The Beloved Community [in Flux]
It's been a quiet season these last months here in the land of creative writing. My calendar has reminded me that I owe the blog a post, but I have struggled to land on much that felt compelling to say. I only want to offer that which the Spirit leads, and the quiet season has leaked into my ears.
Recently, though, I have realized a dynamic that has been threaded through this year and I feel like telling you: my beloved communities have been changing and it's unsettling. If you have read my earliest posts, you will know that an aim of this blog is to convey the beauty of, and in some way to offer, a space to be with people of a common heart posture. One friend described it as a campfire: always available, mostly agendaless, largely untimestamped. It's a place of ease and sojourning where our masks come off, we can close our eyes and sit in silence, we can be together and share the heartbeat of God among us. Sometimes the dialogue is about the tangible things God is doing in our everyday stories, sometimes it's about beauty, truth, philosophy or math. You never know, but it also doesn't matter very much. It's the being there, together and with God, that draws us.
Two things have occurred this year that have impacted the shape of my campfires.
First, back in the spring, someone left. It was unexpected. It came with no animosity, but also no explanation. And it was jarring. It made me wonder: was our campfire not a refuge after all? What did we miss while walking alongside this friend that would allow him to think it would be okay for him to hang a (unblinkered! no warning!) sharp turn and continue on alone, without comment? Are we not covenanted in the Way of Jesus to be life and breath and love to one another? We must have missed something. And the dynamic around this particular campfire has changed. It has taken months for us to settle into a new way of being together that seems as rich as it once did. We sometimes still wonder, with sorrow, how we failed our friend.
The other change is this: I have a brand new campfire! Some of you may be aware that I began work on a Master's degree in Spiritual Formation in August. This is a course of study that will add dimension to my own formation and to my direction practice, I hope. While the class is primarily working through various online platforms, we were required to spend five intensive days together in September as a cohort of 15. We began as strangers but have begun to be knitted together in the most Spirit-gift of ways. I recognize in our continuing interactions the deepening of a new group of beloved ones.
So, I am again reminded of the promise that God is at work in all the things: the goings and the comings, the rearranging of the seating logs in one place and the birthing of a newly kindled flame in another. Possibly unexpected, but inviting us to grace and open-heartedness. All for the sake of loving one another as we have been loved: seen, known and cherished. And, even in the inevitable losses, deeply held.
Be at peace, dear ones, as we prepare to enter the season of Advent and look toward Christmas. May the glimmer of God's delight in you find you and melt deeply into your soul.
