Community Life

"If you have come to help me (or be helped by me), you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together to be free."

-- Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, 1970, often attributed to Lila Watson, who has said she was "not comfortable being credited for something that had been born of a collective process" - the attribution here is the one she accepts.

"We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something."

-- Sandra Day O'Connor

"So long as we receive and eat our daily bread together as equals, we shall have sufficient, even for the least. Not until one person desires to secure his own bread, hoarding it for himself, does hunger and poverty ensue, and it isn't solvable by condescending handouts."

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together

"We are all longing to go home to a place we feel we've never been — a place half-remembered and half-envisioned, that we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own unique access to (His) power. Community means strength that joins our strength, to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of acceptance and healing. A circle of true and lasting friends. Someplace where we can be free and learn to take the light of freedom out into the rest of our lives."

-- Starhawk

"It takes true community to really know an individual. Christians commonly say that they want to 'get to know Jesus better.' But you will never be able to do that by yourself. You must be deeply involved (as an equal) in community life, with strong relationships of accountability, love, and reciprocal service and teaching, and you must struggle through conflict and hardship together, learning new things about yourself, as well as new distinctions about what it is to be a human being, and along the way gather a few useful new communication and relational tools, and, most importantly, learn to stay no matter what, and only if you are actually a part of such committed community life - seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus, inviting his loving spirit into every conversation -will you ever be in a position to lay your whole newly discovered self down and let him live for and through you."

-- Timothy Keller, in The Prodigal God

I love the work I get to do one on one, connecting deeply with another person in a place of love, openness, and truth, but my life is more expansively created and I am made most whole in community life, for I am so much more than the me I experience through the single lens of my own consciousness, or the me that gets reflected back to me by one relationship that I can sometimes manipulate and control (or at least suffer the illusion that I can), but in the space where I can't fully see myself from all the angles, through certain other lenses I'm not even aware of, the place of simple being observed by many, here is a creative space that is so much more than my own invention, where we all are co-creators of each other, and when God is in the center of that, invited in to cleanse and purify, what gets created is beautiful beyond description.

The hallmark of Love Machine as "Ekklesia," as "Parakaleo," as "Tuwi" (a cry of shared pain that is Totally Unconcerned With Itself)

"Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: 'He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community.' A community is not an abstract ideal with its own needy identity. We are not striving for perfect community, for promoting community's virtues, for branding community as our own. Community is not an ideal; it is people; it is you and me. In community, we are called to love people just as they are, with all of their wounds and gifts, not as we would want them to be. Community means giving people space, and protecting that space, which helps them to grow. It means also receiving from them so that we too can grow. It is giving each other freedom; it is giving each other trust; it is confirming but also challenging each other. We give dignity to each other by the way we listen to and honor each other, in a spirit of trust and of dying to oneself, so that we may all live, grow, and give."

-- Jean Vanier, in From Brokenness to Community

Community emerges and grows naturally out of our shared brokenness and pain, focused on people, not growth or status, unconcerned with itself as an object, really, birthing hope and life as its primary unfolding. It is about to "show up" once again, and powerfully this morning, in support of Rhyder (during his challenging birth in Clear Lake) and his parents, Dave & Michelle. There are no words to describe the sacredness of this perilous occasion that is also filled with such unlimited possibility for God to do what He does, in ways way beyond our understanding. Please pray for our understanding and appreciation of the miracles about to unfold.

The love involved here is through the roof and scary as all get out. As Henri Nouwen once said, "Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering. But if we want to avoid the suffering, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is so much stronger than fear, life so much stronger than death, hope so much stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking and do it extravagantly, letting it flow through us beyond our comfort and convenience."

Love emerges and flows naturally out of God's grace in healing us, together. They go hand in hand, community and loving, so I will repeat Saturday's main quote from Sri Chinmoy in my message entitled, "Love in Abundance - the real thing vs. the imposter," here to reinforce the point and to distinguish between our feeble human attempts at loving and God's overpowering victory in loving us and making that love so readily and absolutely available, especially at scary times such as these.



"Dear sisters and brothers, I wish to share with you my humble philosophy, which is based on love, but not just any love. We know that there are two types of love: human love and Love Divine. In human love, what we actually try to do is to possess the many without caring for the One, the true Source. But if we do not possess the Source, then the many cannot be of any help to us or us to them. If there is no root, then how will the tree grow? How will we be able to claim the branches or the flowers and leaves as our very own? With the Divine Love, we go first to the One, the Source, and from there we go to the many. We become one with the root, and then we grow into the tree, which will manifest itself through the branches and leaves, the flowers and fruits. Divine Love is the song of multiplicity in unity.
In human love there is demand or, at least, expectation. Very often we start with demand, and when a higher wisdom dawns we no longer demand, but still we expect something from others. We convince ourselves that this expectation is justified. Since we have done something for others - offered our love - we feel it is quite legitimate to expect something in return.

But in Divine Love there is no such thing as demand or expectation. In Divine Love we just give what we have and what we are. What we have and what we are is dedicated service. In the human life, before we give our love, we try to discover love in others - that is, their love for us. In the Divine Life, before we give our love to others, we try to discover Love in its reality and integrality within ourselves. Only then are we in a position to offer love to others. At first our satisfaction dawns when we feel that those to whom we offer our love accept it wholeheartedly. But there is an even higher form of Divine Love when we go beyond this feeling, and give love just for the sake of giving. We give, and even if our love is not accepted, we do not mind. We shall go on giving, for we are all love, because our Source is all Love.

In human love there is not only demand and expectation, but there is something even worse: withdrawal. First we demand, then we expect. When our expectation is not fulfilled, we sometimes try to withdraw from the person to whom we have offered our love. In Divine Love, it is never like that. With Divine Love we try to become one with the weakness, imperfection, and bondage of others. Although we have inner freedom, we use this inner freedom not to lord it over others, but to become one with them, consciously one with their imperfections. In this way we can understand them and serve them at their own level, with a view to transforming their imperfections as our Source transforms ours. It is actually Love (vs. ourselves) that is doing the transformation work in both places.

The capacity of human love is so limited that we cannot expand ourselves (due to a scarcity mentality) and so we totally embrace (in an unconscious attempt to consume) another. There is bound to be a feeling of supremacy while doing this. I shall love you, no doubt, but I wish to remain an inch higher than you, with you 'needing' my love. On that condition I shall love you. The superior loves the inferior because he is satisfied to some extent with his position in this relationship. The inferior very often loves the superior because of his insecurity. So love binds them at the place of their limitation and gives them both some sense of satisfaction. But in Divine Love there is no such thing as superiority and inferiority. Divine Love always gives itself freely and wholeheartedly. Divine Love gets satisfaction only by offering itself totally and unconditionally. In Dvine Love, we come to notice that the personal and the impersonal perfectly go together. There is a balance between the two. The personal in us enters into the vast, which is impersonal; and the impersonal in us enters into the personal to manifest its unmanifested Reality, Divinity, and Immortality. In human love, the personal and the impersonal are two strangers; worse, they are at daggers drawn. The personal and the impersonal at best try to reach a compromise, but this compromise brings no satisfaction at all; in the very depth of human love, there is always a rivalry and competition between the two, and therefore no hope. On rare occasions, the personal says to the impersonal, which is inside the human being, 'Let us alternate our reality, our height, our wisdom, our capacity. This moment you stand up and I shall remain seated; the next moment I shall stand up and you will sit.'

In human love, very often the physical mind, the doubting mind, the suspecting mind, comes to the fore. But in Divine Love, we see only the loving heart, the surrendering heart, the all-beckoning heart. The mind loves a reality because it sees the reality according to its own understanding and vision of itself. But the heart loves a reality because it sees the reality in the reality's own form. The heart becomes inseparably one with the reality, with the very existence of that reality as it is, both inner and outer. It sees the living breath of the reality in its own form and shape; it sees the body and soul of the reality all together.

In human love, the lover and the beloved are two separate persons. The lover is running toward the beloved, and when he reaches the beloved he finds his satisfaction, if only temporarily, in a fleeting fantasy way. In Divine Love, the lover and the beloved are one and inseparable. In Divine Love, the Lover is the Supreme and the Beloved is the Supreme. In human love, we feel that satisfaction lies somewhere else - not within us, but in somebody else. But in Divine Love, satisfaction is found nowhere else but in ourselves. The Lover and the Beloved are one and the same - the Supreme dwelling within, the Supreme flowing to us, and the Supreme outside us waiting to receive itself. When we speak of our 'self' as the Divine Lover or Beloved, we have to know that this is the 'Self' which is both the One and the many. This Self, the Supreme, finds its satisfaction only when it gets a glimpse of God's Reality, Infinity, Eternity, and Immortality in the many. This 'Self' is the One, and it wants to see and feel its Reality in the many.

Love is duty. In our human life we see duty as something mechanical, lifeless, forced - something thrust upon us from the outside. But in the Divine Life, duty is something full of opportunity and power. At every second an opportunity dawning for us to expand our life's consciousness, our life's reality, our life's healing, our life's delight. So, in the divine Life we welcome duty, for it increases our capacity and potentiality and expands the dream of our divine, unhorizoned Reality.

Life is the lesson of Love. Love is the lesson of Life. When we study Life's lesson in our human life, the lesson is composed of fear, doubt, anxiety, worry, and frustration. But in the Divine Life, we see that Love is the lesson not only of Life, but also for Life - for the Life that is everlasting, ever-illumining, and ever-fulfilling.

A Divine Lover is he who believes in the divine miracle. A human miracle is something that feeds our curiosity, something that lasts for a fleeting second. But the divine miracle is the elevation of consciousness. To raise somebody else's consciousness, to raise humanity's consciousness even an iota is the true divine miracle. The conscious help the divine Lover gives to the seeker performs this divine miracle.

We are of God the eternal Love and we are for God the eternal Love. We are of God the infinite Love and we are for God the infinite Love. Eternity is the Source of the Silence life; and Infinity is the message of the sound life. From the One we came and for the many we exist. This is the real message of Divine Love. We are of the One and we are for the many -the many in the One. This is the quintessence of Love Divine."

-- Sri Chinmoy


Here's to God using Rhyder to take us all for a loving ride. We're ready, Father!

Belonging and community

"Today I want to talk to you about belonging and about community. As followers of Jesus, we are called to look at Jesus and see how he lived and moved among people. First of all he called people into a deep relationship of communion with himself. He looked at them - deeply into them - and really saw them, loved them right where they were, and said: 'Will you come and be with me? Will you enter into a deep friendship with me?' And then he would say: 'If you want to enter into that relationship, if you accept and receive my love, you must own and be responsible for your bold choice, and accept whatever losses ensue. If you follow me, then you will most likely have to lose some things you previously valued greatly. You might have to lose some money or material goods, another person's affections or approval, a group's or organization's inclusion, and/or some other powerful attachments you have.' That is the first thing: it is a relationship that implies a hard choice - really choosing, following a call, and accepting loss which will imply grieving and pain.

Then Jesus calls those who accept this communion of love with him into community, to live and be with others who also have been called and who have accepted the call. This is where even deeper grief begins. I love to see how human and 'like us' the first disciples of Jesus were. As soon as his back was turned (and sometimes right in front of him) they started to bicker and fight among themselves: 'Who is the most important to you, Master, who is the best and most deserving of your love?' Community is the place where are revealed all the darkness and anger, jealousies and rivalry hidden in our hearts.

Community is a place of pain, because it is a place of loss, a place of conflict, and a place of death. But it is also a place of joy through redemption and resurrection. For finally, as soon as the community of disciples is truly 'born' and comes fully 'alive,' Jesus sends them out into the world: 'Go. Go and announce the good news to the poor, but go with nothing - not even two pairs of sandals. Don't take two tunics, don't take any money, don't take any food. Your money, food, and clothes don't matter. Go with nothing (including no need for ego satisfaction or emotional self-indulgence).

Go poorly and do the impossible.'

What is the 'impossible?' It is total liberation. To liberate people from the demons of fear, of loneliness, of hatred, and of egoism that shackle them. To liberate people so that they also can love, heal, and liberate others. But in order to do that you must go in poverty and experience the life of God flowing within your own flesh. You will give life but a life that flows from the heart of God. You will bring people to new life, a new hope that is not grounded in fairness or retribution for others' wrongs. The mystery of community lies between the call of Jesus to communion with him, 'Come and be with me,' and the sending off to announce the good news of love, to give life to other people, as the way to your own life."

-- Jean Vanier, in From Brokenness to Community

"When people say of us: 'See how they love one another' in the midst of such chaos, confusion, and pain, they catch a glimpse of the Kingdom of God that Jesus announced and are drawn to it as by a magnet. In a world so torn apart by strife, shallowness, rivalry, rage, competition, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that relentlessly bridges all divisions and heals all wounds."

-- Henri Nouwen

Love Machine communities, this is so for us! Chew well and fully digest. As you can see, all is exactly as it is meant to be (including our occasional, if not frequent, sense of external, as well as inner, conflict and total overwhelm), given who we say we are, what we say we believe, and what we are committed to with our whole hearts and lives. We are to break out of our own bondage and "go forth poorly and do the impossible," which is about bringing liberation to trapped minds and bodies everywhere, starting with our own, returning ourselves and others to our childlike entitlement, climbing back down the ladder (dying to our worldly ambition) to fully reclaim our true selves. Here's to our collective liberation and full-out celebration, and to the courage it takes to walk such a (at least, initially) perilous path. We must boldly begin and continue relentlessly with the end in mind. It looks like this.




What does it mean, this invitation to dance, play, and sing as - to enter the kingdom of God like - to reclaim the full entitlement of - a child?

Well, it means that we get to explore freely together like wildly enthusiastic children, while on a bold adventure of our Father's choosing, while holding each other's hands, helping each other put our fears and pain at His feet, thereby not ever being stopped by or stuck in them, looking to Him for comfort, encouragement, guidance, and relief in the hard times, while offering these to others without heaviness or hesitation. We receive the good news by proclaiming the good news. And as we boldly explore and loudly exclaim, we get to collectively hold His hand and know deep in our hearts that we are really and truly safe, forever.

We know that our Father loves us and will always do what is best for us. We know that our Father will protect us from all real harm and guide us in the best way to go, every single time. All we have to do is hold His hand and do what He tells us to do and we will have fun along the way, too, whether we know what we're doing or where we're going at the moment!We won't get so scared that we hesitate for even an instant. We'll embrace the trip down strange new streets and to whole new lands as nothing but great adventure, with full and bursting confidence in our Father. We will celebrate life in Him, without fearing death in the world! That's how Jesus said we should be; like children who have faith in their Father.