Without a protected time of daily silence we have no possibility of doing the extraordinary inward work that each of us needs to do. More, we will not make any substantial or sustained commitment to the solitary life unless we ask and seek for ourselves a structure of accountability.
The New Community
We can too easily become identified with goodness--feel that we are 'the enlightened ones.' We cease to ask questions about what we are doing, how we are doing it, whether it might be done another way. Not only must we question ourselves; we must create the kind of atmosphere that invites others to question us and to give us feedback on how they perceive and hear and experience us.
We will not be able to encourage reflection unless we have felt the sweeping, transforming, generating energy [of the Holy Spirit] in our own lives. We may be able to publish journals and newspapers, renovate slum apartments, even be good reformers, but unless we teach reflection we will never be among those who carry out radical transformations.
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.
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."
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 church that educates for a new society will live out in its structures what it proclaims. The very structures themselves educate. When our acts mirror our words, they give to our words a transforming power.
The salient fact about the community we yearn for, and that calls us into wholeness, is that it cannot exist for itself. It exists only in relationship to the world. In recent years we have awakened to the fact that the people of this world are largely destitute--without food and clothing and shelter, and without structures that nourish an inward life. Unless a group of persons reach beyond themselves to touch and be touched by some of this need, its members will not know community.
An inner truth always has a corresponding outer reality. Our interdependence is woven through the fabric of the universe. The painful, fearful, wonderful message of the modern world is that we are members one of the other, and that we cannot live if we are not in communion with each other?. The world, even for the hard of learning, is turning out to be one great household ? every woman, my sister, every man, my brother.