Hemlock Lane

Enter in Pieces
As discussions unfolded a while back on Martha’s and Nathan’s blogs, I found myself overcome with myriad thoughts and feelings about the experiment of community life. First a confession: About a year or so ago, there was a moment where I became aware of an impending personal loss of innocence in my church/community experience. I knew that cynicism hovered (as it always has) in my periphery, but hoped against hope that I wouldn’t encounter it there. My belief in the possibility of a truly communal way of life was in peril, mainly because of my own idealistic definitions. I hadn’t left space for the debris that I’ve come to find is both inevitable and integral to shared life. Just as the child in pursuit of creative expression must be allowed a certain amount of contained chaos, so the people in pursuit of community—a creative pursuit—must be allowed it too.
Now, confronted with the mess, my unrealistic standards and resulting cynicism, I find myself squirming. An elder woman recently told me I’ve discovered “Christians,” are human and therefore not immune to the human condition.
There’s been much talk lately about authentic community and compassion. As Greg spoke recently on this subject, I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Is it a stretch to respond compassionately to the needs of the starving and the orphaned? Who isn’t moved by the photos from Africa, the stories from Russia? But what about the people right beside us? What about those we claim to know but don’t know at all? What about those we’ve gossiped about? Those we’ve judged? Those we’ve shunned? Those we’ve denied? Where’s our heart for those we are attempting to share life with? Have we taken off the skin, the mask, the costume of our old selves to be replaced with the new self, “which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator.”?
The first time I visited the Bridge Community, Greg read from Colossians: “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another.” I was so undone by this simple directive that I spent the rest of the evening frantically thumbing through the New Testament to find the verse. I called a friend, a lifelong believer, to ask her where it was and she didn’t know. At the time I had no biblical knowledge, but I connected deeply to the idea of bearing one another. It was my first softening to the story of God. “Bearing” implies discomfort. It hints at effort and tolerance, which any parent knows to be a form of love. For more than a decade on and off I sought the true spirit of God (looking for love in all the wrong places) yet never did my various dabblings, other than the Big Book of AA, ever touch on this idea of bearing.

“Bear WITH one another.”
And it’s in the “with” that all the trouble lies, isn’t it? When we truly live “with” one another, bear “with” one another, lose, gain, grow and transform together, we feel one another’s pain and compassion emerges.
At times maybe we carry each other’s emotional load. And when we don’t want to, when we resist the needs of the other, we see ourselves and this knowledge of ourselves, reflected back to us from the perfect love that is Jesus, ultimately breaks us. And it is only in the petri dish of community(in its various forms) that this truth is cultured and brought to light.
But is there a catch? If compassion is formed through our continuing knowledge of Christ and can only be tested in the regular company of others then isn’t a certain vulnerability on the part of the other (and ourselves inasmuch as we too are the other) necessary for the process? In our attempt to follow Jesus and therefore do as Jesus, are we missing the point? Maybe He isn’t asking us to be like Him, but rather to fully embrace our humanity through the realization that we cannot be like Him. Because maybe it is there that compassion is born. And it also in that space that we are refined by Him.

If I allow myself to show you my brokenness and confess it to you, humility opens the door to compassion allowing me to respond to with love to your brokeness when you confess your brokenness to me.

And so the confession begins as the masks come off and compassion takes hold. We “bear” with one another. We bear together the beauty and pain of life, the beauty and ugliness of ourselves and we are transformed both individually and communally as there is no separation.
So, maybe He’s not asking us to somehow emulate Him, but rather to be truthful and raw before one another that compassion may be stirred and love itself unmasked.
We are not the Christ or even Christlike but we are the touchable Christ in that He may be and wants to be encountered through us and through the “us,” and amid the reality of the “us.”