From Volume 9, Number 3, Winter 2002

Another Article

 At various times and in various settings the issue of community arises in our discussions about Celtic Christianity and the Aidan Way. For the last twenty years I have noted a deep and gnawing hunger to be part of a “we” rather than the disconnected, self-contained “I” that is the ideal of our culture. In spite of that hunger the atomization of our culture continues unabated. We have attempted many substitutes for community, the most recent and highly touted being the idea of human connectivity across the Internet. Yet this community is even more insulated from the fullness of human contact and isolated from the challenge and pain of community than the fragmented culture in which our physical connections take place.

 The Alpha Course, a world-wide phenomenon based at Holy Trinity Church in the UK reports that the most powerful part of that 10 week program is not the teaching offered, but the groups in which participants can ask any and all questions and learn, over those weeks, to cope with the different, occasionally prickly personalities in the group. When the course ends, most all of these groups desire to continue on. And when churches are ready to offer the groups assistance and resources Alpha inevitably results in growth: in church attendance, in ministry and in outreach.

 In our experience at the St. Aidan Trust, it is a rare inquirer who can pursue the Aidan Way in isolation. It is struggle enough to follow a discipline so contrary to the contemporary world without having to undertake the journey alone.

 So far, few would protest these assertions. We are all well aware of the loneliness of modern life. At the same time, there is a cost to community which defeats most of our efforts to build it, all the more so as the cost is rarely articulated and even more rarely identified when communities fail. The cost is the cost of love and love is the most costly commodity in our world. The love God bore for a humankind at war with both Creator and creation cost the Son of God betrayal, rejection, torture, humiliation and death. The love needed to build and maintain community will cost us our comfort, our pride, our self-protection against pain. In certain nations in today’s world it may cost us our property, our families and our lives. Yet, our hearts still yearn for this costly thing: to be together in community.

 For a member of the Order of St. Aidan, the value of community is part of our Way of Life. Yet even the Aidan Way speaks of communities already in existence, not communities that need to be created. That task requires perseverance, patience, grace and charity. It is simple enough to start a study group or prayer group. We would recommend that members of our community living far from an Aidan Fellowship (which is just about all of us!) try to begin with such a low-risk enterprise, perhaps using Esther de Waal’s book Every Earthly Blessing. (NOTE: Michael Mitton’s work, The Soul of Celtic Spirituality is now out of print. We are negotiating with the UK publishers to purchase a quantity of the UK edition under its original title, Restoring the Woven Cord, to sell through the St. Aidan Trust.)

 Such a study group is more than just disseminating information. It is offering an opportunity for dormant dreams and hidden hungers to reawaken. In a group of seven or so, it may be that only one or two make such a response, but one or two is all we need to begin. Once such persons have been identified, there appears a critically important question: “What are you to do when you gather?” There are a number of excellent resources available, and the St. Aidan Trust is beginning to develop its own resource which we hope to have available this summer. In the meantime, one of the best is found in Richard Foster’s (Celebration of Discipline) community, Renovaré (www.renovare.org). Their “Order of Meeting” for spiritual formation groups is particularly helpful.

 Whatever means you chose, it is at this point where the challenge of community begins in earnest. The closer you grow together the more likely you are to cause pain and disappointment to one another, the more likely you are to feel membership in such a group pressing into areas of you life that have been sealed off. This is where perseverance, patience, grace and charity come in. We need God’s grace because, in truth, the task is beyond our strength. Attempts in churches and seminaries to form small group communities without the Grace of God in Jesus Christ have been universal failures. We need charity in the older sense of that word: caritas (love). It is not the affection of friendship that will carry us through, nor the affection of the comfort we take in familiar faces and voices. This is the love mentioned in the New Testament, represented in the Greek word agape. It is a love expressed in action, in the way we behave towards one another. It is love by doing, sometimes in opposition to how we feel at any given moment.

 We need patience with ourselves and with our companions, for we are all “Christians under construction.” Relapses into wounded pride, anger or emotional withdrawal will happen in each of us. The journey we undertake is not on level ground but on steep and rocky paths. Finally, we need perseverance. There are countless demands in life which make it easy and convenient to postpone meeting together, to skip out of a gathering because we are too tired, too busy, too stressed. Without perseverance our community will be stillborn.

 If you will dare to undertake this journey, we’d like to hear about it at the St. Aidan Trust, and share it on the pages of The Wild Goose. It is a daunting journey, and we will need all the prayers, support and encouragement we can get from one another.