Quotes About Community

Our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of other people. So much depends on things we can never control.

Sabbath was not a burden for him, any more than it was a private day off that he could take or leave. Sabbath was who he was . It was his stake in the ongoing life of his community, the one set day each week when he entered into communion with God and his neighbor.

Most of us do not live especially holy lives, after all. We spend most of our time sitting in traffic, paying bills, and being irritated with one another. Yet every week we are invited to stop all of that for one hour at least. We are invited to participate in a great drama that has been going on without us for thousands of years, and one that will go on as long as there is a single player left standing.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

Somewhere along the line we bought—or were sold—the idea that God is chiefly interested in religion. We believed that God's home was

This may be the real reason many of us fear silence in church—because anyone sitting near us may hear the hissing, rumbling, wheezing sounds of a living human being, which do not match up with the attractive countenances that we work so hard to present to one another.

Because they were not old enough to serve on committees or wrangle over the order of worship, the children often had a better grasp of what church was all about than the rest of us did.

I know that nothing strengthens community like a common enemy. I know that when religious people are feeling overwhelmed by a world with little use for their ancient truths, they can find new meaning by identifying a great evil to oppose.

As enjoyable as it could be to spend a couple of hours on Sunday morning with people who were at their best, it was also possible to see the strain in some of the smiles, the effort it took to present the most positive, most faithful version of the self.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.

AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God.

Come tell us what is saving your life now

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture's wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self.

Maybe someone should start an Opaque Church, where we could learn to give up one kind of vision in hope of another. Instead of wearing name tags, we would touch each other's faces. Instead of looking around to see who's there, we could learn to listen for each other's voices.

Our shadows are often behind us, where others can see them better than we can. If we want to hear and see more, even the parts that expose our scornfulness, we need partners from outside our ingroups to keep telling us how we sound.

Cherish your human connections - your relationships with friends and family.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

What I see here, what I feel here is that people in your world believe spirituality isn't distant. It's close and real. Religion seems born in the home, stays in the home. I mean, the services are even held in the home. And there's not one person in charge, one speaker set above the others. It's farmers and carpenters, and well, just average folk speaking spontaneously about the message they find in the Bible. [...] A message from the heart to the heart.

He described how, as a boy of 14, his dad had been down the mining pit, his uncle had been down the pit, his brother had been down the pit, and of course he would go down the pit.

I want my new friends and my old friends to get together,' she said, 'so we're going to have a shoe dance. All the guys take off one shoe and put it in the middle of the floor. All the girls pick a shoe, find its mate, and dance with the fellow who's wearing it.' Without a second's hesitation, I glanced over at Billy. He was standing next to Sally at the victrola. His saddle shoes were black and white, not brown and white, and very dirty. I memorized the dirt.

She chattered on about the Inn. 'I'm a genius,' she said. 'I got three hundred people into two rooms that were meant to hold two hundred and fifty. And they're happy. Deep down, people are really sardines. They love being squeezed together.