Hearing the Word as a Community*

The gospel's image of the forgiving father sighting his wayward son "a long way off" reminds me of members of my community distressed about their loved ones who are in trouble. How can we make it easier for them to ask us to share that burden? Can we become a community where it's less necessary to put on a brave face or to conceal our family worries? A columnist syndicated in the Catholic press in the United States recently wrote of a parish where every member knew every other member's sorrows and woes. (Well maybe not everybody, but there was a remarkable mutual openness among the people described.) A great loyalty held these people together, making their parish proof against the demographic changes that gut other parishes.

In the story Jesus tells, the father does a risky thing even before the prodigal returns.

The author of I Timothy overstates the drama of Paul's conversion. What Paul was doing before Jesus intercepted him was just being a very good Jew. He was rigid in his interpretation of God's will for the Jews, but he wasn't consciously defying God. Quite the contrary. God's call to Paul in Christ was to convert from something good to something better. And that's more descriptive of the struggles of most of the people with whom we worship. Sure, it's good to remember God's lavish mercies, but the people listening to the Word with us are not the ones squandering their inheritances on loose women and riotous living. We're preaching to the choir here. And their struggles are likely about giving up something good for something better. Like the woman who has a well-paying job but would like to become a teacher. Can we help her afford that change? Can we help enrich her life in non-monetary ways, so she feels better off even if she makes less money? Can we do that for people who have already chosen less lucrative service-oriented careers? There may be members of our community pondering religious life or the priesthood. They'll have to give up the joys of virtuous marriage and parenthood. How can we support them in that? They'll still want to feel like they belong to our community, so we shouldn't treat their possible vocations as oddities.

Let's assume the golden calf business in the first reading is about an alternative to Moses' Ark of the Covenant, as described above, not just an episode of simple-minded idolatry. That reminds us of how important symbols are in forming a community. What do our symbols say about the character of our community? (See a discussion of liturgical symbols (the lectionary and others), elsewhere on this site.) A friend of mine once described a monastery chapel that was very spare--with almost no decoration, not even a crucifix. Her conclusion was, "The design told me that the assembly of worshipers itself was the principal symbol." What a powerful image! What a powerful symbol is our very coming together! Think about that. Except for our shared allegiance to Christ, many of us would be at best uninterested in each other, or mutually suspicious, or rivals or even enemies. We'd be like the people on television, God forbid, because we'd have no more commanding model. Think of how different we are, and yet God is making a unified assembly of us. Our tradition's first word for "church" was ekklesia, meaning "the ones called out." From the beginning our assembly itself has been for us and for the world a symbol of God's call to a more gracious way of life. We're supposed to be different from the people held up to us by the Hollywood writers and the style-mongers of soulless materialism. Those forces offer very attractive golden calves. We have to choose very carefully the symbolic things and actions by which we say who we are and by which we reinforce that for ourselves. We don't want to be assimilated.

*The premise of Hearing the Word as a Community is that it's relatively easy to hear the Word as a personal call to conversion or to greater piety; anecdotal evidence suggests it's easy to preach the Word that way. So those endeavors don't need as much help as the more subtle and more demanding task addressed here. That is to apply the Word to the shared life of the community. That means asking how a community forges its corporate identity in response to the Word, how individuals might contribute to the common good in response to the Word, and how the Word calls people to identify themselves more closely with the community. Persons trying to hear the Word this way ask each other "Who are we to become in response to this Word" more than they ask themselves "Who am I?"