Lesson 4: Radical Individualism
I am having a terrible time writing this series. I have studied, examined, and lived Christian community for such a long time that I do not know where to begin. As many of you know, my partners, Ed Keyser, Tim Braband, and I very consciously tried to build a congregation based on the vulnerability of bodily present, face-to-face human relationships. That included paying attention to the smallest details. For example, we did not use titles. No matter what the cost, we absolutely never would have had an automated phone answering service. Besides that, I have worked with all sorts of small groups and participated in a monastic community. Now I am trying to compress a host of ideas into a small number of one-page lessons.
Perhaps the best plan is simply to begin flinging out thoughts and go on until I reach the bottom of the page. Sister Joan Chittister can provide somewhat of a framework. She thinks the work done by the leaders of the monastic movement offers direction. Remember the movement began with hermit monks trying to follow Jesus fully in every way. St. Basil in the 4th century was the first to draw up designs for communal living. He observed the Christian life can never be solitary, because you need to wash someone else’s feet.
St. Benedict, in the 6th century, drew up a Rule for living together that acknowledged God always speaks to us through other people. Every person we meet is an opportunity for God to manifest self. Everyone who knocks at the door is to be considered as Christ himself. Although the abbot makes the final decision on all matters, he does so only after consulting individually with every person in the community, and he begins with the youngest member.
This is about as far as you can get from the modern technological society. The Rule makes relationships a priority in which we share our gifts for the benefit of the group. As our present presidential election makes clear, modern society is based on a winner-loser perspective. Everything is geared for using technology and techniques to get what we want, usually enough money to do whatever we please. Benedictines following the Rule can understand why studies report people in our society have fewer friends than people had in the past, and why they indicate they trust others less and less. People who compete, rather than share themselves, their minds, their insights, and their time with one another, destroy community with anyone except those on their team. And in our world that relies on technological systems and money more than human relationships, people are always changing teams.
Besides that, denying community is to deny reality. No one is self-made any more. We depend on one another for just about everything from the time we get out of bed until the time we return. Listening to what others think and say enables us to see the real world as it is and not as we wish it to be. So the Rule counsels that “we listen with the ears of heart” to all people and all things until we really hear people we love and come to love people we despise.
This involves finding out who we really are as well. If we let other people be themselves and stop trying to control them, we soon find out a lot about ourselves. We discover our own shortcomings once we stop looking for the shortcomings of other people. In fact, the Rule claims that community is designed to change us, not other people. All my studies show that this transformative aspect is absent in the technological society. All that can be promised is that those who are needy will someday have it as good as those who have all they need now. and since this is nonsense, no significant change takes place. In the Beloved Community, as Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us, the goal is always to makes our enemies our friends.
Christian community is an attempt to live out the love Jesus shares with us. When I ask thoughtful people what is the greatest problem is in modern society, most frequently they reply “radical individualism.” The rule offers a way to overcome this crazy self-absorption all around us.
Oh yes, community also assures us that we shall be caught if we fall. If we are all in this together, then we all look out for one another.
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Excellent!