Community

Christmas… how many of you remember Christmas as a child as being the best time of the year? I know I sure felt that way. Presents, cutting down a Christmas tree, decorating, Christmas carols, family… such fun! When I was 17 after my mom died, I headed off to college and when I came home my dad had moved another woman and her son into our home. Christmas was less fun that year. While I still love Christmas, growing up tends to cover up some of the brightness and wonder.

Growing up and adulting doesn’t always dim our wonder at Christmas time. But the reality is that life is complicated and the older we get the more complexities we’re navigating… especially at the holidays. Expectations, loss, grief, family conflict, financial worries, missing loved ones, busyness, worry over the state of the world all layer over that bright light of Christmas.

So many things to bear… bearing them alone they can become very heavy. Hence the lesson of the honey bee. Honey bees survive the cold of winter by shivering together to keep warm, continually rotating the cold ones at the outside to the warmth at the center. We, too, need to pull the ones in need who struggle at the edges into the center. The bees teach us that community is essential to our health, our well-being, our light.

The great Jewish prophet Isaiah reminded us that at our best humanity cares for one another. Isaiah 58:7-8 says share your bread, make sure the poor are housed and clothed, care for your own family and your light will shine forth. Then you will know healing and live with integrity.

Community – Advent must be about community as much as it is preparing and waiting. Community walks the journey with us. Community holds us and heals us. Community shares life’s ups and downs with us. Community says we’ll walk this cold, dark journey of life together and it won’t be as bad.

Rabbi Sharon Brous wrote a book called The Amen Effect. The word amen derives from a Jewish word (emunah) that means belief or trust. As in, “I believe you. I see you.”

When we are hurting, we need the presence of others to assure us that someone believes us, sees us, and will walk with us. Yet we are so often apt to pull away and isolate. Sometimes it’s just too hard to put ourselves out there.

Rabbi Sharon talks about a ritual in Jewish tradition called the Mourner’s Kadish, it is a responsive prayer between a mourner - someone who is grieving the recent loss of a loved one – and the community. The most important part of this ritual, she says, is “that a brokenhearted person stands up in a prayer service and reveals [their] grief, out loud and in public, and the community responds with love and presence.”

Her congregation is in LA so she says she has started to think of this ritual as a screenplay rather than a poem or prayer. In that vein, she translates the story this way. As you read this, note the amens - over and over the mourner is affirmed that they are seen and believed.

The MOURNER – tired, disoriented, teary – rises. The community stops its quiet chatter and looks over as he begins, slowly, almost in a whisper.

MOURNER          I am in anguish –

In one, unified voice, the COMMUNITY responds.

COMMUNITY     Amen! We’re right here. We see you.

The MOURNER takes a breath and continues.

MOURNER          I don’t know how to hold this pain.

COMMUNITY & MOURNER          Amen. We wish it could be different.

MOURNER          I’m afraid I’ll forget the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair.

COMMUNITY     Amen. We will never let her disappear from this world. We will say her name and honor her memory. Amen!

MOURNER          I can’t do this alone.

COMMUNITY     Amen. We’re not going anywhere. We can’t take your pain away, but we can cry with you and laugh with you. We can hear the same story as many times as you need to tell it. We can help you remember. Amen!

Rabbi Sharon says that many people ask if they can’t just grieve alone in their house. She responds that “the tradition says no. No one should walk alone through grief. Your couch can’t say “Amen” to your broken heart. Your fireplace can’t hold your silence, can’t hand you a tissue, and can’t bear witness as you struggle and search for and sometimes find comfort in your grief.”

In the deepest darknesses of our lives we need community to “see” us, to hold space for our grief, and in so doing to bring at least some light to the darkness.

Margaret Wheatley, in her book Turning to One Another, tells a story about touring Robben Island, the South African island prison where Nelson Mandela and many others were imprisoned for more than twenty-five years because of their work to end apartheid. Their guide had been a prisoner in the very room they had come to in the tour – a long narrow room used for housing dozens of freedom fighters. They lived in close quarters with no cots or furniture, just cement walls and floors with narrow windows near the ceiling.

As they listened to the guide, they could feel the cold of the floor emanating up into their feet, they stared at the bars of the door as he described the constant threats and brutality they endured. Then very quietly he said, “Sometimes, to pass the time here, we taught each other ballroom dancing.”

Wheatley said she never forgot that image of “demoralized and weary men teaching each other to dance in the cold silence of a long prison cell. Only the human spirit is capable of such dancing.”

Perhaps that is the difference between solitary confinement and a shared cell. Perhaps that is the difference between grieving alone at home and grieving with the community. Together you can teach each other to dance. And I mean this mostly metaphorically. We’re here for each other on good days and bad. One day perhaps you teach me a dance, and another day I teach you. No matter how you feel, you are welcome in community. And whether you’re up or down, the reality is we don’t come into community simply for ourselves… someone else here may need you. They may need your hug, your smile, your welcome, your kind word, your knowledge or experience.

Advent is not just for the joyful merrymakers. Advent is for each of us with whatever joy, pain, hope or sorrow we hold. Recognize and honor the tension in this season for yourself. But I encourage you not to do it alone. Find a community that will accept you, hold you, help you to heal… a community that will bring you from the tattered edges of life to the center of the hive where you are surrounded by love and compassion.

Love & Light!

Kaye