselves to those blissful experiences and exalted moods that sweep over us like a wave of rapture. For God is not a God of emotionalism, but the God of truth.

Only the community that enters into the experience of this great disillusionment with all its unpleasant and evil appearances begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this moment of disillusionment comes over the individual and the community, the better for both.

However, a community that cannot bear and cannot survive such disillusionment, clinging instead to its idealized image, when that should be done away with, loses at the same time the promise of a durable Christian Community.
Sooner or later it is bound to collapse.

Every Human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive.

Those who love their dreams of Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest and sacrificial.

It’s good for me to face in me the idealism that can become a hindrance to really living faith. Once I have an idea in my head about the way things are supposed to be then I am no longer living by faith but living by intellectual construct.

That is certainly one of the challenges for me… how about you?

Bonhoeffer talks about disillusionment as a good thing. My dad often points out that if you are disillusioned, then it means you had illusions in the first place.

I don’t like disillusionment. I hate it. Its amazing how often in my life though, that the biggest times of growth have come after the biggest disillusionment. Perhaps thats not an accident!