Nouwen: Community

Nouwen: Community

“Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.” Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society, Daily Meditation

Beautiful Community

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament constantly reveal stories of how God continually calls us to community. This is what enlarges our view of God, keeps our God from being so small as we hear about the God of their understanding from others. In community is where we learn how our gifts our needed and how we don’t need to have all the gifts or be in control.  In community, we also learn about ourselves as we begin to see that the faults we so dislike in others are often also in ourselves, and in time we see how ugly they are in the ourselves as well and finally pray to be changed.

We also learn about forgiveness as we are forgiven. In community as we attempt to live in harmony we learn about reconciliation, pluralism, connection, a different kind of living than our society often teaches us. 

We live in a zero-sum world, where we are taught there is only so much food, so much resources, so many jobs, so much money, so much love to go around. If we give any of what we have away, if we give love away, we will lose it all, we will lose love and all the other that we have accumulated, and they will not return or be rejected, so we store our things in pods and warehouses and store up love inside of ourselves and don’t give it away. We fear if we share, we will lose what we have and not be able to have more.

 I learned about the fallacy of zero sum from some of my grandchildren. I once envied their grandparents who lived nearby while we lived far away. I feared there was only so much love my grandchildren could give, and their closer grandparents were going to get most of it. Oh, me. My grandchildren have taught me that they have much more love to give than I can fathom, and how wonderful it can be that they know and share the love of so many living grandparents. This is what we learn in community. We learn about God’s love without numbers, love without conditions, love that we cannot hold onto, but love that can only grow if it continually moves and flows in and out of us.

As I meet with spiritual friends I share what I have learned in community and offer living in community as one more way to keep that connection to God which so beautifully lives in others. In return, our community reflects to us the Christ, the God of our understanding which also dwells within ourselves as well.

Joanna  joannseibert.com

Nouwen: Being Ourselves

Nouwen: Being Ourselves

“We tend to compare ourselves constantly with others.We will never find our vocations by trying to figure out whether we are better or worse than others. We are good enough to do what we are called to do. We must be ourselves.” Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society Daily Meditations

This is the spiritual journey, trying to become the person we were created by God to be. I remember when I first heard this phrase of “becoming the person God created us to be”. It was in a prayer given at a football game by the new Junior Miss of Arkansas, Kristin Murray. Gail and Pat Murray’s daughter. How amazing to learn this from a high school senior, a teenager no less. I think of the years I spent trying to be the person my mother wanted me to be, my father wanted me to be, and finally the person I thought I should be in order to succeed in life, the doctor, the mother, the wife, the deacon I thought I should be, trying to follow the path of those I admired or not following the path of those I did not admire.

I wish I had taken Kristin Murray’s message to heart so long ago, but I was not ready for it at the time, but I am ready now. This is a message I try to ask often in spiritual direction as well, “Who is the person that God created you to be?” Getting to know that person is the pathway straight to the God, the Christ, within us.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Keller, Tillich, Lamott: Faith, Doubts

   Keller, Tillich, Lamott: Faith, Doubts

“Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one in the Presence of the Lord.”    Helen Keller,  Midstream: My Later Life

lots of light

How beautifully Helen Keller describes faith. Someone who is blind describes faith as light, a light in her heart. She also does not negate doubt. The words of Paul Tillich which Ann Lamott has popularized ring in my ears, “The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.”  Faith implies believing in something or being in relationship with something that is a mystery, that is not defined by our human understanding.  

Our rational minds can just take us so far in understanding faith.

When a person has difficulty with mystery, doubts move in. Our doubts can be stepping stones to a deeper faith as we read and share our doubts with others and learn and experience the mystery together.

 I so often speak with spiritual friends about doubt and reassure them that this is not unnatural or the enemy or unhealthy. I tell friends, “Let ‘s talk about the doubts. If you come to a place of unbelief, let me carry your faith, until you are ready to take it back. I am counting on you to do the same for me, when doubts overcome me.”

Joanna joannaseibert.com