Community and Solitude.

This weekend, I took a trip to Banff to meet with the Church of Guinness at someone's new place and to wish Deegy a fond farewell as he goes to live in Toronto for a year or more. We drank champagne, ate supper and I opened up my bottle of Banyuls, a port-like wine that I brought back from Southern France. It's known as "vin bibliotheque", library wine - a sweet drink meant to be accompanied by dark chocolate and a good book. Deegy brought a really great box of books that we will now put in our contemplative library and as we carve out more and more of a space for others. Hopefully, one day, we'll be able to offer a chair, a quiet place, a cup of tea and of course, I'll have to go back and get some more Banyuls.

When you are so small a group, it is sad to bless someone and send them off to another place. Although our little group does not "hang out" all that much, it is lovely just to see them - to be joyful at the sight of their faces and the sound of their voices. They are each so very beautiful.

You know, too, when you are trying to follow certain paths, that you can't print up a flyer and invite folks to a meeting and there will be a whole bunch of you. You bump into people here and there but there is an inherent balance between a healthy loneliness and a healthy time together. Much of this is birthed out of silence and solitude. As Henri Nouwen wrote in Making All Things New, true community is deeply related to solitude. If we come together with so much sound and fury, so many voices and so many worries, we end up using words as barriers. We have never faced ourselves and so it is difficult to meet another. I think many of us have seen a kind of noisy desperation in groups of folks who can't have a moment of silence, who are so afraid of just letting things be quiet and uncomfortable that they must fill the gap with a song or a joke or a long ramble about how good it is to be together...are we a community now? How about now? And now? Reminds me of that little saying, a carrot cannot grow if it is constantly dug up. Nouwen says, "Through the discipline of community we prevent ourselves from clinging to each other in fear and loneliness, and clear free space to listen to the liberating voice of God."

Community is not just about who is here right now either. I know there are a lot of people who are in isolation. Nouwen says:

Finally, we have to keep in mind that community, like solitude, is primarily a quality of the heart. While it remains true that we will never know what community is if we never come together in one place, community does not necessarily mean being physically together. We can well live in community by being physically alone. In such a situation, we can act freely, speak honestly, and suffer patiently, because of the intimate bond of love that unites us with others even when time and place separate us from them. The community of love stretches out not only beyond the boundaries of countries and continents but also beyond the boundaries of decades and centuries.