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In the opening lines of Jan Richardson’s prayer/poem “Beloved Is Where We Begin,” inspired by the voice Jesus heard at his baptism, she sings:
If you would enter into a wilderness,
do not begin without a blessing.
Do not leave without hearing who you are:
Beloved,
named by the One who has traveled this path
before you.
Since last September, the Supportive Ministries Team has been on a journey of discovery with you into what Becoming the Beloved Community might look like and what steps along the path seem most promising and essential. At times in these last months it has seemed that we have been moving further from the vision of beloved communities and further into a wilderness of fear and polarization that tears at the fabric of a beloved community.
Many of our congregations have not been immune to the forces that are seeking to separate us into antagonistic camps. This year, through these monthly newsletters and invitations to further conversations, we hope to help all of us expand our sense of what beloved communities could be. In his book A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community, the Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reflects on lessons he and his wife learned in premarital counseling.
Unions (or communities) of any sort requite a shared sense of purpose and vision. They need a basic set of shared values. They seek to build and maintain trust, identifying shared values and priorities, cultivating open and honest communication, developing an understanding of our past and how it has shaped us and recognizing the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation.
He goes on to elaborate on the very real challenges we face as a nation, part of a world community: “the dire need for a full and more equitable economic recovery, the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change, continued transformations in our economy due to automation and technology, extreme and often radicalized inequality and persistent poverty among others.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. appropriated the term “The Beloved Community” from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which he was a member, founded in the early 1900s as a vision for a more peaceful world. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center seeks to continue his work of embracing The Beloved Community through nonviolence. They summarize the vision of the Beloved Community as “one in which people of different backgrounds recognize that our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others – including those we consider ‘the other.’ It is a society based on justice, equal opportunity, empathy and love.”
Kazu Haga, in Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, writes: “Building Beloved Community is not about loving the people who are easy to love. It is about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. Those people over there. The others. Those who root for (fill in your favorite rival team). The people who voted for that guy. The people who work for the very systems that are destroying our communities. The corrupt corporate CEO. The foreign dictator responsible for countless deaths.”
“If you are not struggling to love people, if you are not trying to build understanding with those you disagree with, then you are not really doing the work of building Beloved Community. The work of building Beloved Community is understanding that we’re not trying to win over people, but to win people over. Historically, winning a war has meant defeating the opponent. Violence can never create relationships. Violence can never heal the harm that has been done. Violence can never bring about reconciliation. Violence can never create Beloved Community. Only love can do that.”
So what does this have to do with our congregations and the communal life we’re called to live? How can we live into “Becoming Beloved Communities?” Henry Nouwen writes:
Community is a basic need and hunger of the human heart. We are created for community, but often we do not experience it in the individualistic and competitive cultures that shape our lives. Community is a place of acceptance, intimacy and vulnerability, where we can bear fruit in solidarity with other and be the body of Christ for the sake of the world. It is a place of care and celebration, the place where our wounds and weaknesses are exposed, a sheltered place for the confession of sin and brokenness, and a house of love where we can receive forgiveness and offer it in return.
Another of the past century’s spiritual mentors, Father Thomas Keating observed:
We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. Love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle and last name. Love is all; not love as sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest, as concerned about the other as much as one’s own.
Beloved is where we begin. Beloved Community is where we’re intended to find ourselves and others within God’s loving embrace. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Sister Miriam Therese Winter offers a prayer/hymn as we close:
O for a world where everyone respects each other’s ways,
Where love is lived and all is done with justice and with praise.
O for a world where goods are shared and misery relieved,
Where truth is spoken, children spared, equality achieved.
We welcome one world family and struggle with each choice
That opens us to unity and gives our vision voice.
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