Day 18. Experiencing Life Together
Thomas Hawkins is an author of many of our lay speaking courses and a favorite of mine, especially with topics dealing with community, small groups and hospitality. I commend to you the excerpt below:
1There Is No Life Apart From Community
Nothing in all creation exists apart from community. At the most basic physical level, all forms of matter seek relationship, connection, and communion. Subatomic particles are attracted to other particles. Microbes combine into larger organisms. Galaxies emerge from primordial swirling gas clouds into coherent shapes.
What is true for atoms and microbes is true for us. People grow and find nourishment through the giving and returning of attention and recognition. This flow of care and concern moves from us to others and from others to us. When this rhythm breaks, our lives are broken by alienation and separation. When others fail to acknowledge and recognize us, we feel cut off and alone. Experiences of communion, on the other hand, bridge the spaces that divide us. The need to be known, to have our experience understood and accepted by another, is meat and drink to the human heart.
Life is the gift of community. There is no life that is not life in community. Our lives are gifts that come to us from relationships in community. Nothing is more personal and intimate than our names. Yet we do not name ourselves. We receive our names in the midst of a community that names and claims us. A pastor holds us, pours water on our foreheads, and says, "Mary, I baptize you."
If we trace our "natural talents" back to their ultimate source, we discover communities of neighbors, family, mentors, friends, or teachers. None of us are self-made creatures. We are constituted through the communities that have embraced us, loved us, and nurtured us.
1Thomas R. Hawkins, Cultivating Christian Community, (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 2004), page 6.
Blessings,
Rick
PS. I've added a couple of links that you may enjoy. "Song of Deborah" is a daily devotional by a gifted lay speaker, Deb Spaulding. "The Problem with God" is written by the pastors of La Croix UMC, Cape Girardeau, MO, and tackles the most difficult questions about God and faith: faith and doubt, theism and atheism, abortion, war, suffering, Scriptural authority to name a few.
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