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Community Today
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The early Christians lived in the Spirit. The Spirit blows like the
wind - it is never rigid like iron or stone. The Spirit is infinitely more
sensitive and delicate than the inflexible designs of the intellect or
the cold, hard framework of governmental or societal structures. The Spirit
is more sensitive even than all the emotions of the human soul, more sensitive
than all the powers of the human heart, on which people so often try -
in vain - to build lasting edifices. But just for this reason the Spirit
is stronger and more irresistible than all these things, never to be overcome
by any power, however terrible; for it is the breadth, depth and height
of being.
In Jesus, who lived a life of love without violence, love without rights,
and love without the desire to possess, the Spirit lives on powerfully
as the Risen One, as the inner voice and the inner eye that leads to community.
The light of the early church illuminated the path of humankind in only
one short flash. Yet its spirit and witness stayed alive even after its
members had been scattered and many of them murdered. Again and again through
history, similar forms arose as gifts of God, expressions of the same living
Spirit. Witnesses were killed, and fathers died, but new children were
- and are - born to the Spirit again and again. Communities pass away.
But the church that creates them remains. Efforts to organize community
artificially can only result in ugly, lifeless caricatures. Only when we
are empty and open to the Living One - to the Spirit - can he bring about
the same life among us as he did among the early Christians. The Spirit
is joy in the Living One, joy in God as the only real life; it is joy in
all people, because they have life from God. The Spirit drives us to all
people and brings us joy in living and working for one another, for it
is the spirit of creativity and love.
Community life is possible only in this all embracing Spirit and in those
things it brings with it: a deepened spirituality and the ability to experience
that can never feel equal to it. In truth, the Spirit alone is equal to
itself. It quickens our energies by firing the inmost core - the soul of
the community - to white heat. When this core burns and blazes to the point
of sacrifice, it radiates far and wide.
Community life is like martyrdom by fire: it means the daily sacrifice
of all our rights, all the claims we commonly make on life and assume to
be justified. In the symbol of fire the individual logs burn away so that,
united, its glowing flames send out warmth and light again and again into
the land.
We must live in community because the spirit of joy and love gives us such
an urge to reach out to others that we wish to be united with them for
all time."
[excerpted from Why we live in Community, by Eberhard
Arnold, 1925, (c) 1995 by the Plough Publishing House, The Bruderhof Foundation,
Farmington, PA]
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