The Territory of Together

I'm digging into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Life Together" now. If I hadn't read Bonhoeffer before, I wouldn't have gotten past the first few pages; but when he says things like this: "Spiritual love, however, comes from Jesus Christ, it serves him alone; it knows that it has no immediate access to other persons.", and this: "Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love's sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love," I feel like I'm in a theological bouncy castle. Yippee!

I need to think more about this, but I believe I'm beginning to see a different picture of community.

I forgot that "community" is such a buzz-word. I realized that I don't have to limit myself to any of the popular and trendy meanings of the word.

I remembered that the "C" in LC stands for Community, and so I started looking at the shape of my relationships within that community. That's when a big old sledgehammer hit me. For as long as I can remember, I've longed to belong to a group of people who have a common practice or task to which they've committed themselves. I knew I'd found it in the LC. But here’s what I forgot!  I overlooked the plain fact that I don't have to be in physical proximity to other members in order to belong. Bonhoeffer just gave me a handle on that. My unfulfilled longing to live with, or among, such a group doesn't alter the truth that it is a community, and that I am part of it.

Bonhoeffer talks about 'human love' vs. 'spiritual love' and says this: "Human love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a fellowship that has become false for the sake of genuine fellowship,". I felt very strongly that this applied to my decision to leave St.__.  I reviewed this decision in my mind in light of this quote, and that's when the sledgehammer hit!

I am so glad that I'm autistic, because that means that the only kind of love available to me is 'spiritual' love!

I don't connect with other people in the usual way: I'm not moved by likes or dislikes; jealousy, status-seeking, or approval-seeking. I used to say "I don't connect with people", but now I realize that I do connect with them. The connection is not something I 'feel' as an emotion; it's something I 'feel' as a perception, or sensation. We breathe the same air; we walk on the same earth; we are alike in our shapes; the same air lies along our skins. Our tears come from the same ocean, and our hearts beat with the same rhythm. This connection is inviolable, and doesn't need me to work at maintaining it. Whenever I look for it, there it is. But that connection isn't "community"; it's not even close. Community is something else. I remember being uneasy when a vicar of mine answered some comment I made about how being autistic affects my relationships with people by saying, "But this is a community, and you have to be a part of it." 

Now I realize that I'm free to consider that the vicar’s concept of "community" is not the only one, and if I don't fit into that concept of "community," that doesn't mean that I'm excluded from it forever; nor does it mean that I have to wrench myself into a different shape in order to be part of it. That's what autistic "masking" is all about, and that's why there is so much work being done within the autistic community to unhook ourselves from the kind of toxic masking that leads us to fail over and over again, and then go on to blame ourselves for not being able to "get it."

Going back to Bonhoeffer, I realized that when I left my church I was doing exactly what he was talking about: I dissolved a false fellowship for the sake of a genuine one. This is why my relationships with individual people at my old church remain strong; and, from my point of view, no different than they were before. The "genuine" remains. My love for those people, and theirs for me, tolerated the 'dissolution' easily; so, if Bonhoeffer is right, that would mean that ours is a spiritual love, not merely a 'human' one. It would also imply that if anyone tries to lay blame or inflict guilt; or expresses resentment about my departure, I’ve at least got Bonhoeffer in my corner about the fact that I'm not swayed by their attitudes.

I think the next adventure for me is going to be that of re-exploring "community" --thoroughly engaging my heart/body/mind—by wandering around in the ‘territory of together’ for a while.



The Territory of Together



On a sunny afternoon

there might be a bridge

bending over a good fishing stream;

now and then, around a corner,

an old fieldstone inn

where we can sit by the fire and eat a good stew.

On a gray, rain-spitting morning

there might be a cold, mucky bog

waiting to slurp at our boots;

once in a while, past a thicket,

a bee-full meadow

where we can collect burrs on our socks.

On a bitter midnight

there might be a mountain range

slanting upward past stars;

from time to time, behind nothing but air,

a broken, windy pinnacle

where we can go fly a kite.