11
The Web of Existence
COSMIC CONNECTIONS
Jayber Crow, the novel by Wendell Berry that I mentioned in chapter 7, portrays a character named Jayber in the small town of Port William, Kentucky. Typical of Berry, it’s a slow-moving but profound book, following Jayber as he works as the town barber for over fifty years. Jayber is orphaned as a young boy, and the beginning of the story is about Jayber’s resistance to dependence and constraint. He wants to be autonomous. Yet his quest for independence takes him to a town where he belongs, to a community that feels like family and fills the absence he’s always felt. Port William takes Jayber in, as imperfect as the place is. He is viewed as suspect by some of the townspeople for being an aging bachelor, and he’s judged by others for his chosen profession. But he becomes embedded in this web of existence. He has a role to play and a duty to fulfill, and by cutting hair, he comes to know the people and the rhythms of that place. He’s entangled and cannot be independent. He comes to recognize the “normal” that can be known only locally and with time. He becomes part of the history of the place, and it begins to feel like home. He stops trying to figure out what he is going to be or where he is going to go. He settles in place.
At one point in the novel, Jayber shuts his eyes and imagines all the people of Port William, these people whom he has observed, judged, fought with, and loved. As he imagines this web of connection, “They were just there. They said nothing, and I said nothing. I seemed to love them all with a love that was mine merely because it included me. When I came to myself again, my face was wet with tears.”1 By committing to place, he has grown to love a people. He isn’t like Troy, whom I mentioned before. Troy is restless, always wanting more, always pursuing the next big thing. Jayber settles on love, and love requires mutual sacrifice and the end of freedom. As David Brooks mentions in a college commencement address, “The things you chain yourself to set you free.”2 There’s a deeper freedom that arises with commitment. Faith requires fidelity.
These cosmic connections are true for all of us. We have invisible roots that go down into webs of communion beneath the surface. Affection roots us in place, allowing the web to grow stronger and more durable.
In the first section of this chapter, I discuss the fundamental web of communion as found in the church. To be a Christian is to be part of a church community. In the second section of the chapter, I expand our connectedness beyond church members to neighbors. We are called to nourish the people and places that have nourished us.
LIVING INTO THE CHURCH
You need to commit to a local church. If you’re like me, every element of that sentence makes you uncomfortable. A statement about me needing to do something is a nonstarter. It assumes someone has the authority to tell me what to do. And I don’t like authority. Obedience implies a restriction on freedom, a disfiguring of who I am, because who I am is what I desire. And if I can’t have my desire, then I can’t truly be myself.
Myles Werntz argues that “to have no authority is to designate each individual an authority over their fragment of the world.”3 No authority is the way we like it. Hauerwas’s critique of the modern project of meaning-making makes sense if we have no authority. We have no story until we choose a story. No one can tell me which story to choose. I inherit nothing. I’m an individual choosing my way and ruling over my fragment of the world.
The problem is that we want all the benefits of community with none of the requirements. Or as Ronald Rolheiser has written, “Typical today is the person who wants faith but not the church, the questions but not the answers, the religious but not the ecclesial, and the truth but not obedience.”4 We want community with no strings attached, no mutual commitment to one another. We desire a community that’s easy to enter and easier to leave, with choices and no responsibility. In essence, we want a community void of all necessary elements of belonging.
The second problem after authority is commitment. No one likes commitments. Personally, I have a serious case of FOMO (fear of missing out). Commitments, like authority, limit my freedom of choice. I don’t even like to commit to plans for a Friday night in case something better comes up. Commitments are scary. Moreover, it’s easy in the modern world to throw things away rather than repair them. If a phone is old, buy the latest version. If a marriage is broken, get a new one. Moving up means moving on. Bigger is better. So if a community is broken (and what community isn’t?), it seems easier to move on. Rather than working with what we have, we leave for some hopeful, better future.
But the church is a place of commitment. There are good reasons to leave a church—for instance, a dysfunctional or unhealthy church leadership or an intriguing opportunity in another city. But I think our overall tendency should be to stay. In a documentary called Godspeed, a film about slowing down our pace of life and getting to know neighbors in a parish sense, there’s an interview with a monk. Benedictine monks take a vow of stability, promising to stay in the same monastery their whole life. In our mobile and global age, I know that sounds unthinkable. No travel? No exploration? Just stuck in the same spot? Yes. For these monks, commitment to place is a spiritual matter.5
The monk who is interviewed, Father Giles, says the secret to stability is the realization that one is a sinner but a beloved sinner. He says, “Very quickly, you see people’s faults. Look at that guy. But to see people’s virtues, it takes longer. To learn to know takes time.” He explains that modern culture may be obsessed with the “shallow novelty” of new experience, but deep relationship takes time. Later, he talks about growing with these brothers in place as an opportunity to see the grace of God at work. “You see Brother So and So. You can’t get within two miles of him.” But after ten years you can get within a single mile. And after twenty years a half mile. And after forty years maybe six feet. And if God can do that, what graces may he have at work within me?
Often, when a conflict occurs in my life, I am quick to leave. If a leader makes a decision I don’t like, I’ll go someplace else. Or if that lady seems arrogant and rude, I’ll think that this isn’t the right church for me. Or those guys seem closed off and distant, so let’s get out of here. I can choose to live like that, but if I do I’ll never stay anyplace long enough to truly know a people, and therefore I can never really love anyone or receive love in return. Worse, I’ll never stay long enough to see the grace of God at work. Wendell Berry suggests we should carry forgiveness like a fire extinguisher. “If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher.”6 The problem of many communities is that we live like we don’t need one another. We think we can move on and not care. We don’t live with affection, and we therefore have no prepaid forgiveness.
A life committed to stability requires radical honesty, truthfulness with one another in church.7 The typical way I handle conflict is to bury my feelings deep down and never bring it up. I’ll just wait till I feel better. But this way of handling conflict results in a false peace. The work of true peace requires daily mending. Mending is the work of love. On this note the novelist James Baldwin challenges me:
If you do love somebody . . . you try to correct the person whom you love. Now that’s a two-way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. . . . If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. . . . I will not see without you, and vice versa, and you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which is called love.8
The thing about blind spots is that you can’t see them. So you need a community to help you see yourself more truly and pursue Jesus. In our right minds, don’t we want people to help us forsake sin and pursue righteousness? If there’s an obstacle to loving Jesus, don’t we want that pointed out? Love is the commitment that we will sharpen one another and not run away when things get tough.
Here’s the reality: We each contribute, positively or negatively, to a community of faith. We all make daily deposits, so to speak. Either our commitments and rhythm of life enrich a community, or our presence poisons it. Living in trivial, superficial, or restless ways poisons the stream of communal life. Commitment, by contrast, restores and nourishes a community.
This requirement to commit pertains to a particular local church, not to church in the abstract. The normal mode of being a Christian is going to a place where Christians gather together.9 This commitment is harder than the commitment to the idea of church, since people have warts and idiosyncrasies. They are harder to love than a vague sense of community. I’ve worked in the church for most of my adult life. I know how poorly people can be treated. I know how lousy life in church can be. I know what it’s like to be embarrassed by people who are supposed to be like brothers and sisters but who act like weird, distant uncles. Communities are messy, worship can be emotionally manipulative, sermons can be shallow or boring or partisan, and so on. The list could go on. There are unhealthy dynamics at play. But as one Russian Christian says, “You’re not a Christian so that you can be happy, you’re not in the Church to be happy but to be alive.”10 When Jesus asks the disciples if they want to leave, Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). I know the church can be messy, but Jesus gives the church, the body of Christ, stewardship of the words of eternal life. Where else could we go?
In the Roman Catholic tradition, there is a teaching that says: outside the church there is no salvation.11 That may be uncomfortable to individualistic Protestant ears. Protestants broke away from what they considered to be a dysfunctional and lax church for greater purity, not less! However, even the early Reformer John Calvin teaches something similar. Citing the church father Saint Cyprian, who says we can’t have God as Father without church as mother, Calvin writes, “But as it is now our purpose to discourse of the visible church, let us learn, from her single title of Mother, how useful, no, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government. . . . Moreover, beyond the pale of the church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for.”12 Commitment to Christ entails commitment to a church. There is no other way of salvation, as we saw in Acts. The way we enter the church is by being baptized and taking on the trinitarian name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Only the church has the authority to baptize in the name of God. No one has the authority to call themselves a Christian. They can say the words, but baptism is the proof. In the same way, someone could say they’re funny. We’ll see about that. In baptism the church gives the stamp of approval—yes, this person is who they say they are.
THE COMPELLING COMMUNITY
The power of Christian witness depends upon the quality of our life together. Love is the sign that we are Christ’s disciples (John 13:35). A lack of love, which sometimes characterizes Christian congregations, is antithetical to the gospel. Christine Pohl affirms, “The beauty of loving communities does not replace the importance of the verbal proclamation of the gospel, but Jesus explicitly linked the truth of his life and message to our life together.”13 The outworking of the gospel is love overflowing from the community into the world.
In the fourth century, Saint Basil of Caesarea was elected as a bishop in the church. Coming from a wealthy and connected family, he had all the means necessary to be “successful.” Yet he gave up all his privilege to serve the poor. During his time as bishop, a great famine arose in Caesarea that caused many impoverished people to become even more destitute. Many in the city underwent a slow and terrible death by starvation. Basil got to work. He preached sermons condemning money lenders and the rich. He recognized the institutional injustices that faced the poor. He would preach things like this:
Who is a man of greed? Someone who does not rest content with what is sufficient. Who is a cheater? Someone who takes away what belongs to others. And are you not a man of greed? Are you not a cheater? Taking those things which you received for the sake of stewardship, and making them your very own? Now, someone who takes a man who is clothed and renders him naked would be termed a robber; but when someone fails to clothe the naked, while he is able to do this, is such a man deserving of any other appellation? The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.14
Saint Basil didn’t play around. He convicts us of complacency and greed.
Basil’s lasting impact was establishing what came to be known as basileas, which translates into “new cities.” They were to be places of hospitality for the poor, serving as both a home and a hospital. Basileas also provided vocational training so that the poor could contribute to the needs of others as well as seek employment.15 Foundational to Basil’s ministry was meeting the needs of others. His monasticism included activism. He cared about both spiritual and material needs.
Basileas found expression several centuries later in Celtic spirituality. George Hunter III details the difference between Roman and Eastern monastic communities, on the one hand, and Celtic monastic communities, on the other. Whereas the Eastern monasteries were formed to protest the materialism of the Roman world and the corruption in the church, Celtic monasteries were “organized to penetrate the pagan world and to extend the Church.”16 It was a movement not of escapism but of missional strategy. Hunter continues, “The wall [of the monastery] did not signify an enclosure to keep out the world; the area signified the ‘alternative’ way of life, free of aggression and violence and devoted to God’s purposes, that the community modeled for the world.”17 These walls were not exclusionary but opened to hallowed ground—an alternative community that lived in alternative ways. Celtic spirituality therefore produced ways of living that were more communal than the individualistic or tribal lifestyles that surrounded them. The people of their monasteries lived in contact with place and the ground and cultivated the earth as they cultivated one another. Their beautiful setting impacted the way they lived on the land, close to nature.
In living with distinct rhythms, the church offers a compelling welcome to the outside world. There is distinction—this is the church, and this is the world—yet the church always has its arms open. We know what it’s like to be welcomed as a stranger because Christ has welcomed us. Therefore, we welcome the strangers among us. Christians are distinct in the way they love each other, so onlookers see a community where people truly love, forgive, and serve one another, unlike people in the broader community. A Christian community should be the tangible reality of the love and community that the outside world has always longed for but never knew existed.
HOW TO TELL TIME AND HOW TO LIVE: THE LITURGICAL YEAR
My wife and I were both raised in religiously apathetic homes. Perhaps you could call us both cultural Catholics—my wife being of the Hispanic variety and me being of the Italian variety. We went to church sometimes, but church life was never a commitment that defined us. Church was not a story we carried or desired but was more something we were coerced into. I can’t remember a religious conversation from my childhood. That does not mean they did not happen, but spirituality did not seem to be an animating force for our family.
When my wife and I started a family, tradition was hard for us. It felt like we did not have any. How do we organize a family and establish rhythms? What traditions should our kids have? What do we do for Christmas? Or Easter? How do we spiritually form our children? Should we fast for Lent? It was all fair game. So many choices with no direction can be debilitating for people making decisions. It all felt so consequential, but we had no wise guides to help us. How do I make up practices that will help and not harm my children? How do I know what works? What do I want to pass on to future generations? What has worked in the past? I did not have the resources to answer these questions.
I realized that taking up spiritual practices is a lot easier in community. I’m not strong enough by myself or in my family unit to succeed at spiritual formation. I need others with me, encouraging me, helping me, guiding me.
Tradition helped ballast me. Tradition may seem stifling and archaic, but every community, and every family, has traditions. Tradition helps us live into the world by taking up practices of the past. The church is not an information-transfer station but training for a way of life. To help assist people in living in the world, the church gives us a calendar that tells time differently than the popular culture does. Myles Werntz notes, “Our lives are not just a litany of activities to be accomplished but an ordering of time that must be reclaimed.”18 Time is told in certain ways. If you’re a student, your time is ordered from August to May. If you’re an accountant, the crunch of tax season is in April. If you’ve been formed by American culture, the year starts at New Year’s Day and proceeds through Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, and a few other special days until it arrives at its climax: consumer Christmas.
In a provocative talk at a youth conference, Stanley Hauerwas challenged the upcoming generation.
I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not at all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example:
—How many of you worship in a church with an American flag?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
—How many worship in a church in which the Fourth of July is celebrated?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
