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5 Great Quotes About Community

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I have a love hate relationship with “community.”

As a person who falls a bit more into the introverted side of personality yet works as an ambivert (both intro and extroverted), choosing to connect is not always an easy choice. I recharge best alone, and living and working in a world of people I notice my energy levels deplete pretty fast. The last thing I want is to connect with more people.

However, I have also noticed a tendency towards depression when I choose to isolate too much, and it is actually people (community) that have been the key to re-infusing my energy levels, remind me what is true, and love me as I am…and this is life-giving.

Experiencing real community in a culture that is immersed in rabid individualism is rare and scary but oh so powerful. In community we cultivate our “others-ness” which opens the path of love that is only available when we are authentic, vulnerable and real. This creates a spiritual and emotional connection that is a greenhouse for affection, trust, risk, honesty and love…these things require that we open ourselves up in community, with-and-for-others, resulting in a mutual if not global effect.

Here are five great quotes I came across concerning community today…chew on them…

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”
― John Donne, No man is an island 

 

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

 

“A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.”
― Jean Vanier, Community And Growth

“Each of us must rededicate ourselves to serving the common good.  We are a community.  Our individual Fates are linked; our futures intertwined; and if we act in that knowledge and in that spirit together, as the Bible says: “We can move mountains.”
–Jimmy Carter

 

“When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community, I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word….”glory.”
–M. Scott Peck

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Healing Through Music: The View Down Here

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The most powerful songs find pain as their muse. My son Liam just posted a song he had been working on dealing with the loss of some people close to us. How do you express the pain you enter into when suicide has stolen a life?  How do you work through the loss of a life that has shaped you? Music has a way of helping us weave our way through the emotional journey. When Liam posted his song I took a listen and loved it. But what hit me more was the place in his soul where the song came from. Here is what he said about the song:

Written to commemorate those we have lost unexpectedly, and have impacted my life in radical ways. Rest in peace to Bill Bedell, Tyler Bushmiller, and Paul Lee. I miss you all so much.

Also to everyone else that I have lost under similar circumstances, but did not directly influence the creation of this song. Far from forgotten. Cody Botten, Berkely Repp, Josh Fisher, Don and Jean Shultz, Kirk Lewis, and oh so many more. Thank you all, for everything.

Take a listen…

Verse 1:
Somber melodies have brought me here,
And ones of hope have been unable
To lift me from this low
I think I’m alone,
The streets became wide,
And I’m stuck under this water, under this tide

Chorus:
Loneliness tastes like metal in my mouth,
And I constantly try to wash it out,
Ever since your one way ticket to the fields I don’t know
I’ve grown a bit older, but it’s colder below


Verse 2: 
Little did I know
That your presence everyday
Quietly meant everything
The day you were lost,
I learned the evils of Earth,
Fairness was a thing of our dreams
Chorus:
Loneliness tastes like metal in my mouth,
And I constantly try to wash it out,
Ever since your one way ticket to the fields I don’t know
I’ve grown a bit older, But it’s colder below
To say I miss you, To say that I missed a lot
To Say I miss you, To say that I missed a lot
(My opportunity slipped through my hands, like grains of sand)
2013 © Liam Wright Music
All Rights Reserved

credits

released 04 August 2014
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Gotta Love Buechner: theological beauty

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Frederick Buechner has always been one of those theological, pastoral voices that I have personally drawn from in my life. His writing is a unique language of poetry, theology and philosophy that creates a verbal canvas of grace.

He has written many books that I hope you would consider investigating. Below are some great thoughts from many of his volumes:

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“Go where your best prayers take you.”  ~Frederick Buechner

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” ~Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

“Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking.” ~ The Alphabet of Grace

“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” ~ Frederick Buechner

“Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.” ~ Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

“Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn’t.” ~ Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith

“Maybe it’s all utterly meaningless. Maybe it’s all unutterably meaningful. If you want to know which, pay attention to what it means to be truly human in a world that half the time we’re in love with and half the time scares the hell out of us. Any fiction that helps us pay attention to that is religious fiction. The unexpected sound of your name on somebody’s lips. The good dream. The strange coincidence. The moment that brings tears to your eyes. The person who brings life to your life. Even the smallest events hold the greatest clues.” ~Lecture to a Book of the Month Club

“You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.” ~The Sacred Journey

“Grace is something you can never get but only be given. The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you. I created the universe. I love you. There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”  ~Wishful Thinking

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past … to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” ~Wishful Thinking

“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.” ~Frederick Buechner

“Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” ~Frederick Buechner

“You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. … You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”  ~Beyond Words

“In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.” ~Frederick Buechner

“In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.” ~Frederick Buechner

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To Russia With Love

Amy and I are going to be in St. Petersburg-Russia soon. We were  in Moscow a few years ago and loved it!  Even though the people were hard to engage, there was something about the city that drew us. St. Petersburg is different from Moscow as it is the most European of Russian cities. The Hermitage Museum (which I am stoked to see) holds Rembrandt’s painting “The Prodigal Son.”  I have a print of that work on my office wall and I am beyond excited to have the opportunity to gaze at it for a while! From the descriptions I have heard and the images I have seen, St Pete looks and sounds beautiful. It would seem we also get a double blessing as we will be experiencing the White Nights” while we are there. The White Nights are a perpetual dusk…it never gets dark…

As we are getting prepped and set to take off, I thought it would be good to absorb to the words of some famous Russian writers, Dostoyevsky & Tolstoy…

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“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“To love someone means to see him as God intended him.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Beauty will save the world”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness…”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“To get rid of an enemy one must love him. ”
― Leo Tolstoy

“What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession

“Music is the shorthand of emotion”
― Leo Tolstoy