Two readings and some comments on community – Mary K.

 

 

            I have two readings and some comments to share with you this afternoon.  The first reading hearkens back a long way; it is an ancient story from the Jewish tradition, which explains how the legendarily wise King Solomon came to choose the site for the Tabernacle which would hold the Ark of the Covenant.

            In the days of King Solomon, there lived two brothers who reaped wheat in the fields of Zion.  One night, in the dark of the moon, the elder brother gathered several sheaves of his harvest and left it in his brother’s field, saying to himself, “My brother has seven children.  With so many mouths to feed, he could use some of my bounty.”  And he went home.

            A short time later, the younger brother slipped out of his house, gathered several sheaves of his wheat, and carried them into his brother’s field, saying to himself:  “My brother is all alone, with no one to help him harvest.  So I’ll share some of my wheat with him.”

            When the sun rose, each brother was amazed to find he had just as much wheat as before!

            The next night, they paid each other the same kindness, and still woke to find their stores undiminished.

            But on the third night, they met each other as they carried their gifts into each other’s fields.  Each threw his arms around the other and shed tears of joy for his brother’s goodness.

            And when Solomon heard of their love, he built the Temple of Israel there, on the place of brotherhood.

 

I find it very significant that Solomon chose to construct one of the most important buildings in religious history not on a site dictated by a deity, or where a miracle had occurred, but in a place made sacred by great human goodness.

But he was following an impulse that we all know and recognize, which is that the presence of community makes a time and place sacred.  I’ve been part of several non-church communities at different times in my life which nevertheless created sacred time and space, so important and nurturing and sustaining were they to their members.

To my view, when those communities were together, they were having church, although some of the participants might strongly object to it being called that.

I have some examples.

I grew up in a theatrical community in Houston.  Few people in that community went to any formal church, but we were committed to each other.  Everyone knew everyone, with their strengths and eccentricities/peculiarities; we ate and played and cried together, and when we were together, there was a sense of release, of trust and freedom and safety.  It was sacred space.

In the trappings of hard work and late hours, dirty surroundings, fast food and impossible deadlines and enormous stress, we were joyous (and grateful).  And putting on the show was for many of us of secondary importance to being together.

Whenever I go into a theatre still, especially if it’s mostly dark and there are only a few people in it, I feel a tingle up my spine and my heart expands, and I’m in my childhood home once again.

A number of years later when my husband and I had met and married and had begun to have children, our family was invited to a campout with a number of other families.  They had all known each other for along time.  We were there on probation:  Those twice-yearly campouts were so precious to these people that they greeted newcomers with a little bit of caution.

However, by the end of the first day, we’d clearly been welcomed into the family.  And our reception by that community was expansively loving.  In that atmosphere of perfect safety, our older children would disappear off into the woods with other kids for several hours at a time, and other adults would carry the baby around, and hand him off from person to person, and sing him little songs and talk to him, and Martin and I would play dominoes or music or help fix the communal meals and help clean up.  Everyone’s possessions got all mixed up together and the kids slept over in each other’s tents, and we all sang singalongs for long periods of time.  And then finally after two and half days, everyone regathered their possessions and sort of drifted home, tired but deeply replenished by that experience.

The rest of the world seemed less draining just knowing that that community was there.  We had a little church service on Sunday morning, but really it wasn’t any different in feeling from the rest of the weekend.  When we were there, we were all in church (together).

And most recently, some close friends invited our family to a Wednesday night get-together with the unusual name of Body Choir.  It’s an intentional spiritual dance community.  The kids and I went; Martin was out of town.  We spent two hours in non-verbal expression to a carefully chosen program of music.  It was really interesting.

It began and ended with a circle where people could share their names and experiences if they chose.  The participants find this two-hour stretch of purely physical communication transforming.  The children were asking me even before we got to the car when we could go again, and when I told them that our friends couldn’t be there the following week, one of my daughters said, “Oh, that doesn’t matter.  We’ve got family there.  Everybody is family there.”  The children felt that sense of community, and we’ve been back.  It is a moving (no pun intended) and joyous parable for life:  30 to 50 people listening to the same music and responding in their individual ways, each dancing his or her own way, and each contributing, consciously or not, to the larger, perfect whole.

To look at it one way, everybody who has a real community has a church. 

As Emerson wrote, “Men will worship something.”  They might not call it a church; in fact, some of my friends would fiercely reject the word.  And not every group becomes a community.  But whether it’s at a union meeting, or a chess club, or working on a play or camping out or dancing, if the people come together in gratitude and commitment to each other, with a sense of belonging, feeling loving and loved, feeling safer and better understood, then that is a community, and it is holy.

My second reading, from Louise Cowan’s Poetic Form and Place, states,

“Place is indeed, then, sacred to us.  But our real place is community.  Place is not nature or manmade objects, but community, a group or groups of people united by a common endeavor and by love and trust.  Wherever community appears, spirit descends.  We may have to make our own communities wherever we can find them.  We cannot always choose our place.  But we can from time to time return to our roots, to sacred things in our lives, and know the place for the first time.”