I'm not going to tell you what just happened in Sharon Astyk's life, but it was sad, yet it made her understand the unmerited grace that comes with living in a real community, for better and for worse. If you read nothing else today, make sure you see her entire post -- and send it on to everyone you know. She writes in it:
And yet, that's a part of the truth, and maybe they should, because there's something to tell about the gift of this - community, real community that invests all the people in it, old and young, comes with this gift - the gift of blessed memory.You get to be part of a whole life - you get to be there when people are celebrating, and there when they mourn. You get to live the good parts, and the hard and painful ones, and be richer for it. You get to know what it is like to be helped and to give help, to see people face death and grief, and come through it with courage, and when the time comes for you, perhaps you are a little better for it. You get to be part of a living thing - the community, the whole, which exists not because of one person, but because of all of them, which transmits the past, those lost, forward to those still to come. No death can kill it, as long as memory remains. You get the stories, and the memories of the past, you get the comfort of knowing that others have come through hard times and gone on. You get people in all stages of their lives - the ones with time on their hands and those with none, the ones who give everything and those who can give less, and those who need you. You get to give and receive in perpetuity as part of something bigger than you. You get to know people you would never have known, to be part of their lives and memory, and in turn, they of yours. You get, someday, the best we all can hope for - that someone will say your name, tell a story of you, and add sincerely, with feeling, "of blessed memory."
Here again is the entire thing. It puts the small town double suicide we discussed earlier this morning into a certain light.
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I've never had the benefit of living in one place for very long at all, coming from a long line of military, and serving in the military myself. But my extended family is unusually close, and prone to not contract out caregiving, either to kids younger than three, or the elderly who need round-the-clock care. We freely share money and time, without expectation that anyone will settle accounts once and for all. It's just considered an IOU for the next time the giver might need something. I think it does make you a less self-centered person, if, from a young age you understand everybody has to take care of everybody else.
Sharon: "Josh was a Professor of Physics like Eric"
Ren: "You're one of the good ones, Stimpy"
This is a touching story. I have a question about it, though, or rather about the conservative Christianity that many here espouse. It's something I've honestly been puzzled about for a long time. Is the experience of community that Sharon Astyk is describing the kind that conservative Christians advocate? I mean, Josh and the other people she's talking about were apparently Jewish. That means they deny the divinity and Messiahship of Christ. Yet, as Pope Benedict wrote in his new encyclical:
Love comes down to us from the Son. It is creative love, through which we have our being; it is redemptive love, through which we are recreated. Love is revealed and made present by Christ (cf. Jn 13:1) and “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5).
Isn't a Jewish community, however warmly experienced, alienated in some sense from this love that is "revealed and made present by Christ"? Aren't they in some sense not fully in touch with God, for "no one comes to the father but by me?"
As a liberal Christian, I don't think of being Jewish (or Muslim, Hindu, etc.) as problematic, because I think there are many equally valid ways to God. But don't conservative Christians think otherwise? Suppose you were told that the whole communitarian agenda -- strong, stable families, thriving communities with a strong ethic of mutual aid and self-help, the whole bit -- could be magically achieved tomorrow, but that every family and every such thriving community in the entire U.S. would be like Sharon's, i.e. non-Christian. Would you think that a better country than the one we have now? Would you swap the present situation (a nation with a Christian majority, but with all kinds of failed communities and other problems) for that one? Seriously, I'd be really interested to know how conservative Christians reconcile understanding of the centrality of Christ with their commendable affection for communities like Sharon's.
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