communitas

the following is an article that i wrote a month or so ago and have reproduced here.  enjoy.

Communitas –

defined as: an intense community spirit, the feeling of great solidarity and togetherness. usually exists in the form of common living.

community is a buzz word these days, used in churches, neighbourhoods, alcoholics anonymous, weight watchers, etc. it seems that everyone wants a piece of belonging, of being greater than just themselves. it can be used to expose or hide our pain, give or take love, and to unite a group of similar people. do we really understand community though?

that’s where communitas comes into the picture. it’s the picture of togetherness, of a common spirit or goal, a group of people who are striving to meet one end as a group. it’s a group like this that is what i think true community was intended to be. when did community really start? as soon as God created adam, there was community in-between man and God. with the creation of eve, man and woman had intimate community. soon enough there would be community between multiple men of the earth. community is a part of who we were made to be; it’s been there from the start. so why do we seem to suck at living authentic community, or communitas?

community is so much more than meeting together once a week, seeing each other in passing, or watching a movie together. communitas embodies the type of community which is people sharing their lives together. it’s eating together, it’s laughing together, it’s crying together, it’s about being there. true community is about being intricately woven into a part of other people’s lives. it’s about knowing when your brother or sister is struggling and being able to just be with them. it’s not about having the right words or encouragement all the time, but it is about just being there. it’s about being vulnerable to the point of being brutally honest about you entire life with those involved in your community. when we’ve got secrets that are burning inside us and we can’t bring them up in our community, what is our community really worth?

ask yourself this question: am i tangible part of communitas right now? chances are that we might have a sliver of it, but we haven’t even come close to understanding what it’s about. it’s a long process, not one that can happen in a day or even a week, but we work at it.

in the past few days i’ve cried, literally wept at the feet of my brother, i’ve laughed until my side hurt, i’ve enjoyed pancakes, kraft dinner, and a hockey game with my brothers. tonight i’m going to go out and enjoy dinner with two of my brothers whom i’ve been able to get a slice of communitas with. i don’t know where we’re going, or when we’ll be back. but that truly doesn’t matter because i know i’m going to be with my brothers, and that’ll be enough for me. we’ve told great stories, are sure tell more as the day continues, and will continue to create great memories as we just work at being. i’ve experienced true vulnerability, true joy, and contentment in community. community has burned me this year, brutally backstabbed and let me down time and time again, but the bottom line is that my brotherhood of community has allowed me to experience so much more than it could have been. it’s not that i’ve reached the pinnacle of community, but the journey is bringing wholeness to my spirit that i didn’t know was possible.

God is there with us in the midst of community, and he’s laughing and weeping alongside us. when we have communitas, it means that no matter what comes our way, or what might break us down, there are always our brothers and sisters around us to just be with us.

so ask yourself again: am i a legitimate part of communitas? if you’re realizing that you’re not, then you’re missing out. our souls long for that sense of community, for the ability to be transparent and one with all of those around us. seek it out, wherever you’re at, sit down and break down the barriers in your community and see if you might find a real sense of communitas, of what it means to have an intense community spirit. you’re only going to be better off if you find it, and maybe it’s just what you’ve been crying out for and needing to have.

God has designed us for community, and it’s through the aspect of communitas that we’re really going to find out what we have been designed for. may we go now and be blessed by a little bit of communitas, a little bit of love, and a little bit of genuine togetherness. and then maybe we can just be.

rethinking love.

came across this article this past week and it struck a specific chord in my life and my conception of what love looks like. you see, i think i understand the concept that the definition of who God is, is love. what exactly this looks like is a big mystery for myself and i’m sure millions of people all around the world wonder about it too. what does the love of the perfect and blameless creator truly look like?

the reason i think that hardly any of us truly have it right, or have any part of it figured out, is because of how we truly go around living our lives. i mean, if i’m supposed to be a christian, one who is modeled after Christ, then shouldn’t i be showing His love in everything? i would even go as far as to say that love is the driving part of the christian life, and without it being the number one thing that we all live by, maybe we’re letting Him down. the author of the article, Jim Palmer, states that, “I’m finding myself is that virtually every aspect of knowing God is related to love.”

everything is woven in and out of love and it’s framework presents itself in all i should be doing and saying day-to-day. i mean, God’s own Son put love at the premier place when He established what your two highest commandments were: love the Lord your God, and love your neighbour as yourself. it’s all about love! i mean, we as human beings try to sit back and try to follow the rules of religion and of morality and then we go out in our world and try to follow five million different conflicting ideas of how we should deal with everyone and everything. we tire ourselves out by trying to fulfill everything to a ‘t’ and then we should be satisfied that we achieved the precedent or followed the law. christianity becomes a system and a religion full of achievements and standards that we try to reach, and if i get to a certain point then surely i am closer to God and i am holier than thou.

this kind of christianity tires me out. it’s incredibly hard to keep track of rules and regulations, standards and morals, and to monitor my own personal holiness. but isn’t that the whole norm of our culture and this world? to try to set up boundaries and rules by which we can confine everything and keep it in a nice little neat box? yep, we get thinking that we have a total grasp on what it means to be like Christ, that we have a control valve on the whole situation. it seems like that might be the problem with what we see as a fall-out and abandoning of the church by supposed Christ-followers. how often do i walk into church to see fellow believers, or see my peers during the week trying to show how they measure up or how they’ve achieved a greater level of faith. i’m sick and tired of everyone trying to measure up and trying to show that they have “arrived.”

this is not what i want my faith to look like. i want to know God on a deep and personal level, that i might be able to have an idea of what it means to love like it hurts, to love fully and recklessly. I want to be able to say that i loved to the best of my ability and to know that that is what He wanted from me. I’m not going to get there by following all the rules or the standards, or to try to measure up with the front-row, big Bible doting brother who yells “amen!” every minute of the service. it’s not that he’s got it wrong, but that i don’t want to feel like i have to achieve that. if I’m going to draw closer to God and see Him in everything it’s going to be because of love.

love is not going to be glamorous, and it’s not going to get the accolades and honours we might think would be cool. instead, we’ll be the one that getting down and dirty with the “outcasts”, the “nobodies”, and even the “uncool”. love also means that we’ll be spending time relating with the rich and the famous, and everyone in-between. love is not something that should be limited, for God gave us the greatest example in being there for everyone, sinners and all, that needed to know what love was about. if anything, it’s going to be the ones who are the lowest that are going to be the ones who might grasp this the most. love is unconditional, unchanging, unimaginable until you yourself feel it.

so enough with the rules, enough with feeling that i’m not good enough because i haven’t totally measured up to the religious. instead, it’s time to love, and love fully; to show what it means to be changed because the Father who created us loved us even though we are flawed. and oh that this love might make a difference in those who see it, that we might reflect God’s perfect image of love. it’s not going to be perfect, and surely we’ll stumble along the way, but hey, it was never the perfect that needed love in the first place. and this is love: to know that God loves me and that that’s enough for me.

as Palmer put it at the end of the article, when love becomes our anthem and our life, “anything is possible.”