In my last post, I leaned heavily into the community I have found in the Episcopal Church. However, I know that a similar sense of belonging is found in other places as well.
Other denominations must offer some of the same feelings of cohesion across individual churches and geographic boundaries. I receive bulletins from the United Church of Christ that supports such fellowship among UCCers. My Quaker friends describe similar experiences.
I recently heard an amazing and beautiful story: A young family – mother, father, and infant daughter (parents Russian-born but living in China, the daughter born in China) knew they needed to flee ahead of the invading Japanese. While none spoke English (Russian and Chinese their languages), they chose to immigrate to Australia. Their denominational connection was Baptist (not sure which branch but one that had roots in Russia and a presence in pre World War II China) sent out a world-wide newsletter regularly. When this young family was to leave, the newsletter told of their journey. It reached Australia and a group of church folk decided to meet every boat on which the family might be sailing. The family was delayed because they had decided to stop off in Singapore on the way, and yet, the faithful group continued to meet every boat. Finally, the family arrived and were overwhelmingly welcomed into their new community. Can you imagine how that must have felt for this precious, displaced family as they arrived in a strange land! The woman who told me this story, now a grandmother, was the infant daughter and still had tears in her eyes in the retelling and the rejoicing in God’s wonderful work through community.
While I believe that some of the best communities are those that are created in a spiritual context, deep feelings of connection happen in other settings as well. I have found those in professional relationships, particularly with the folks I worked with for many years in a family service agency. Additionally, particular avenues of post graduate work have led to several communities of which I feel a part. One in particular has melded the professional and the spiritual to create a unique cohesion that is rich and deep. This is the community built around sand tray work, which is both a clinical tool of healing and insight and also a way of deepening personal and communal spiritual growth, connection and bonding. I have been richly blessed by this professional community. It remains a virtual community as I travel.
Social Workers seek to support their clients in building healthy support systems. Part of the work of a social work clinician is to assess the supports available to a client system, learn where it is broken or dysfunctional, where it is healthy and helpful; then strengthen the natural positive threads and help the client to build bridges of healing where possible or create new avenues leading to a strong and expanding web of support. The profession even has a tool, called an ecogram, which plots these supports. This tool, when drawn and completed, indeed looks much like a wonderful spider web with all parts interlinked and threads connecting back and forth and all around; or like a wheel with the spokes complete and strong.
However we find community, both the church and my profession reflect on how incredibly essential and basic they are for health and contentment, for successful functioning.
One of the joys of traveling has been the ability to experience a wide variety of ecosystems. When I first wrote this we were in the Mojave Desert. From the interstate, it looks dry and barren except for the scattered cactus and other desert plants, some of which look as dried up and dead as the desert floor. But get off the highway onto a back road; walk a bit into the desert and it comes alive. We see cactus flowers, lizards, a bevy of desert quail, a small spring-fed stream, coyote tracks. They are all interconnected, a desert community, precious and spectacular and vulnerable. A community that must be preserved.
Let’s all embrace, expand and preserve our own precious networks!
