Thoughts

Community is not what happens to a group when they finally feel warm fuzzies toward each other. Community does not "happen" at all. Community simply is, or is not. If I am in community with you, I may or may not experience warm feelings toward you, but it has no bearing on whether or not we are in community. We either are, or are not, regardless of how we feel about one another. It’s about ontology, not phenomenology.

Now healthy community is another matter, one of confession and absolution and forgiveness and grace, but one cannot learn to live and move in healthy community until one decides to be in community. And real community is the playground of hurt feelings, misunderstood motives, annoying idiosyncrasies and growth in grace, which is probably why so few actually decide to do it.

Remember when you were a kid, and bubbles were the most amazing things? Every day was a new torrent of wondrous experiences, tastes, sensations, adventures. No wonder they never want to go to bed. Life is just too exciting! Children know what it is to stand in awe of creation (not just the big stuff, like Niagra Falls, but the little stuff, too, like bugs and zippers and puddles and mulch and yes, bubbles); their capacity to be amazed hasn’t been dulled by competence and information.

We adults have a harder time at wonder, because we are competent, we are informed. It would seem we are doomed to a life of bland functionality and mathematical predictability. The answer is not to become stupid and inept, but to re-discover wonder without becoming incompetent or ignorant.

But perhaps there is something wrong with us if we cannot find a way to be stunned anymore. Maybe if we don’t know how to marvel, we are in fact incompetent, dysfunctional. If we cannot be amazed, then perhaps we are in fact ignorant, not seeing what the child sees when she squeals with delight at a floating bubble.

Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from a precocious two-year-old.

(photo by chris)