Being in Community

Today was a good day to hang out a wash. The table cloths washed from use at a 4-day personal growth retreat on which I served as the cook.

Living in that community is an ‘inspiriting’ experience. Being in community fills a hole, a hole that has allowed breath to leak out. Breath is Spirit. Breath is life. When you find a community where you feel you can breathe, where you belong and that enters into the wonder, challenge and brokenness of actually being the body of Christ together, it feels like radical hope. It feels like the hole is plugged.*

So often my Church community does the exact opposite of this. It is what depletes my spirit and compromises the way God seeks to breathe in and through me. It seems like there are so many holes in the church that the life-giving breath of Spirit is leaking out through holes of discouragement, anger, envy and tradition.

Jan Richardson, one of my favourite artists and writers says:

Is there some hole in your life, or in your community, that has allowed your breath to leak out, depleting your spirit and compromising the way that God seeks to breathe in and through you?  What might it take to heal the hole and breathe again?

Breath is ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek. It means Spirit.

I don’t know how to fix the Church. But I feel after being on retreat I am able to breathe fully again.

*Thank you to Jan Richardson for these thoughts.