Community requires effort.
We are social beings, surely. Still, we each seem to have our own ideas about what jobs need doing, and how best to do them.
All of these dynamics were on full display early Saturday as one of my favorite communities – my parish, St. Joe’s in Manchester – put on a full-court press to prepare for today’s Sausage Supper. I wandered into “community” as part of the outside crew, folks charged with setting up the booths and tents that would eventually transform one of our parking lots into Party Central.
Many of us on the crew had a rough idea about the set-up required. But in the early going, the operative word was “rough.” We had not yet gelled into “community” – a team focused and on-task. Instead, we worker-bees wandered every-which-way, all pretty much looking for somebody else to be “in charge.”
Before long, though, the energy shifted … the dynamic changed … and actual productive work began to get accomplished. We became “community,” in service to the larger community that will gather for the parish festival today.
And I felt blessed, deeply blessed, to be a part of it all … to experience “community” taking shape in real-time. A couple of us found a niche task we were well-suited to perform: using lengths of baling wire to attach water buckets to the pop-up canopies, as ballast against potential updrafts.
The weather is supposed to be beautiful today. But if a storm blows in, the Game Booths will be prepared to weather it. And that’s a good thing, indeed: Nearly invisible wires offering strength against a gale that may never come.
It would be easy to overlook such a minor contribution to “community,” along with any of the dozens of other tasks that were taking place throughout the day yesterday. But I suspect all of us worker-bees had our hearts warmed by the work we’d put into community. We saw, and helped, the Body of Christ take shape on the grounds of St. Joe’s.
That’s not nothing. In fact, it might be everything. Jesus seems to say something along these lines when he embraces the one-in-ten leper who returns to thank him for the cure. “Your faith has saved you,” Jesus tells the man. In other words: You are now wired back in – a productive part of the community. And this, surely, ought to be cause for great joy and gratitude.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 