THERE IS A mind-boggling connection between creation and chaos. This unexpected synergy applies not only to creation's emergence from the primordial chaos but is mysteriously operational when people's spiritual foundations have crumbled. It is revealing that the Genesis creation accounts were woven together, as the poetry of the dispossessed, during a time of the exile and crisis of faith. Disorientation in communities and in individuals has a peculiar way of resulting in an inspired movement toward creativity and re-orientation.
When we at Watershed were flailing around, wrestling God, shadowboxing in the post ‘91 period, many of us felt on the verge of spiritual and emotional destruction. We reached out and to our surprise we discovered something that promised to bind us together and provide a foundation. We were like those of whom the Psalmist sings,
Some went down to the sea in ships,doing business on the great waters;they saw the deeds of the LORD,his wondrous works in the deep.For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,which lifted up the waves of the sea.They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;their courage melted away in their evil plight;they reeled and staggered like drunken menand were at their wits' end.Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,and he delivered them from their distress.He made the storm be still,and the waves of the sea were hushed.Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,and he brought them to their desired haven.- Psalm 107:23-30
Covenant in community came forward as an anchor-like promise, a possibility for genuine security in fellowship. We realized that in order to survive spiritually, we needed to depend on our union around a common faith. This was hardly a new idea for us. We had often spoken of our need to stand-alone together but never before were we required to place our faith in this notion like we did in the dark winter of ‘91. Before this watershed, we had a translative idea about the nature of covenant in community but we did not have the transformative power to put our faith into practice. We hadn't grasped the nature of the spiritual adhesive that would bind us together in community. Our experience of fellowship at Cornerstone and our first chaotic years as Watershed lacked a secure spiritual grounding.
We mistook covenant for an act of the will where we would make promises and keep them through single-minded resolve. We were inevitably disappointed when we, and others in our group, didn't or couldn't live up to these promises. This discouragement led to the sad assumption that we were not a community, at least not in our current state of immaturity. We were a group of individual seekers attempting to find something to nourish us. It was a time of questioning; the Indigo Girls' song taunted us with the words, “How long till our souls get it right?” Covenant in community promised security but on what basis could we forge a union that would enable us to become an authentic spiritual community?
Jürgen Moltmann's essay, "In the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit," helps us appreciate the dynamics of the spiritual adhesive that can hold us together in fellowship. This essay suggests a foundation for true individuality and strong community. The basis of this life is not found in our determined promises but in the Spirit of Life. The Spirit of Life is above all a provider of fellowship between people and God and between people and each other. She is a mediatrix, a go-between-Spirit, committed to establishing free and faithful relationships in faith. Moltmann summarizes:
Through the Spirit, we're drawn into the eternal symbiosis or "fellowship life" of the Father, the Son and the Spirit and our limited human lives participate in the eternal circular movement of the divine life. So in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit with us all, we experience the nearness of the divine life, and also experience our own mortal life as life that is eternal (1997, 90-91).
Charles Williams used the term co-inherence to describe a mutual interpenetration of personalities. In many of his novels and books he emphasized how the ability to truly enter into another person's life is based on the principle of spiritual exchange found at the heart of Christ's atonement. With this notion we can learn to, without fusion, identify and literally take on the pain and joy of each other. Fellowship is a spiritual union of total identification with another. The Spirit takes the pattern of Christ's life, the way he lived and died, and applies it to our unique human situation. The life of Christ permeates our lives as we enter this spiritual atmosphere and we find the same Christic energies exchanged between us as individuals.
Williams' ideas have always convinced me ever since I first encountered them in his work on the way of images in Dante where he declared that God is found in our experience of human relationships. I have learned more about Christ and his love and forgiveness of me by relating to Bev, Sean and Erik, and in our Watershed community, than in any academic or church setting. This is the work of the Spirit in my life, making what is Christ's mine and vice-versa. I have learned about love, forgiveness, patience, long-suffering, kindness, truth telling, and reconciliation - from relationships that have mediated God to me directly. This is co-inherence, the union with one another we share because of the Spirit of Life.
The matrix provided by the Spirit is not limited to the connection that exits between individuals one-on-one; it also has a social dimension. The oneness is with others (notice the plural here). Dante presents our fellowship with God as an ever expanding, interconnected White Rose.
Fellowship is personal, as Williams stresses, but it is more than that - it is communal, as Dante envisions it. In fact, our individual relationships exist to serve this larger unity that ultimately includes all of creation.
The fellowship that the Spirit of Life has invited us into is between the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, as well as into a direct communion with herself. However much the historical doctrine of the Trinity has complicated, even obscured God's personality, it nonetheless provides an excellent model for the relationship into which we're being invited. Community, and that is basically what the Trinity is, can be understood as a veritable definition of God.
In Genesis, it is said that God created humans after his image and likeness, that is, male and female. This indicates that there is something about God that always implies agency-in-communion. Just as male and female are distinct from one another and yet have communion, there's something about the very nature of God that implies a union in difference. Union in difference is the root of all communion, or as Moltmann says, it is only those who are not the same that can be truly interesting to one another. What a dynamic definition of community we share in and through God!
We have to go well beyond our old and inadequate conception of what covenant is in order to find the glue for fellowship. We are not held together by our intentions or will; we're bound together because we share in a communion with God brought about by the Spirit of Life. Fellowship is more than the team spirit we have at Watershed. Fellowship is a shared life in the Spirit.
Recognizing the Personality of God
To strengthen our connection with the Spirit of Life it is essential to re-establish the notion of God as personal. This may be difficult because the impersonal metaphors for God such as fire, water, and breath enable us to separate ourselves from anthropomorphic, mythic god-images. God-images are chock full of personality, probably of the most undeveloped and immature qualities imaginable. Immature god-images tend to be very stock replicas of our super ego. God's so-called personality ends up being capable of only a narrow range of not too deep and often demeaning responses. Acceptance and rejection seem to be the coinage of our inadequate god-images.
We have probably inherited this from the Christian tradition's emphasis on the legal aspects of salvation. God justifies and saves but somehow doesn't seem capable of identifying with or having compassion on sinners. No wonder most people don't want to fellowship with a god like that! Do you consciously seek out friends whose chief function is to judge you? Seeking fellowship with a God of judgment is hardly better. This is not to say that God doesn't evaluate or discern who we are or what we do. Friends who are true friends always evaluate and seek to call each other to their finest potential.
You can't love when you are judgmental but neither can you love without valuing and examining the incredible worth of your beloved. Jesus of Nazareth taught, “For God did not send his Son into the world to be its judge, but to be its saviour” (John 3:17). A personal God who neither judges us nor indulges us must know us through and through in order to be personally affected by what happens in our lives. The Spirit of Life seems to be a mediatrix translating the tones and qualities of our subjectivity in such a way that enables God to be touched by lives.
"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God" (Romans 8:26-28). The Spirit of Life enters into our loneliness, festivities, disappointments, elations, and our good and bad dreams. She does so with great empathy, yet with the deepest respect and honour for our choices. To think that even when we make choices that go against God's best intentions for us, there is still an understanding love between us.
A personal God, albeit not a god of our projections, is capable of feeling sadness or joy and can be either proud or ashamed of what we do without withdrawing from us or coercing us to do what he wants us to do. God treats us as free people in communion with himself. We live a shared life with God. With this refurbished understanding of God's personality, we can now go on to ask these questions: What is God going through as God lives within us? What are we going through because God's personality is made transparent to us through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ? Caring about the answers to these questions is the heart centre of fellowship.
Honouring Individuals in Community
Birds of a Feather
Brown-gray mono-plumage fused in groups of precision squadrons come screeching in from the south. We admire these aviators for the symmetry of their flight, the precision of their landing. Their sameness seems a self-chosen conformity. Humans see them through the lens of air show entertainment. We've had too many Blue Angel exhibitions. Birds, unlike jet pilots, are genetically coerced.
Birds make it look effortless because, for them, it is. They fly by instinct - by the radar of the genes, not by the seat of their pants or wits. Only mutations can change the pattern; only dissonance, disruption, and disease cause deviations. What takes effort, for them, is to tolerate birds of another feather, from another path and plumage. For the feathered pilots true intelligence resides in inclusion, in breaking the dim-witted proverb of "birds of a feather flocking together," caring only for their own.
Is it asking too much to see two dissimilar squadrons in mid air collision knock that racist principle out of both of them. Such a catastrophe would send the bird world into a colorful chaos. Choices would be pressed upon them. Do we wait until the genes take over and create rainbow birds of a same color? We could grow a soupy plumage that would satisfy all. One bright bird might come up with a strategy of invitation. Extend a wing wave of invitation to the strays, the confused and those who have lost their flock. Surely a few colorful adjustments could be made to the tried and true flight path. A hint of colorful difference will remind us that all birds have feathers and can indeed flock together.
A second step in our relationship with the Spirit of Life involves reconciling individuality with our identity as part of Watershed. To stress one aspect above the other is bound to create acute problems. While we have over-emphasized both at various times in our history, our greatest problem has been in reacting to selfish individualism. Correctly, we have affirmed that there are no Lone Ranger Christians. Nevertheless, we have mistakenly devalued individual uniqueness making it difficult to express our particular vocations. Neither the self nor the group ought to be de-valued; they're both intricately connected and to be honoured.
There are times when we have allowed ourselves to be swallowed in the vision of the group. During these times, we may have difficulty differentiating between our thoughts and the goals and ideals of Watershed. Often, we will take credit for something that the community has done - as if we don't have to make the gift or idea our own through applying and understanding how it fits in with our inherent personalities. Ken Wilber calls this stage of development mythic-membership, a tribal view where individuals become modes of appearance of the greater unity called Watershed. This doesn't lead to confidence or maturity in fellowship, however much its collectivism seems to relieve us. By stressing our unity at the expense of our diversity we have sometimes devolved into legalism using the undigested catchwords of group life to coerce one another. The Spirit of Life as the spirit of freedom never forces or manipulates people in community because she assumes that they are there by individual calling, choice and love.
To honour our diversity is to honour the gifts each of us brings to community, especially the gift of themselves. While the same Spirit of Life calls us all into this community, we are given different charismata, that is, unique talents, tendencies and temperaments that are used by the Spirit of Life to build up our group. The Spirit of Life enters into these charismata and supports, encourages and validates Watershed's community.
Here is a sample of some of the gifts used by the Spirit of Life at Watershed:
Dave: Film-video, Graphics, Cooking, Website, Hospitality
Lydia: Reflexology, Yoga, Healing Arts, Hospitality, Letter Writing
Lorna: Organizing, Teaching, Orator, Poetry, Hospitality, Interior Design
Lyle: Research, Writing, Proof Reading, Tech Support, Web Site, Leisure
Cal: Helps, Encouragement, Managing Finances, Humour
Verda: Decoration, Empathy, Hospitality, Photography, Liaison
Eldon: Helps, Entertainment, Art, Writing, Friendship
Marilyn: Singing, Poetry, Animal Ministry, Inquisitive Learning
Linda: Administration, Programming, Web Site, Reading,
Liaison Paul: Mentoring, Teaching, Visionary, Writing
Bev: Watercolour Painting, Domestic Arts, Wisdom
Serving Creation through Community
Moltmann stresses that the Spirit of Life invigorates communities in order to fulfill a promise to all of creation. The Spirit will be poured out on all flesh. Communities invoke (epiklesis – or prayer of yearning) the Spirit of Life so that creation prospers. Hildegard of Bingen calls this the greening of creation. The idea is not so much that communities of spirit exist to take care of the planet or other people. That is a paternalistic throwback. Communities of spirit exist to empower others to fully participate in their world. Jürgen Moltmann states it well:
"The community of Christ is a community of free and equal people" (Galatians 3:28f.) [So there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women; you are all one in union with Christ Jesus.], who in the charismatic diversity of their gifts and vocations live with one another and for one another, and in the unity of the Holy Spirit together serve the Kingdom of God in the world "(1997,97).
By breathing in, the Spirit of Life gathers together a community called Watershed. She breathes out and we're scattered back into the world. Wherever there are spiritual communities there is a sign that unity in diversity is available for all creation.
Since our study of Christology began, the Spirit of Life seems to have turned our community into the world where, especially through our website, we have shared with, inspired and been encouraged by others. We have been assured that we are not alone but are a part of the Cathedral of humanity in whom the Spirit wants to take up residence.
One regret I sometimes have is that our community does not seem to reflect diversity in terms of our membership. That is not to say that we share the mono-plumage like the dull birds in my poem, only that we are around the same age and from the same racial group. I would love to see a Watershed that would reflect the kingdom's rainbow hue full of different ages, cultures, and perspectives.
Jürgen Moltmann also emphasizes the importance of breaching the generations' divide between the various stages of development:
"Inter-stage fellowship should be one of our hopes. In the relations between the generations, the function of the Christian congregation [spiritual communities] is to build up a mutual trust between old and young. But the necessary premise is that we also see our fellowship as a fellowship extending over the different stages and ages of life, and so learn to understand others in what they were and as the people they can be, the possibilities they have lived with and the possibilities that are going to offer themselves in the future "(1997, 98).
Just to show that bad habits die hard, I notice in myself a return to activism when I perceive something lacking, like our lack of diversity or stable structures. The intention of Jürgen Moltmann's essay was to remind me to replace my efforts and planning with trust in the Spirit of Life. Just as I wrote this sentence my e-mail notification reminded me that I could trust the Spirit to produce diversity. One of our web guests thanks me for our site and tells me, “It is a comfort to know that there are others with similar goals and ideas.”
As for the generation gap, I was deeply moved by the fact that Erik came home the other night rejuvenated and refreshed from a reflexology session with Lydia. What struck me was the trust and vulnerability that has led Erik, a young guy, to place his feet in the hands of Lydia, an increasingly maturing teacher. This is not far removed from the foot washing of the early Christian community who touched, healed, and were vulnerable in the midst of diversity. Perhaps that is the best way to leave our discussion of Watershed in the world, with us placing our hearts in the hands of the Spirit of Life hoping that she will touch others through us.