*This post has been recorded should you wish to listen instead of read*
Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”
-Mark 1:36-37
This is the moment, in our text at least, where community begins. There’s an old Hasidic tale told in Nouwen's Spiritual Direction that goes like this:
The rabbi asked his students: “How can we determine the hour of dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?”
One of the rabbi’s students suggested: “When from a distance you can distinguish between a dog and a sheep?”
“No,” was the answer of the rabbi.
“It is when one can distinguish between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked a second student. “No,” the rabbi said.
“Please tell us the answer then,” said the students.
“It is then,” said the wise teacher, “when you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or your sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”1
Filled with the knowledge of who we are, we now emerge from the dark and experience the light enabling us to see the face of another human being and realize that they are our sister or brother. We are able, in other words, to see them for who they are in Christ, rather than who we imagine them to be, or desire them to be.
In the previous post we explored why solitude plays such an important role in our lives which subsequently feeds positively into community and as a result, why, in some ways, the practice of solitude should be considered prior to the formation of community. But I now want to acknowledge that we’re in fraught territory here. When Nouwen references the way that we remember our baptismal identity in solitude, it also needs to be said very clearly and strongly that our baptismal identity is not a private identity. The church both witnesses and participates in our baptismal identity. We are baptized into the community we are speaking of and so in no way is our baptism one of solitude. In that sense, then, the community comes first. With that acknowledged, however, the reason that solitude is important is because we, like all of the baptized, are baptized in Jesus name – we are in Christ – and this has a particular implication, and that implication, as we’ll explore below, means that we have no direct access to our christian sister or brother. Christ always stands between us. It is this that we are reminded of in solitude.
Here I want to bring Dietrich Bonhoeffer into conversation with Nouwen. The problem of not being secure in who we are in Christ is that we will potentially wreak havoc in the community if we do not come to understand that it is God who forms and defines the community. Bonhoeffer writes,
“Within the spiritual community there is never, nor in any way, any ‘immediate’ relationship of one to another…”2
We do not know each other directly, not even if the other is our spouse, child, or best friend. We have no direct access to another person. Bonhoeffer explains:
I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes.3
Let’s add a third voice to the conversation. Ian McFarland writes:
“The fact of anyone’s being a person cannot be determined by looking at her or him in isolation, but only by examining that person’s relationship to Jesus. It is Jesus who, as one of the divine persons, establishes us as human persons.”4
Our uniqueness as persons, McFarland believes, exists because of our relationship to Jesus. And he therefore writes,
“Difference is integral to this account of personhood, since no two people stand in the same relationship to Jesus…Even though it is true that we all stand equally in the shadow of Jesus’ cross, none of us occupies the same place under the cross.”5
So when morning comes, the light by which we recognize our sister or brother is none other than the light of Christ. This past Sunday was transfiguration Sunday in which we read of the light which emanates from Jesus. This is the uncreated light, the light that existed before the sun and stars and will exist after the sun is no more (Rev. 21:3). Recalling that it is Jesus that makes another who they are, we are free to love them in their difference and uniqueness. We reject trying to form them into our image since they are already formed and being formed into the image of Jesus. The light that shone on the mount of transfiguration is the light by which we recognize the face of the other.
So what happens in community, and why is it important that we move beyond solitude and towards the dawn? Here we can say a few things. First, we reflect our unique relationship with Jesus to one another. There’s a beautiful passage in C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves where he talks about this very thing. Lewis’ close friend Charles Williams had died and he thinks about the way that this not only affects him personally, but how it changes all of his relationships in which Williams was also formerly connected. He writes,
“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facts. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”6
“I want other lights than my own,” writes Lewis, and he wants those lights in order to see others for who they are. And then he says this stunning thing that brings out what McFarland says about us all standing in different places in the shadow of the cross, thus possessing different perspectives. Lewis writes,
Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed…increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another…The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.7
Lewis is right to want other lights, because these lights are stronger than our own. They show us something of God that we could not find in solitude. Bonhoeffer says it so beautifully (though forgive the dated gendered language here):
God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.8
In community, then, we see both each other and God in a way that we could not on our own. The closer we draw to the center of the community – Jesus the light – the more true and beautiful the community we live into. Notice I say live into instead of form. I make this distinction because it is the community that Christ is forming in and around himself that we come to be a part of. This is different than us creating community by our own ingenuity as we are ever tempted to do. Bonhoeffer, once more, has some very strong words about this exact thing which we would do well to heed:
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.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious...When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.9
We live in a time of visionary dreaming. But a church rooted in visionary dreaming is a church that believes it needs to be “the star of its own story.”10 No matter how sincere and hard worked the visionary dream of community, it is likely to end poorly unless we understand that we are living into the community that God is creating, not creating a community where God is welcomed. Only by drawing closer and closer to the center, Jesus, can we experience the community that already is and that we are invited into.
So, as a church, while it is really important to have good pathways for people to connect, it is even more important that we, together, are drawing closer to Jesus so that we can reflect Christ’s own light to each other and find the Christ in our sister or brother’s heart stronger than the Christ in our own. And then, we can invite others into that light. We’ll take up that third movement in the next post.
*Author: Phil Aud (also writes at Theomagination)
Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith. (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 109-110.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community (New York: HarperOne, 1954), 32.
ibid., 36.
Ian A. McFarland, Difference and Identity: A Theological Anthropology (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2001), 10-11.
ibid., 11.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1960), 61.
ibid., 62.
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 23.
ibid., 27-28.
See ch. 6 of Andrew Roots, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology For A Secular Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).