From Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together:
"Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God's grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves….
"He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
"God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious…."
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Rereading the opening of this text today, I was struck by how applicable it is to the faith communities of which I'm a part.
Evangelicals – I meet many people who claim to be Christians but don't go to church, for whatever the reason. They are the ultimate expression of Protestantism and evangelical "Me and Jesus"-ism, often using any excuse to avoid Christian community.
Catholics – for those stuck in the '70s and '80s, with the liturgical focus on 'the community' that produced all those awful, banal, and, frankly, heretical hymns singing our own praises, this book shows from where true community comes, something I've said numerous times before. Community is only formed by group focus on one thing. For the church, that is worship of God. Vertical, God-centered and Eucharistic-centered worship is the only way to produce the horizontal community these people long for. Collective navel gazing at 'community' only ends up turning community into an idol and, ultimately, destroying the very thing we are trying to gain. C.S. Lewis discusses this in Mere Christianity (I think) when he talks about putting first things first, right ordering of goods. One only gets lesser goods by keeping the ultimate good first. To place anything else first only leads one to lose that for which one grasps.
2 comments:
"Vertical, God-centered and Eucharistic-centered worship is the only way to produce the horizontal community we long for."
See how a slight word change can chage the tone of a sentence from exclusionary to inclusive?
That's pretty telling, Bob. But fundamentally I agree with Matthew to a startling extent. I think I'd like to read more of the Bonhoeffer book. Could we look at that for our group sometime? PS, this is Sepha, but I want to be more anonymous on the web, so I'm going with "FiliaPrima" as my moniker. If I wanted to post something and become a "contributor" how could I go about that? Do I need to ask you, Mr. Calamia as our fearless leader?
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