Last Sunday we had a Child Dedication for our youngest son at a church our family has held dear for nearly a decade. The experience was one of church at its best. I was flooded with love and gratitude as we were showered with bubbles filled with ruach (רוּחַ, the Hebrew word for breath and spirit). Between each wave of iridescent breath the congregation spoke his name with a blessing.
“Zachary may you feel safe…
Zachary may you feel cared for…
Zachary may you feel loved…
Zachary may you know support on your hardest days…
Zachary may you offer support to the community around you…
Zachary may you have the courage to stand up for what is right…
Zachary may you be kind, even in moments when you feel angry…
Zachary may you notice the flowers among the weeds…
Zachary may be curious enough to know even weeds can have blessings…
Zachary may you know that through it all you have a community around you.”
How profoundly sacred it is to be witnessed, named, known, and loved. Community is a gift. Sometimes it is a gift I struggle to accept because I know from experience that it is also not easy. Community has led to some of the most challenging conversations and choices of my life. I aim to be a mother who tells her children the whole truth. How do I articulate the fullness of what this is? The potent bliss of this moment led me back to this reflection I shared with this same congregation last summer, while in the liminal space of pregnancy, on the complexity of community.
Acts 2:44-47
44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
They make it sound pretty idyllic right? These early followers of The Way… A community with no scarcity, generosity rather than greed, everyone has what they need, no one is lonely, their community is growing, their circle is being drawn wider. It sounds like they are nearly dripping with gratitude and joy…
We all know it has to be more complicated than that, right? The first question that pops into my mind is yeah, okay who is doing all the meal planning and cooking? It sounds like the number of people coming to dinner each night keeps growing so plans keep changing. Who is in charge of distributing the funds from all the shared and sold possessions? How are they communicating with everyone? How do they stay on the same page about who they are collectively and make decisions?
Community is hard… We all know this. It requires tons of communication, trust, and intention. There are moments when we don’t fully live into who we say we are. We don’t always hear or receive each other’s concerns or hurt with the love we profess.
The summer after high school I arrived to work at a camp on the Pikes Peak Mastiff going through a spiritual season of grief around this realization that community falls short. The congregation of my childhood was amazing in a ton of ways. I loved being at church. I was supported, heard, and loved there. I had adults that let me ask hard questions and listened to me wrestle with my faith for hours on end. And then there were a series of ways the community fell short around willingness to prophetically engage conflict to care for LGBTQ people I saw sacred beauty in. At home my family was adjusting to life transitions around chronic illness, a fire at a family home, mental health challenges, and financial hardship. I was angry with God. I was exhausted. I was struggling to trust the goodness of the world around me. I was repetitively asking the questions, “Where the heck is God? And does that God even care about me or those I love?” In seminary I have learned that this grief and the theological attempts we make to make sense of it is called theodicy. We will come back to that later.
That summer I learned about Aspen groves. One day on a hike a fellow staff member mentioned that aspens are not actually separate trees, but that the groves are one organism sharing a root structure, and nutrients. They are inherently bound to life in community. Beginning that summer, and in countless seasons since then I have spent time on forest floors, holding awareness of the cradle of aspen roots below me at times when our communities, the hands and feet of Christ, fall short in their ability to hold me or those I love. I come to be held in this community of trees at times when I fall short. Season after season, these mountainside communities are my place of sacred stillness, rest, reflection, and generative grace for the imperfect humans around me and my own imperfection. The community of the Way in the book of Acts reflects on this sacred stillness as awareness of the God “in which we live and move and have our being.” These forests bring me home to God.
The largest known aspen grove is located in Fishlake National Forest in Utah and is believed to be the largest, most dense organism ever found at nearly 13 million pounds. The clone spreads over 106 acres, consisting of over 40,000 individual trees. The exact age of the clone and its root system is difficult to calculate, but it is estimated to have started at the end of the last ice age. Scientists have named it the “Pando clone.” Pando for the Latin word that means “I spread,” and clone for the fact that it originated from a single seed and spreads by sending up new shoots from the expanding root system.
I feel it is important to note here that in 2022 Governor Polis claimed that Colorado’s Kebler Pass Aspen Grove is even larger. This is not yet proven… his claim was spurred by, as Polis stated, “Australia is vainly professing that a self-cloning underwater sea grass forest is even larger than Colorado’s world-class Aspen groves," He said in a statement. "We don’t know what’s going on down under but up at our elevation we know Colorado’s gorgeous Aspen groves are a sight to behold and are the world’s largest plant.” I find it amusing and ironic how even in our awareness of interconnection in the natural world we become competitive…
Our society teaches us to live lives of fragmentation, separation, competition. We can point to numerous factors creating this lived worldview including capitalism, neoliberalism, natural selection, binary thinking and others. My ability to put food in my mouth, to shelter my child, to move through the world with freedom… We are taught that these are dependent on my ability to compete. To keep moving, producing, achieving.
This shows up in the way we as human stewards of the earth interact with forest ecosystems even as these ecosystems are showing us another way. Thanks to the paradigm shifting work of ecologist Susan Simard we now know that even across species each tree is linked to neighboring trees in a forest by an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in the brain. In her studies Simard has witnessed a Douglas fir that had been injured by insects sending chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced defense enzymes to protect against the insect. Her discovery challenges the common forestry practice of thinning out trees that were “competing” with the ones that loggers wanted to harvest for wood, and explained why replanting only one kind of tree after clear cutting a forest has created unstable ecosystems. By eliminating “competition” for their favored commodity loggers have eliminated the powerful diversity a forest ecosystem needs to be sustainable.
This societal norm of competition over the collaboration of community, like so many other places in our walk following the way of Jesus leaves a vast discrepancy between what is and what could be. Spiritual communities in our society are one of the only places where we bring so much of our wholeness to one another. We do community bringing our individual journeys, and the sacred complexity of our families to walk together over years, sometimes lifespans, and generations. We show up to this space with the most precious and vulnerable parts of our beings and strive to exist in relationship with one another. We find ways that we are like all others in the community, like some others, and ways where we are truly unique. We come from various faith backgrounds, lived experiences, pains and joys. Among it all, in this tangled web of complexity, we try to do the impossible task of loving community. We are a counter cultural movement, a reversal of societal norms, a beautiful example of what could be. The overwhelming difficulty of that task is nearly comical. This brings us back to theodicy.
Bad things will happen. We have this societal perception that spiritual communities are places of conformity, but the truth is they are not. We will not agree, we will be in conflict with one another, and that can be uncomfortable. We will try to do conflict in healthy and loving ways, but sometimes we will fall short and hurt one another. We will have to have the courage to continue to show up for one another when it is hard, own our mistakes, and offer ourselves and one another grace.
I know in my bones that our God with us, co-creating this world in our embodied experience. Is the same God in which “we live and move and have our being” of the followers of The Way in the community of Acts. This embodied God is in each breath of each one of us. Each of us carry a sacred prophetic voice, AND a sacred call to lovingly hear and witness others. God is the feeling of being seen and known. We are the body of Christ in eye contact, a smile from across a room, being met by name, a place set for you at a table, an empathetic ear, words of affirmation and encouragement. God is in all of the ways we embody love for ourselves and one another. This is the Kingdom here now and not yet.
God with us is also with us when the community falls short. We aren’t alone holding the heartbreak and self doubt of feeling unheard or misunderstood. We aren’t alone in the ache of realizing someone you love needs something you cannot give, or that your best intentions hurt someone’s feelings. God is with us when we realize we owe someone an apology. God is in grief, and “well now what?” When our apology isn’t received. God is in the ways we learn to serve ourselves grace. We aren’t alone when someone says something that marks a part of your identity, the truth of your lived experience of being in your sacred beautiful body as wrong, not enough, a stumbling block. God is with us in the lament of hate crimes, mass shootings, abuses of power, leaders spouting rhetoric of hatred, senseless violence…We are not alone in our trauma, tears, and fears.
God never leaves us. God is with us as we hear the diagnosis. Share the news of death. Create a “new normal.”
We ask questions of theodicy, “Where the heck is God? And does that God even care about me or those I love?” Again, the beautiful ways we are connected can hurt. There is no way around it. What do we do with that? People say things like “Everything happens for a reason.” What? I mean, no shame here. I have said this to people, and I’ve also had it said to me.
I’ve asked the question, “Really? Do you really think God would plan, or desire this suffering for me?” The phrase, “everything happens for a reason,” though we say it with the intention of offering comfort, steals our agency. I don’t believe that God ever takes away our agency for any reason. Yet painful experiences do not have to happen for a reason for me to use my agency to create a reason with God. God is here in the pain, grief, and trauma. God is with us in the muck and we co-create the transformation. We are active participants in the creation of meaning with God. As Jesus is healing he names this participation over and over, stating to people “your faith has made you well.”
Yet again, Jesus is teaching us a way of Kingdom that we are to live here on earth that is countercultural, yet we see it in the universal way of Christ playing out in the natural world around us.
Earlier this month I was a part of a seminarian cohort at the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. There I listened to a panel of public theologians talking about climate change and how to address concerns of environmental justice. Together they were lamenting the fact that the sustainability of the world we are leaving to our children doesn’t look good. They lamented that we are no longer asking questions about how to stop the damage, but are holding the reality of how to slow or reduce the damage. Brian McClaren reflected on hope. We want, desperately, hope for the future. He states, “hope is not the confidence things will turn out well. It is the conviction that some things are worth doing regardless of how they turn out.”
Is our call to be woven together as a community of Christ one of those things? Is it something worth doing regardless of how it turns out? Is that how we offer hope to our world? Is community our path to the Kingdom of God?
In the fungi, soil, and roots below the forest floor trees communally, and collaboratively share nutrients, practicing self emptying kenosis at critical times to keep each other healthy. Symbiotically they also practice plerosis, being filled. This practice is cyclical and ancient. Resurrection.
Are we a resurrection people? We hear a repetitive invitation into love from Jesus to his disciples just prior to his arrest, trial, and death:
“Abide in my love.”
“Love one another as I have loved you”
We are called into kenosis, to love completely, pour out our lives.
We live in plerosis, filled again, that our joy may be complete.
Like our forests. Cyclical. Ancient.
May we too practice resurrection.