Healing one another requires showing up

We need reliable community, and reliable community needs regular participation.

People need community to heal. Jesus did not rise from the dead; Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of Trinitarian love. Christ relied on others to conquer suffering, as must we.

When Christ was raised from the dead, this raising did not erase the past: Jesus rose with his wounds, which were as real as their healing. If we trust God to heal, then we need not deny our wounds. Acceptance of their reality produces openness to their power, a power that is released in communities of wounded healers.

Wounded healers heal others’ wounds through their own. In every such act of communal healing, God intimates the new creation—God is felt in healing, which is a foretaste of the Kingdom. Those receptive to such intimations will naturally gather to express God’s grace to one another, to heal one another.

During times of great trial, people of faith experience God, and God-centered communities, as helpful. They experience the Creator as loving, even as they experience the creation as enigmatic—beautiful yet tragic, alive yet deadly, providential yet threatening. They choose to live within this paradox because the inhabitation of paradox, the ability to sit peacefully with unanswered questions, offers the most life.

Powerful, healing community requires interpersonal loyalty, and interpersonal loyalty requires being there for each other. People derive comfort, support, and strength from church (or mosque or synagogue or temple), but these benefits depend on regular engagement. Sometimes, people just go to church as needed; hard weeks are followed by church on Sunday, drawing strength from community, and easy weeks are the weeks to take off, because ease fosters the illusion of self-sufficiency.

This irregularity may suit the individual, but it doesn’t help the community. If we are truly connected, which we truly are, then on bad weeks we should attend church because we need community, and on good weeks we should attend church because community needs us.

Paul and Kay Williams, beloved members of a church we served, were church shopping. But they weren’t looking for a church that would meet their needs. They were looking for a church that needed them, because they felt that was where they could best serve God. They had realized that, as mentioned in a previous post, every participant in church is a priest, a minister of God, to every other member in a church. The pastor alone is insufficient due to simple time limitations as well as limited life experience.

On the Sunday when someone who has lost their job goes to church, they will need other people who have lost their jobs to support them. Parents who are struggling with a child will need other parents, who have struggled with their children, to support them. Those who are grieving need to be loved through their grief, comforted in the truth that grief is a universal experience.

We bear one another’s burdens and carry one another’s crosses because community lightens misfortune. And the best way to support one another is to be there for one another, to attend regularly and live openly. Because we can get through things together that we never could alone. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 231-232)

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For further reading, please see:

Nouwen, Henri. Henri Nouwen: Writings Selected. Edited by Robert A. Jonas. Modern Spiritual Masters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.

Nouwen, Henri. The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. New York: Crown, 2013.