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Pastor’s Corner for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, by Fr. Russell Pollitt SJ

Being “friends in the Lord”

 

Last week, reflecting on St Ignatius of Loyola, I wrote of the importance of community.

 

We are not just a sacramental centre but, invited, as followers of Jesus, to become a community of “friends in the Lord”.

 

This week I found this, written by Fr Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, and thought that it was good for us to reflect on. He writes:

We all ache for community and tend to be dissatisfied with what we’re actually experiencing in our lives. Everywhere, it seems, people are looking for community and complaining that their families, churches, and workplaces are disappointing them.

There is a general frustration about community, at every level. Today, it seems, community everywhere is in trouble. Marriages, families, religious communities, associations, and even business and civic communities that sustain themselves over the long-range are the exception more than the rule. As well, many people have tried to start new communities and in almost every case have failed, despite much initial passion and good will.

Why is that? Why, when we so desperately want community, do we find it so hard to achieve and sustain?

Perfection is the enemy of the good and what we over-idealize will invariably disappoint and frustrate us. And that’s exactly our difficulty with community – with marriage, with family, with church, with friendship, with civic community. Simply put, we’re often unable to sustain community because we have false notions and false expectations as to what constitutes it. An overly romantic notion so much clouds our vision that we rarely even recognize real community when we see it.

What is [Christian community]? Before defining it positively, we need first to dissociate it from some of the things with which it is commonly confused. By a certain via negativa, one might say that Christian community is not:

Mutual compatibility, like-minded individuals gathering together on the basis of liking each other.

Huddling together in fear or loneliness, lonely or scared people ganging up against a cold and hostile world.

People rallying around a common task or cause, people brought together because they share a common passion or ideal.

Family, understood in the romantic sense, people brought together through psycho-sexual attraction.

Family, understood in the biological sense, people bonded through blood.

A common roof, people brought together because they live in the same house, eat at the same table, or sleep in the same bed.

None of these are bad and each in fact makes for a certain kind of community. However none of them touches the essence of Christian community. What is that?

Simply put, it is a gathering around the person of Christ in a way that displaces our selfishness so that we begin to live in a charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, constancy, and mildness that make it possible to precisely live with each other beyond differences, fears, and incompatibilities.

Being “friends in the Lord” means this: choosing to be together because we are gathered around the Lord. It is our gathering around and commitment to the Lord that daws us into community. We cannot have one without the other.