Why is
“community building” stressed so much in our faith? I think my spiritual life is a very
intimate, private thing between me and God.
One
morning a few years back on my way to work, I was on the service drive of I-75
because there was a mess of construction and traffic on the expressway. I was passing through a very over developed
area; there wasn’t a park or even a significant bunch of trees around within
miles – it was all strip malls and asphalt.
While
painfully creeping in traffic I noticed out of my passenger window , standing
elegantly, not even 20 feet from the street, next to an over-filled dumpster in
the parking lot of a convenience store was this beautiful deer, breathing in
the fumes from all the traffic and eating the little tuffs of dusty grass that
were struggling to break through the cracks in the concrete.
The
vision of this deer arrested me. I did a
little double-take because it was so out of place. I thought to myself, ‘I bet that deer doesn’t
have long to live before she runs into traffic or simply gets sick from the
limited, dirty food and stress she is enduring due to living in such an urban
area.’ The deer was surviving, but not
living the life for which she was created.
She was not living the optimal life of a deer. Not living as God intended.
So
it is I think sometimes with us. We are
not living optimally as human beings. We
are surviving but not living as we were designed to live. And, like that deer, we are relatively
unaware of how deprived we really are; we
don’t really see how our choices and culture sometimes rob us of the rich life
that God has intended for each of us.
In
the book Bowling Alone, author Robert Putnam states that social bonds
are by far the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction and a surprising predictor
of personal health. If you both smoke
and belong to no groups, it’s a close call as to which is the riskier behavior! He goes on to note the fact that there are
more bowlers today, but fewer bowling leagues, because everybody is bowling
alone.
Putnam
asserts that we are paying a heavy price for the loss of what he calls “social
capital” which is the life-giving product of communal activity and
sharing. Clinically measured depression
has increased ten-fold in our country over the past 50 years, and although the
origins of this epidemic are not yet clear, the prime candidate is social isolation. The loss of social capital is reflected in
higher crime rates, a weakened democracy, lower educational performance, more
teen pregnancies and incidents of suicide. We
live so alone today. We have taken
individualism to such an extreme, we hardly know how to define ourselves as
parts of something larger any more. So, perhaps Jesus understood our
nature better than we do, knew our tendency to isolate in the face of
(inevitable) conflict and therefore established as our central ritual gathering
in his name each week for a meal…for reconciliation…for mutual support. Maybe he knew that the greatest remedy for
our suffering is togetherness; in other words, gathering to “BE church.”
We
Catholics define “sin” as anything that distances us from God’s love and mercy
and separates us from one another. In a
word, sin is alienation. God does not indiscriminately
declare ‘this and that’ as a sin in an effort to limit our freedom, to exercise
control over us or test our fidelity. Rather sin is simply what is bad for US. Like
any good parent, God wishes for us to have life to the full. But, maybe our fierce individualism, even in
our spiritual lives, is simply not good for us.
It is not the life for which we were designed. A
possibility to consider…
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