Something inside us tells us we were created for community. It’s like the oak tree that can’t be anything but an oak tree. We were designed to live in the shelter of each other.

The friendship of community feels right when we have it. We yearn for it when we don’t have it, and even the most independent among us does not want to be by themselves. You may have heard of the book “Bowling Alone” that speaks to the need for community and the personal and spiritual consequences of losing social capital.

Everyone is afraid of a downturn in the financial markets but we have a lot more to lose than just money. John Ortberg in his latest book “Everybody’s Normal Until You Get to Know Them” delves into the topic of community with candor and humor. It’s a great book because he doesn’t let you forget for a single moment that this issue is present in your life. You are confronted from the get go that maybe you are out of sync with your original design when you try to go it alone.

In Love With Love

We have all heard of the notion of being in love with love and then the reality of a real relationship hits you. Everyone has some kind of quirk or habit that is irritating and over time becomes evident, hence the title “Everyone is Normal Until You Get to Know Them.”  The relationship doesn’t work or have a future if you don’t get beyond the point of being in love with love.

The same is true on the level of community. We all want some kind of idyllic community that we can enjoy and be a part of. We love the idea of our dream community where people are wonderful and friendships are stimulating. No-one needs anything from us except that which we are ready to give. Everyone longs for that kind of community, but the reality is no-one belongs to a community like that because they don’t exist.

Communities are made up of flawed people. Everyone has something going on. We all want to pretend that we are so-called normal and to keep up the façade we have to invest a great deal in hiding and pretending that our lives are perfect. That takes a lot of energy and in the end goes no-where.  Why does it matter?

Being Alone Doesn’t Work

Just like you can’t bowl alone, you can’t grow spiritually in a vacuum. More and more people are saying I believe in God but I don’t need to belong to a faith community. I can figure out my own relationship with God by myself.  The presence of others is distracting and annoying.

Why are so many people shying away from churches or faith communities? It’s because they fear corruption, or being taken advantage of. It’s easier to say “I am on my own spiritual path” rather than deal with other people’s imperfections. But there is a limitation in being alone. There is only one force in the Universe that would want you to be alone and it’s not God! Being alone is dangerous to human well-being and development because it makes it too easy to avoid change.

Think about it. When you are alone you have the luxury of living in your head so to speak. You can think about what a loving person you are. You can feel good about yourself. It’s not until you are forced to be with others that you have to confront just how unloving you can be! It is much easier to love in the abstract than in real life.

Alone, you may feel very magnanimous and assume you are capable of great forgiveness, but once you are confronted with an offense that impinges on your life all of a sudden you find yourself ready to cast stones at others.  Everyone pretends to be kinder and healthier than they are. We don’t really know ourselves until we live in community.  Being alone doesn’t work.

How do you get close without getting hurt?

While we might recognize we need others, we tend to shy away from community, especially a faith community, because we are afraid of not being able to deal with others’ barbs and limitations. In short, we don’t want to get hurt or embrace the difficulties involved in getting close to someone.

John Ortberg uses the example of a porcupine.  Nobody wants to go near a porcupine for fear of being stabbed by a quill. Porcupines are not generally considered for pets, although, I have to admit I do have a friend who has a pet hedgehog.  The reason we don’t welcome porcupines into our home is that they carry about 30,000 quills, which when released produce quite a sting. Under threat, porcupines do one of two things; they attack or withdraw.Like the porcupine we have let go of a few quills and barbs in our lives and have been on the receiving end of them as well. These barbs hold quite a sting: resentment, anger, complaint, selfishness, condemnation and arrogance. We have all been pierced at one time or another.

We too have used withdrawal as a strategy. I was reminded of this fact, last Wednesday when I shared dinner with a friend.  She is a Spirit Blessings Coach. She told me about being at a training that involved an experiment. The facilitator sent one participant out of the room and then told the remaining attendees to collectively envision a wall and place it in a specific location in the room. The person who left the room was then invited back and advised to move around the room at will. Interestingly, she avoided the area of the room with the invisible wall.

My friend had an opportunity to put this into practice in real life. One evening, while taking a walk down a deserted country road she was followed by a dog. Fearful, she turned around and imagined a wall at a specific point in the road. She resumed walking and was shocked to find the dog had stopped and was pacing back and forth along her imaginary wall.

We sometimes place walls around ourselves and then wonder why no-one dares venture in. I wonder how many walls I have erected to protect myself. Nevertheless, despite their quills and tendency to run off, miraculously, porcupines find a way to get close and mate. How do they do it?

To mate porcupines have to pull in their quills and learn to dance. They even dance paw to paw on their hind legs in a kind of porcupine waltz. To make community, we too have to be willing to pull in our quills, break down the walls and dance together. Sure, we know those quills are there and can hurt occasionally, but there is no joy in being alone.

Living in the shelter of each other

I love this picture from the site “All That is Interesting” as it speaks to the joy of friendship and community. The younger boy is smiling and looks so happy, but imagine if instead, he had been walking home from school alone in the rain. His head would have been turned down, as he buttressed himself against the wind and rain. It would have been a miserable walk home. However, with the protection of friendship, even the rain lost its power to dampen his spirits.

Our community, whether it’s our church or a small group of friends we belong to, is what facilitates our growth. We are there for each other, not in superficial ways, but in ways that transform everyone’s life. We can’t bowl alone and I would argue we can’t do spirituality alone either; it’s a myth we have collectively bought in to. Life simply doesn’t work that way.

Why friendship makes the difference

The Bible is full of amazing stories. Although they took place 2,000 years ago and we don’t know all the details, they leave us with incredible insights and impressions about the nature of love. Locked in His story are secrets for successful living. One such story recounted in “Everybody’s Normal Until You Get to Know Them” is an unlikely tale of a paralyzed man from the Book of Mark, Chapter Two. We may think it is difficult today to live with a disability but 2,000 years ago there were no accommodations or accessible buildings. Life was pretty grim. In fact, Roman and Greek societies preferred that the disabled die. There was an assumption that the person with a disability or illness had in some way brought it upon themselves.

What is amazing about this story is that this paralyzed man found redemption because he had friends; he had a band of brothers and that made all the difference.

The story goes like this; through some kind of precursor to Twitter people found out that Jesus was going to speak at a house in Capernaum. It wasn’t uncommon for people to meet in their homes. You might say they were the precursor to the now popular, house parties that politicians and artists use. In this case, the house was full. No doubt, all the so called important and popular people were there.  The paralyzed man’s friends were desperate to get him in to see Jesus, hoping he could be healed. But they couldn’t even get near the door, let alone through it. What could they do? Being smart, they went around the building and climbed the exterior stairs that were a common feature of the time, leading to a patio roof. The next thing they did was extraordinary. They peeled back the matting of reeds and dried mud that covered the cross beams and lowered their friend into the room below where Jesus was speaking. Talk about an audacious gate crashing!

How did they get away with it?

To get their friend in front of Jesus they had to care more about him and his life than what other people thought about their behavior. They had to ignore their fear of the anticipated antagonism they would meet. They must have had total conviction that Jesus could heal their paralyzed friend. They had to care more about their friend than all the road blocks they would meet. They must have really loved him. That is the real reason why they got away with the stunt. What could Jesus say? In the face of such faith, how could he reject their request?  It says in Mark: “When Jesus saw their faith.” What is interesting about this story is that it wasn’t simply one man’s faith but the faith and desire of his friends as well. That’s what was incredible. The friends weren’t going to leave him to suffer alone. They were desperate that he be healed.  When Jesus saw this, he recognized in this little community love as God intended and no-one, not even God, can reject true love.  Jesus felt impelled to heal this man.

“And Jesus seeing their faith said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven,”—He said to the paralytic, “I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.” And he got up and immediately picked up the pallet and went out in the sight of everyone, so that they were all amazed and were glorifying God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this.”

What’s your mat?

The paralyzed man could not have made it there without the help of his friends. We may not be physically paralyzed but in some sense of the word we are. We are paralyzed emotionally and spiritually. We barb others with our quills or withdraw behind the walls that we create to protect ourselves. We are stuck on a mat just as this man was. Our mat or limitations are the things we are least proud of. They are our shortcomings – the barbs that we send to other people when they get too close to see us as we truly are; the things we are ashamed of.

Rev. Moon reminded us in a sermon that part of our problem is that we may not recognize that we are indeed sick:

“What is the most fearful among all diseases, even for God? It is the disease resulting from the Human Fall. Do you have this disease or not? Yes you have it, but most people do not even realize that they are afflicted. These days, everyone fears cancer. In its early stages a person may not realize that he is ill. He only recognizes that he has the disease when it becomes painful, but by then the cancer has progressed to a lethal stage. Still, at least a cancer victim knows he has the disease before he dies. With the disease of the Fall, however, people do not recognize that they are ill until after they die. That is the problem.”

This is why we should be desperate to help each other, just as the friends of the paralyzed man did. Do you have friends who would carry you and who are you willing to carry?

Community requires trust

The man that was lowered through the roof to meet Jesus had to really trust his friends and the people in the room below. He must have been afraid of falling off his mat. It was awkward and embarrassing. Everyone was looking at him. If someone says “I’ll help you” are you willing to allow them to do what they need to do, to get you the help you need? Easier said than done! It requires a little vulnerability. Who could you call at 3 am? Do you have someone who prays for you on a regular basis? Who can you drop in on and share your heart with?  Who can you share a victory with? We need to have friends we can trust.

What do we trust our friends with? It’s not all the externals of life that count but the internal aspects. A real friend’s deepest concern for you will be about your heart and character; your soul. If they see you struggling with spiritual and emotional problems they are the ones to step up and help you – sometimes by confronting you. It’s not always easy because no-one likes being called out. Think of the paralyzed man. Jesus told him that his sins were forgiven. Jesus announced in front of everyone that he had a problem! That’s tough. Nevertheless, it freed him in the end. A faith community is critical to our spiritual health because we need friends who are willing to help free us from our spiritual handicap.

A number of years ago, I was struggling to understand how God truly sees us. I prayed to our Heavenly Parent to be able to see myself and others as He sees us. God spoke to me through a dream. I saw a battlefield and everyone, including myself, was wounded. People had broken legs, bandages around their heads, they walked with a limp. However, I felt this overwhelming compassion and love in the air and I realized to God that we are all crippled in some way. God wants to heal us so we may experience love as God intended. We are no different than paralyzed man on the mat.

What I realized from the dream is that God is consumed with saving His children. God’s heart is inextricably tied up in people’s lives. He can’t forget us or leave us. He is more determined than the paralyzed man’s friends to help us.

This is why there is no such thing as relating to God in the abstract or thinking we don’t need community. God loves all people in a very real and amazing way and so if you love God you cannot help but love people. You can’t be one way toward God and another toward people.

You can’t love God and not love people

Mother Theresa’s ministry is a great example of this. Her love for the people she served flowed from her love for God. People who don’t love people can’t really love God. The two lives are connected.

A famous preacher, Dallas Willard, called this principle the “unity of spiritual orientation.” We have to be moving in the same direction as God if we want His love to flow in our lives.  You can think of it like this. If you laid a pipe across a stream the water would try and flow around it or if the pipe were large enough it might block the stream altogether. However, if the pipe is laid in the direction of the current the whole river could flow through it.  We need to build our unity of spiritual orientation with God to allow His love to flow and that means loving others.

A beautiful prayer offered by Rev. Moon expressed the heart to allow God’s love to flow.

We know that the main problem here is not which denomination,

Which religion or which group we belong to.

The viewpoint of truth—the entirety of truth—

Is to have an inward heart that Thou canst recognize,

And to go forth with an earnest heart that can experience Thy heart.

O Father, grant us to know Thy heart!

Love is in the air

Love is the air we breathe in Spiritual World; this is the reason it doesn’t work to say I want to explore spirituality by myself. Community is essential because it is the womb God created for our development, to prepare us for an eternal spiritual life. The atmosphere of the spiritual world is love. Without learning to breathe in and out, in love, in community, we will not be fully developed for life in the spiritual world.

Watch a video of this presentation by clicking here: YouTube