The Beloved Community: The Church as Monastery

In her book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, writer Kathleen Norris recounts her visits to a local Benedictine monastery. One of the sisters she meets there recalls St. Benedict’s insight that “living in community is the only asceticism you need.” I think I know what she means. No, I know what she means!

Take it from me, building community is one of the most difficult and challenging tasks imaginable. The reason for this is obvious. People are really not all that easy to get along with. We know this, or should. It’s no secret, after all: people are sometimes disagreeable; they don’t always do what we think they should do, or what we want them to do. They have their own ideas and thoughts. They have differing gifts, but they also have shortcomings, flaws and foibles. They are, or can be, stubborn and recalcitrant.

To try to live with people in community is far more of a challenge than donning a hair shirt and mortifying the flesh. The great mistake most outsiders make is to imagine that monastic life is an escape from the world, when in fact what monastic life does is force its practitioners into an unending and almost unlimited proximity. Those who choose the monastic life are forced to live a life of community that I daresay most of us would find unbearable.

But one of the things that we can learn in community is “to bear with” each other. We can learn what it takes to get along. We must learn, if we are to succeed in creating community, about compromise, and even about not getting our own way. Sometimes, we fail miserably.

Sometimes, trying to build community feels more like an exercise in grammar school playground behavior. Any one of us who has been active in community-building has had the experience of our playmates getting mad at us, taking their marbles, and going home. It happens fairly often in church life.

In any true community there are people you would just as soon not have to be with. This was certainly true in the small town where I grew up. There are people you wish would move somewhere else. It has always been this way. Sometimes, though, these are just the people we need, not only for what they bring to the community (a different way of seeing and doing things, perhaps, or a deeper social conscience), but also for what they contribute to our own spiritual growth. Sometimes, they turn out to be right, and to be right for us. Sometimes that thorn in our side is exactly what we were needing to move on to the next and higher level of our being.

“Living in community is the only asceticism you need.” Indeed!

Once you have established that building community is never going to be easy, and accepted the challenge of living in community nonetheless, you may begin to see some of the advantages. After all, none of us lives alone and isolated, especially those who live in intentional community. As John Donne recognized long ago, we are all “part of the maine.” There is no escaping this reality; truly, there is no place to run. The frontier, except for the interior one, is done and gone. Even Thoreau, “alone” in his cabin at Walden Pond, recognized this truth.

The benefits of community should be obvious. Most of us, I daresay, could not get along without it. Think only of your pantry, for instance. We need one another in more ways than we know. True hermits are few and far between. Most of us long for companionship, for neighbors and friends with whom to “break bread.” We long for love, and too often we don’t get enough of it.

Welcoming new members into our church always provides a wonderful opportunity and context to reconsider the meaning of community. What we are trying to create here, we say, is a beloved community. Not that we will all like each other all, or even some, of the time. We won’t. Some of us won’t like each other at all. That’s life. But what we are called to is the creation of a beloved community. We are called to love one another even though we may not all like one another. This may seem like a paradox, and perhaps it is. It is obviously not romantic love that we are talking about.

If we are to survive as a human race on this little spinning planet, we must learn to love one another at a level that transcends likes and dislikes and agreements and disagreements. We must realize that our well-being is intimately tied to the well-being of all other life. We must learn to live in community, whether we like it or not. So we might as well make the best of it, and strive to build the best community of which we are capable. Still, it will never be perfect. It will always be a work in progress.

I have many visions for what a “successful” church community should look like. None of them look like a love fest, although I am sometimes amazed by the amount of love and caring of which we are capable.

One of my visions for the church is nicely captured by my colleague Roy Phillips, in his book Transforming Liberal Congregations for the New Millenium. Phillips writes that, “the local church could be a kind of in-town, day-by-day monastery, a retreat site, so to speak. Our church must be a place set apart where laypeople go to find support and challenge in their personal paths and plans for spiritual development.”

Perhaps it is my background in education, but I have always found this vision of community, and of the church in particular, very appealing. There are lots of reasons why people come to church, of course, but one of them is the expectation of spiritual growth. Wouldn’t it be great if the church really was a place where one could come on a regular basis to accomplish that goal? A place set apart, a place for support and challenge?

I also know that I could easily spend the rest of my message trying to define exactly what Roy means by “spiritual growth.” But for now, I just want us to think about what might make the church different than, say, a continuing education program.

Education is part of what we mean, but it is not all. Spiritual growth encompasses not only the mind, but also the spirit. It’s holistic. There is a quality to spiritual growth that exceeds what we expect to get from the current adult education opportunity at the local high school. And I think that it has to do in part with the nature of community, the kind of intentional community that it is the goal of the church to create.

Thinking of the church as a “monastery” where we come to pursue our “spiritual development” is helpful. “Knowledge” is not the ultimate goal, unless we are talking about the most important kind of knowledge, which is “self-knowledge.” It’s not about ideas and facts so much as it is about getting to know ourselves and others at a deeper level. It is about learning to live together even when we do not agree with each other. It is about learning to listen, and it is about being heard.

My friend Roy suggests that one possible outcome of spiritual development might be similar to that articulated by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians, where he states that “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, self-control.” Imagine if we mastered just one of these virtues! Imagine if the church became more and more a place for the exploration, in community, of love or joy or peace. Imagine becoming a patient person--for even a day! Imagine practicing gentleness and self-control with our loved ones and friends. What would your list of spiritual outcomes look like? What characteristics or qualities would you like to nurture in your own living and becoming?

I would love to see this kind of vision become more of a reality here in our own congregation. One of the reasons that I am so excited about the prospect of new meeting spaces is that it will provide more opportunities for small groups to meet and, I hope, to pursue this development of the spirit. I think we all long to be the better people we sometimes imagine ourselves to be. We long to be more honest, more forthcoming, more generous, and, God knows, more loving. And if we cannot learn about these things at church, then where can we go to learn about them?

Spiritual development, however, is not just an end in itself, important though it may be. Rather, it is most important because of what is allows us to do. If we hope to change the world, or even to make a slight dent in it, or even to help another person, we have to begin with ourselves. We must be spiritually grounded, secure, somewhat “together,” if we hope to have an impact on the world. How can we really know others, or really know what we should be doing with our own lives, if we do not truly know ourselves?

This brings me to another useful analogy to the monastic life. In his book about monasticism entitled The Silent Life, the religious writer and monk Thomas Merton speaks about the goal of monastic life as “the realization of our true selves, as we actually are.”

I am a firm believer that each of us is born with unique gifts and characteristics. Merton might call these our God-given talents. There is no one else exactly the same as us. But, sadly, many of us never get to know those “true selves.” Sometimes we try to avoid or deny them, fearful of where they might lead us. But sometimes our true selves are denied us by forces outside of ourselves: expectations that others have for us, institutions which don’t fit our religious or intellectual needs, jobs which do not allow us the full expression of our individuality and the full scope of use of our skills.

The church as monastery might be a place to rediscover our true selves, a place even to use our God-given talents, a place of sustenance for our work on behalf of a troubled and troubling world, a world which desperately needs us in order to survive and prosper in the generations still to come.

My dream for our church is that it will be more and more a beloved community, a place where we can work out, not so much our salvation, as our becoming. Each time we welcome a new person in our midst, we increase the opportunities for our own growth and development, even as we provide the context for the other to grow and develop to his or her true potential, his or her truest self. I can think of no other work so worthy of our time or treasure. Truly, this is, or can be, holy ground, and truly this is sacred work which we are about.

After all, we are loved for what we are. Flawed and imperfect though we may be, far though we fall from what we might become, it is for ourselves that we are loved, and ultimately it is for ourselves that we will be grieved when we are gone. None of us will fully succeed in realizing our potential.

My hope is that more and more of you will find a home in this place, and that more and more it will come to resemble that “day-by-day monastery” of which my friend Roy Phillips speaks. If we can learn to live together with even a bit more understanding and acceptance of our fellow travelers along the path of life, it will have been a worthwhile experiment. If we can come even a step closer to being those people we long to be and know ourselves, deep inside, to be, then it will have been worth our efforts.

This is my dream and my hope, for myself and for each and every one of you. May it come to be. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock