The eCrozier

Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives… And when that person moves away, someone else arrives immediately to take his or her place. – Parker Palmer

The Reverend Peter Robinson, who is now himself with the Communion of Saints in heaven, once preached a requiem for a mutual friend, Art Henrich. He said in his sermon that: “Art was a man of enormous humor and generosity, which were very important virtues for Art to have now that he was in heaven.” Jesus, Fr. Robinson asserted, “needed people like Art in heaven because there are a lot of disagreeable people in heaven and Art will be able to help keep them all in a generous good humor.” Fr Robinson was hinting pretty directly that the Communion of Saints on earth could learn something from all this. We better get used to living with people who disagree with us because we are going to spend eternity with many of them.

Parker Palmer’s quote above is so true from my experience in parish ministry. There was always that one parishioner who seemed to make it his/her life’s ambition to make my life miserable. If I said “up,” he/she would say “down” even if he/she did not care about either up or down. The parishioner just “enjoyed” (or so it seemed) being contrary. I’ve even had parishioners who reminded me of Madame DeFarge in Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities who sat next to me knitting while the guillotine was being sharpened. Yikes!

Life is like that. And the sooner we accept that truth the sooner we will be able to enjoy and thrive in and among our community of discipleship, also known as the Church. The Church is both a hospital for sinners and an academy for saints. It is full of all sorts and conditions of people some of whom, even when we work at it with great determination, we will not be able to always get along.

We live in a culture that is becoming increasingly fragmented. People are hunkering down among only people who look like them, share their politics, and congratulate one another for being “right” and not like those “other” people (see this coming Sunday’s Gospel for Jesus’ take on all that). Such xenophobia is the exact opposite of the Biblical virtue of showing hospitality to the “other.” Xenophobia (Greek = fear of others who are different) is countered by the Biblical virtue of hospitality, which is a translation of the Greek philoxenia (Greek = love of others who are different).

It is hard, spiritual work to love the Madame DeFarge’s (and even the less threatening among us) of this world. Yet, it is part of the spiritual discipline you and I are called to embody. What helps us on our way to such discipline is for us to remove the fantasy that such people will somehow disappear from our lives. We better learn how to love them here on earth because we will have to love many of them in heaven for eternity. As the old saying goes: “Practice makes perfect.”

+Scott