By Bruce Spear
I was recently reading in the Celtic Daily Prayer Book 2 and came across this comment about community and honesty as well as the poem below.
“The road to Community involves many little deaths each day. These little deaths to self are choices to be real and authentic and can often be painful, hard choices especially as the road is long. Yet it is only here that rebirth can happen, the rebirth of love, commitment and community.”
We enjoy a rich community experience at Elizabeth Presbyterian Church. And it is important to realize that community doesn’t just happen when we walk into a particular church. It doesn’t seep up through the cushions we sit on or fall down around us from the globe light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Community is a choice, the choice to open our lives up to each other and to be real about who we are and what is happening in our lives.
Ken Medema in the following poem asks where he can go if he can’t be himself when he walks into a church.
If this is not a place where tears are understood,
Then where shall I go to cry?
And if this is not a place where my spirit can take wings,
Then where shall I go to fly?
I don't need another place for trying to impress you,
With just how good and virtuous l am.
No, no, no, I don't need another place
For always being on top of things.
Everybody knows it's a sham, it's a sham.
I don't need another place for always wearing smiles,
Even when it's not the way l feel.
I don't need another place to mouth the same old platitudes;
Everybody knows that it's not real.
So if this is not a place where my questions can be asked,
Then where shall l go to seek?
And if this is not a place where my heart cry can be heard,
Where, tell me where shall l go to speak?
So if this is not a place, where tears are understood,
Where shall l go, where shall l go to fly?
My experience of our church is that this kind of authenticity usually happens one on one with a person we trust, who listens to us and welcomes our true self into the conversation. As Henri Nouwen writes:
When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
The experience of Authentic Community in a church like ours seems to me to be the cumulative effect of many such one on one relationships of trust and openness. In other words, authentic community is not necessarily standing up in church and blurting out to everyone all that we’re going through. It is rather what happens in a church when there are many individual trusting relationships which are growing in honesty and receptivity so that as a whole the church experiences community. In other words, I walk into a church and feel community as long as I see at least one person there who listens to me and understands me and with whom our conversations are real.
A few years ago, Melinda Hagan introduced us to the song “If We're Honest” written by Francesca Battistelli. This is the refrain:
Bring your brokenness, and I'll bring mine
'Cause love can heal what hurt divides
And mercy's waiting on the other side
If we're honest, If we're honest
You can listen to Melinda’s version by going to our website and pulling up the July 12, 2020 Online Service and fast forwarding to the praise section. And you can listen to Francesca Battistelli tell us a little bit about why she originally wrote the song and listen to her sing it at
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