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Thoughts on Community Life
Alan Creech

It is a refreshing thing to hear him speak in this way about community. there seems to be a freedom boiling up in him and a desire to see that freedom lived out. A tiredness of old. A longing for new. This is good. I know this.

Not that everything "old" is bad, or just because something is "new" (to us) it is therefore good. This is obviously not so at all. He was dealing with what he had seen and experienced over the years there and how it affected him and the others. I think he was beginning to see, now that he was somewhat withdrawn from the every-day life of the community, some of the negative aspects that perhaps he didn¹t have time to see or notice before. It¹s what I¹ll call "Spiritual Glaucoma" ­ a fogging of the eyes so as to see dimly and without clarity. Most of us suffer from this malady to some degree or another. this is what it seems like he is talking about in this community. Things have been going a certain way for a long time. We have to go here and do that in this place or at that time, and there is an atmosphere created by this frustrative pace in which we simply pass each other by. The community has no Community!

As he said, "this is stupid!" We go about trying to live in community and a good deal of what we are doing actually cancels out any chance of "real community" developing at all. Now, Big Tom was obviously talking about a monastic community, but this very easily translates to any local Christian community or "church", whether Catholic, Protestant, or somewhere in between.

We have all very much borne the brunt of over-institutionalization in the Body of Jesus. We have in many ways sold ourselves back into slavery. We have been rescued from a state of brokenness and disunity with others and with God. We now have the joyous right, priveledge, and ability to live in this union first with God and then, as an expression of that, with one another. In fact, we can¹t fully experience our union with God unless we also live in community with our brothers and sisters in a real way.

He used the term "free wheeling" several times in this lecture, which I found amusing ­ and cool! He was clearly, although a "hermit", having quite a bit of contact with the outside world. He was seeing something happen in our culture, in the young people. A longing to "be real". A desperate yearning to escape a facade of life and relationship and live without constraint. These kids were seeing the artificial lives their parents were living. They saw with disdain the manufactured "relationships" the older generation had, and the wanted to go deeper.

Merton called for more openness and spontaneity in relationships. This was good and would allow the Love and Will of God to flow more freely in their midst ­ and so it is! We must break down the walls that are dividing us. Not just denominationally, racially, doctrinally ­ these are easy! What we desperately need is to allow God to live through and in us all, simultaneously, the communion He has with Himself. This, though, requires us to open ourselves to each other, to get uncomfortably involved in one another¹s lives. this terrifies us!

All this is very close to me as I work in ministry as one involved in the revolution of Cell Groups in the church. This vision of real Christian Community is something I see as utterly important and crucial to the proper functioning of Christ¹s Body on earth. As Merton saw things in his own body being prohibitive to community, so I have seen, along with many others, the crippled state of the Church without the proper interaction of it¹s members with one another.

We go to "church", attend mass, go to choir, sit in chapter, etc., etc., ad infinitum ­ all in our shells with little or no meaningful contact with our own body parts! We may still be breathing but that is not life!

I was very encouraged to hear Louis speak about these things and in this way. Undoubtedly I will use this encouragement to encourage others in this area. I hear God saying it now in myriads of ways, and even in a voice from the past, "We are all one! Let us live then as one!"

AMEN

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