The Value of Community

The Value of A Community

Community will be humanity’s salvation

Fr. Bede Griffiths Cited in Mystical Hours

Here is a more lengthy observation by Brother Wayne Teasdale as he speaks about  his valued mentor and guide, Bede Griffiths…

Father Bede Griffiths was born in England and lived in India for over forty years. After he became an icon of interspiritual thought, he was taken to the United Nations in 1979 to speak with world leaders. 

As he was leaving the building, he looked back and remarked:” The renewal of the world will not come through organization, but from something more rooted in the earth herself.” 

Later, he clarified his remark, revealing that it should come from the discovery and recovery of community. [as Gay Luce in his book, Body Time, had previously written- on the previous page in Mystical Hours…]”

Father Bede had in mind small, manageable communities with a contemplative vision and practice as a focus of their commitment to live together. Their membership would include married and single people, the elderly, children, the poor and vulnerable. Communities would not be afraid of the poor but would make a place for them…. Do you have the generosity and the courage to experiment in such a human adventure?

In our highly fractured and self possessed culture, where individualism has gone off the rails, and personal opinion has been elevated to a nonsensical importance, the quest for genuine community has, nevertheless, remained a constant attractive ideal. It is a shared desire among those who have an orientation towards the common good, and towards the preservation of humanitarian values and ecological/environmental respect…

Of course, we are all familiar with Martin Luther’s Jr.’s ideal of the “Beloved Community” where there is truly a mutual affection, regard and depth of sincere caring that makes the community a deeply held value and an enduring aspiration for any church, or humanitarian group.

Unfortunately, although well known, the evidence of its presence in contemporary religious communities is elusive at best… As long as any kind of tribalism exists, both within the church as well as in our larger society, the beloved community will remain an unattainable ideal…

The concept that I currently wrestle with in my thoughts and meditations is not the one forwarded by King, although my hopes have been diminished, they have not been extinguished as keeping hope alive is central to my sense of a sustaining faith.

I fully expect to see, by the end of my lifetime, a more wholesale collapse of popular religion or status quo concepts of church life… to be vibrantly replaced by a true and vital approach to Christian and/or an intentional interfaith community…

The intriguing idea I am most curious to explore is the need to replace religious and spiritual leadership. It is the idea forwarded by the inspiration of Thich Nhat Hanh. Among his many thoughtful, cogent, and startling truths that he has shared now for many decades with the West, this is one that grabbed my attention in a persistent way. 

He remarked that it is a spiritually evolutionary possibility that the next Dali Lama will not be a person, but a community. Similar to his teaching that “the larger your beloved community, the more you can accomplish in the world” he observed this in an article he wrote in 1994:

“It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.””

Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be A Sangha” in Inquiring Mind journal, Spring 1994.

While having my serious doubts that cloud my thinking when reading about worldwide current events,  my heart is quietly joyous about this possible outcome for  the growth of human social evolution and for the development of a more compassionate society and its maturation…