Anyone who has tried to live in community with others knows how beset with pain and difficulties such a life is! Perhaps that is why the pews in our churches are row on row, and why in less obvious ways we have put distance between ourselves and others. We have not wanted to suffer in any serious way the encountering of one another, all unaware that avoidance deprives us of community.
Elizabeth O'Connor
The real problem with the structures of the Church is that they do not often allow us to become engaged in the anguish of people whose needs, and accents, and ways are different from our own. They do not allow us to feel. It was not enough for Moses to see the misery of a slave people. He had to identify with them---to be able to say, "My people."
No one can know in advance how one will be used, or when, or what one's life will count for in the long run. The young Pablo Casals, while pouring his life energy into years of practice on the cello, could not guess that when Franco came to power, he would stop playing for three years, and that the silence would be heard throughout Spain as if the streets were full of demonstrators....
When the need for bread is met we discover that we have other hungers, and none so deep as the hunger to be understood. The artist helps us to interpret, understand and communicate feeling. When the artist is successful we are led into communion with ourselves and with the world, and the solitary work becomes a communal work. For want of this we walk on parched land.
Contemplatives warn us not to begin on the inward adventure without the strong promptings of the Spirit, but they believe that an inner quickening of life happens as one wills to take time to tend the small seed in one’s self which harbors the faith that there is infinitely more than we can now see or understand. That seed can die, or it can grow and shoot forth branches. When the mystics speak of prayer, they are talking about that which will create in us a new structure of consciousness. From this there is no turning back.
We may need most to pity persons who have had no problems too big for themselves. Such persons have no remembrance of pain and loss and a crying in the night which will let them hear this in the life of another. Perhaps of all people they are the most lost--lost to self and to a world acquainted with grief.
Somehow we keep our lives so well hidden from one another that we do not guess that we are not alone. Distrust is among our subtle illnesses. We were given hearts for "reciprocal trust," but fear has built high walls. We are afraid of being hurt, and when we talk, we make ourselves vulnerable. What we say can be used against us or betray our loyalty to another, and so we add isolation to our own burden and the burden of others.
The primary purpose of the disciplines, structures of accountability and mission of the Church is to build life together, to create liberating communities of caring. To each of us is given a gift for the building of a community of caring, a community in which we can learn to embrace our pain and to overcome all those oppressive inner structures that would keep us in bondage and make us protective and anxious for our own futures.
The act of creation is always a solitary one. Others can encourage us to create. They cannot create for us. The man of ten talents needs the same courage as the man of one.... Surely, I reasoned, it must be the magnitude of their gifts that enables artists and scientists and inventors to go on producing when they are rejected and scorned by their own contemporaries. Now I am not so sure that the greatness of the talent has any direct relation to the degree of persistence with which it is developed.
When I become aware of my own gifts and give my attention to communicating what is in me--my own truth, as it were--I have the experience of growing toward wholeness. I am working out God's "chosen purpose," and I am no longer dependent on what others think and how they respond. The experience itself is confirming. The response of others can give me pleasure or pain, but it cannot keep me from the act of creating. I am content to be nobody because I know that in the important inner realm of the Spirit I am somebody. Through the exercising of my gifts I am in the process of realizing and communicating my own uncommon self.
We cannot listen and speak and work out of our own centers and at the same time give our attention to weighing whether or not others are approving of us. But the fact is that probably no one--not even the saint--operates continually from his silent self. One of the certain signs that we are at the periphery of our lives is our beginning to wonder whether or not what we are doing will be pleasing to others. Whenever we begin to act and produce with the approval of others in mind, there comes the haunting possibility that we will not live up to their actual or imagined expectations.
To the degree that this feeling takes over we abandon ourselves, and spontaneity and creativity die in us. We enter into the sin of judging our own works, of deciding what is good and what is bad, when our only task is to be faithful over what we have--to do the best we can with it and to leave the judgment to God. We do not have to be better than others, or live up to their expectations, or fulfill their demands.... One of the fears that binds us is our fear of rejection. We have our gifts wrapped up and buried away because we are scared.
Many of us have buried them so deep that we do not even know what they are. This is why so much emphasis is given in The Church of the Saviour community to discovering and using our gifts. The teaching-preaching ministry of the church is to help a person discover the gifts that he is to use in the creating of his life, in building the church of Jesus Christ, and then, finally, for his commissioning in the world so that he can be "the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in" (Isaiah 58:12)....
One reason for difficulty in our lives is that others have confirmed in us the obvious or what they, themselves, wanted to see. To please them, or to get ahead, or to make more money--we then developed those gifts, meanwhile putting aside and forgetting the gifts which were neither so evident nor so valued by others. If our unused gifts have any strength or power of their own, they cry out for recognition--to be given a name.
This excerpt is from the book Eighth Day of Creation--Gifts and Creativity, available here.
Whoever joins God's liberation movement must be content to spend time in the wilderness, to live in tents and not know what the morrow brings.
The difficulty confronting the churches in the organization of a small group movement is the lack of leadership for such groups. Most of us lack the confidence required to assume this kind of responsibility. We have discovered over the years that even the people who know how to administer churches, banks, corporations and hospitals have no idea how to nurture a small group so that its members deepen their lives in Christ--learn self-knowledge, how to listen and to care--the deep nurture of the spiritual life so essential for the recovery of vision and passion.
The lack of servant leaders is being experienced in the whole of society. One looks in vain today for those who are using their strengths and gifts and riches on behalf of the common good. In all of our institutions is a yearning for the presence of the fearless ones in whose company we will be able to put aside our own fears and begin to hope and exercise imagination.
We can create the climate and nurture the trust in which a deep giving of ourselves can happen. Much more than the confession of our light or our darkness is involved. What is involved is the recovery of love, itself, the communion that is the deepest need of every life, the unlocking of that infinite capacity that each one has to be a friend and to have a friend. If the pilgrim journey is a journey toward freedom, then the liberating work is the freeing of love in me and the freeing of love in you.