AUTHENTIC COMMUNITY: WHAT IT TAKES
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many…those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. – 1 Corinthians 12
When I was in college, my first spiritual mother who was also the Protestant University chaplain, impressed upon us a core teaching that was like a thread running through everything we did as a church and community. By the time I went to college in the 90s, the decades-long agenda of the evangelical Protestant church to dominate the public discourse of what Christianity is and what it means to be a Christ had become, to me, our national/spiritual overculture. To this day, when people think of a Christian, they almost always have in their minds an Evangelical. This is because those Christians have been consistent and strategic in bearing witness to their faith.
What the chaplain was teaching her flock of students is that, as moderate to liberal Christians, we operate from a place of weakness when we distinguish ourselves from our Evangelical brethren by reacting to their agenda. She instead taught us how to operate from a place of STRENGTH and integrity in doing the work to articulate a progressive brand of Christian faith. This message revolutionized my faith, and frankly, my approach to life and all my personal identity politics!
It was definitely a battle on campus though. Between our fundamentalist Christian student groups and the rabid secularism that was adversarial to ALL forms of religious life, it felt like a four-year Game of Thrones season. Highly educated professors exhibited low emotional intelligence in classes where they attacked anyone who identified as Christian. More than once I was on the receiving end of that, on top of systemic racism and discrimination. But all the adversarialness, hard as it was, was also where I sharpened my tools in preparation for even greater forms of oppression in the real world. I will forever be grateful to Chaplain Nan for teaching me how to speak truth to power out of the love and conviction of my progressive Christian faith.
I am writing about this today because I continue to see so many occultists and occult teachers sew divisions and contrive conflicts. They are spending a LOT of energy and time on this. Doing this is not creating anything that builds people up, let alone sustains community. It creates the vibe of reality TV, which if you have ever watched you know is fake, contrived and structured to make conflicts where none exist. Even the way people have come at me for choosing to teach Hoodoo and spirituality in an inclusive way is telling of this shift in our common life. I don’t engage the negativity, except to challenge those naysayers to make their own efforts to teach and build something that’s positive. This is almost always where the conversation ends.
I think we can do better. But I think to get there we must return to our sacred wisdom and self-assess how far afield we are from our own standards. The Apostle Paul, who was a complex historical figure, did get some things right. The passage from his letter to the Corinthian Church is where the head and heart of any professed Christian should be. And honestly, you can take the Jesus language out of those words and still be left with a philosophical approach to building and sustaining community that cuts through our bullshit and gets to the heart of why we choose to be in community to begin with. I hope we can find our way back to a healthier Body. A lot is riding on us doing so.
