Is Our Community Any Different?

I used to have a lot of “conference envy.”  That feeling when you were jealous anytime someone went to a conference.  I used to think conferences were the end all be all, the place to pass out business cards and network and become instantly cooler than all the people you left behind in their normal lives while you attended a conference.

Eventually, I got tired of conferences.  I kind of hated the retreat crash, that feeling of numbness that youth pastor’s warn their young people about, the emptiness of real life after the ecstasy of an otherworldly event.  For a while I bought into the sentiment that you should try to continue the “retreat high” for as long as possible, and not loose the fire.  It worked for a bit, but real life always happened.  It seemed conferences and retreats were trying to take the place of real life and creating this feeling of dread upon coming down from the mountain.  So, after much thought, I decided to just stop chasing conferences and retreats and enjoy real life.

We Christians are not the only ones to share this sentiment.  Kevin Larimer writes in the Editor’s Note to the latest issue of Poets & Writers (Mar./Apr. 2010):

“I left my first writers conference feeling not only elated…but also a little disappointed that I hadn’t connected with any of them on a substantial level….I have since been to conferences and festivals that offered the nourishment I craved, but not before coming to the realization that community…is not so effortlessly attained.”

If community is hard for writers (born communicators mind you) to obtain, how are our communities any different?  Do we have communities that chase the church high, the retreat high, the conference high?  Or do we have communities that chose to abstain from the roller coaster of spirituality and instead participate in the long haul of shared life together?  We must have the latter, or we will continue to experience the dread of real life.

The monks of old called the dread of real life acedia.  Right on cue, our modern culture has dropped this word from our vocabularies, but it is making a comeback.  Our conferences, our technology, our frantic lives, our kids’ sports schedules, our church committee meetings—these have all become the dread of real life.  But they aren’t real life.

It may be hard to think about it (it was for me), but real life cannot be defined as “right now.”  Real life is experienced as a long view down the scenes of life and a glimpse into the future.  Real life is not singular or static.  It is dynamic and kinetic.  It cannot be isolated but only experienced.

We feel this awful need to live in the present, to always ride the wave of the life’s highs from one to the other.  We were not built for lives such as these.  We were built for slowness, tedium, and reflection.  We were built for weeks, months, and years, not days.  We were built for real life, the long haul.

Our real life is the lifeblood of our community.  It is the whole connection of real lives into one life: the local church.  And it is a connection that must span the long haul, not just skip from high to high and wander aimlessly in between.  We may experience a “church service high” together some times.  But most of the time we just talk and eat each other’s food.  And that’s okay.  That’s what we were built for.  That’s real community.