Community of Love

Recently I’ve been surrounded with ideas around verbal reflection. The process of speaking to one another about societal issues has emerged as a theme on becoming self-aware.

It first started with the final theological reflection essay that I wrote for my Pastoral Care class. My setting of caregiving that I focused on was regarding young adult women and I emphasized common themes on how narrative provides a sense of belonging, which leads to empowerment. After collecting ideas from a variety of theologians, my thesis was essentially that talking about deeper issues and vocation leads to a greater sense of community. Here is an excerpt from Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak:

Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole. Community doesn’t just create abundance — community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed. (Palmer 108)

The next event that brought this theme to light was The Red Bench. I have started attending monthly interfaith conversations with an organization called the Interfaith Action of Central Texas (iAct). The organization hosts The Red Bench to provide a setting where community members can focus on various themes and better understand their own perspective, the other attendee’s perspective, and the relationship between these varied perspectives. This month the focus was on reverence. The conversation in my group focused around how external and internal reverence looks. I was struck by how little reflection I have given to this topic, which led me to spend the time verbally processing my opinions on reverence.

Finally, the AYAVA house was asked to read an article that focused on love and community. The conversation is between bell hooks, an author and social activist, and Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. My fascination of Buddhism stemmed from a religion class at Sewanee taught by Dr. Sid Brown. I want to let you read a few excerpts. The full article can be found here.

In our own Buddhist sangha, community is the core of everything. The sangha is a community where there should be harmony and peace and understanding. That is something created by our daily life together. If love is there in the community, if we’ve been nourished by the harmony in the community, then we will never move away from love.

The reason we might lose this is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves. This is, I think, the basic thing. That is why we have to go back to our community and renew it. Then love will grow back. Understanding and harmony will grow back. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that we ourselves need love; it’s not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can’t expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others. Are we treating our body kindly — by the way we eat, by the way we drink, by the way we work? Are we treating ourselves with enough joy and tenderness and peace? Or are we feeding ourselves with toxins that we get from the market — the spiritual, intellectual, entertainment market?

So the question is whether we are practicing loving ourselves? Because loving ourselves means loving our community. When we are capable of loving ourselves, nourishing ourselves properly, not intoxicating ourselves, we are already protecting and nourishing society. Because in the moment when we are able to smile, to look at ourselves with compassion, our world begins to change. We may not have done anything but when we are relaxed, when we are peaceful, when we are able to smile and not to be violent in the way we look at the system, at that moment there is a change already in the world.

So the second help, the second insight, is that between self or no-self there is no real separation. Anything you do for yourself you do for the society at the same time. And anything you do for society you do for yourself also. That insight is very powerfully made in the practice of no-self. (Hanh)

Fear is born from ignorance. We think that the other person is trying to take away something from us. But if we look deeply, we see that the desire of the other person is exactly our own desire — to have peace, to be able to have a chance to live. So if you realize that the other person is a human being too, and you have exactly the same kind of spiritual path, and then the two can become good practitioners. This appears to be practical for both.

The only answer to fear is more understanding. And there is no understanding if there is no effort to look more deeply to see what is there in our heart and in the heart of the other person. The Buddha always reminds us that our afflictions, including our fear and our desiring, are born from our ignorance. That is why in order to dissipate fear, we have to remove wrong perception.(Hanh)

This week, I’ve been surrounded by a supportive, loving community. The network of my relationships runs far and wide. I am so appreciative. Thank you for your constant love and support. Community is essential for love and an abundant life!