1. Berry, Jayber Crow, 165.
2. Brooks, “Ultimate Spoiler Alert.”
3. Werntz, From Isolation to Community, 169.
4. Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 35.
5. Saint Anthony was once asked, “What must one do in order to please God?” “He replied, “Pay attention to what I tell you. Whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes. Whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures. Wherever you live, do not easily leave it. Keep these precepts and you will be saved” (quoted in Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 2). Those first two pieces of advice are standard enough. But that third one hits the modern person differently. Anthony doesn’t say never to move, but he does say not to leave easily. I think that’s rich advice to heed in today’s world. (And thanks to Ryan Smith for pointing me to this passage.)
6. Wickenden, “Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age.”
7. Truthfulness and honesty are a major emphasis for community life in Christine Pohl’s Living into Community, 61–159.
8. Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin,” 155–56.
9. The problem of “digital community” “begins with the scattering of people from one another as the default ground to which our vision of church then must be calibrated. When we construct church in such a way that all of the activities of the church can be fully and completely performed through our own individual thoughts, our own individual agency, our own individual interpretation mediated through our personal digital device, then what we are doing may very well be religiously informative or inspirational, but we will be accommodating to the conditions of isolation, not operating in defiance of them” (Werntz, From Isolation to Community, 34).
10. A Russian Christian as quoted in Williams, Looking East in Winter, 158.
11. See Espín and Nickoloff, Introductory Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies, 439.
12. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.1.4 (Beveridge, 674).
13. Pohl, Living into Community, 2.
14. Basil the Great, On Social Justice, 69.
15. See Smither, Mission in the Early Church, 137–38.
16. Hunter, Celtic Way of Evangelism, 28.
17. Hunter, Celtic Way of Evangelism, 29.
18. Werntz, From Isolation to Community, 93.
19. Hauerwas, Working with Words, 116–17.
20. Heschel, Sabbath, 8.
21. See Rohr, Falling Upward. Rohr uses the phrase to refer to the way in which failures in “the second half of life” can lead to spiritual growth.
22. Much could be said about the church becoming a distraction station and playing into the temptation to be an entertainment factory. If we value the principles of the world, there’s no wonder the church does not have much formative power.
23. Augustine, “Letter 243, to Laetus,” in Oden and Hall, Mark, 106.
24. Bell, Meaning of Blue, 176.
25. Berry, Unsettling of America, 22.
26. Berry, “Native Grasses and What They Mean,” 53.
27. Wirzba, Agrarian Spirit, 5.
28. Bahnson, “Unbroken Grace.”
29. Berry, Life Is a Miracle, 41.
12
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
NEIGHBOR LOVE AND LIFE TOGETHER
I was first introduced to the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a seminar at Gordon College on the North Shore of Boston. It was an upperclassmen seminar, full of group discussions and presentations. The class was held in a rotunda overlooking Coy Pond, an idyllic setting in which to start my research into a man who plotted to kill Hitler and was later executed.
After I finished the course, Bonhoeffer sat dormant in my mind until I was meeting with my friends Bethany and Steven to talk about starting an intentional community where we would farm, care for the poor, and live together. This vision of connectedness and wholeness compelled me—caring for the land and caring for the least of these.
One day, Steven sent out an email that began with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, a book I had read during that course at Gordon College. Bonhoeffer is worth quoting at length:
Just at this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood. In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being clear right from the beginning, first, that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian brotherhood is a spiritual and not a psychic reality.
Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it has sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. . . .
He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.1
Idealism, what Bonhoeffer calls a wish dream, destroys the reality of Christian community. Bonhoeffer is not against an ideal church or the desire for the purity of the church. But if wanting a picture-perfect community makes you forsake the church, then your idealism is useless. You’re rejecting Christ, who is already there. He goes on to say that God hates the visionary dreamer.
