excerpt from Courage and Calling: community as conversation

We need the grace of community. We discern our vocation in community, and we fulfill it as we are anchored in mutual interdependence with others within community. Furthermore, we negotiate our vocation with others – with our spouse, with the community of faith, with people with whom we live and work – taking into consideration their actual needs and circumstances. No vocation is fulfilled in a vacuum apart from the needs and experiences of others with whom we live and work. Having a vocation never means that we are freed from the obligations and responsibilities of communal life. All vocations are communal in character.

This is not all good news; the community, even the community of faith, can be oppressive. The traditions, expectations and cultural patterns of family and community can easily undermine our capacity to become our true selves and to discern our vocation. Some people may wonder, when they consider their own context, whether it is even possible to genuinely discern vocation in their community; they may well think that their only hope is to get away and find solitude and strength and encouragement elsewhere.

We can so easily get caught up in the expectation of others. We must be wary of people who have something to gain if we fulfill their expectations, who all too easily equate their expectations with the expectations of God, whether they be parents, pastors or other authority figures. There may be times when we need to make a break, if we conclude that the personal integrity is impossible because of the oppressive character of a community.

This is where solitude is so critical, for it is in solitude that we encounter the one to whom we owe our ultimate allegiance, the one who alone can give us security, identity and purpose. This is why we cannot live merely in community. When we do, we are easily consumed by communal expectations rather than living our life in response to the voice of God.

But even as we recognize the dangers of community and affirm the need for solitude, we must come back again and again to our critical need for community, for life lived in the company of others. We are not walking – and cannot expect to be walking – this road alone. Some form of authentic community is necessary to grant us the capacity to discover ourselves and to embrace vocation.

By community we mean the capacity to live in communion with others. This communion is a means of grace, and as such it is the very stuff of life. It is really remarkable that God says that the creation is good, very good (Gen 1) but he also states that it is “not good” for Adam to be solitary (Gen 2:18). In other words, Adam needed more than God! He needed the company of others; only through this company could the radical aloneness of the human soul be overcome.

It is in community that we learn to honour one another – to honour without flattery but with a love informed by truth. It is in community that we learn forgiveness – the capacity to bear with one another, as Christ has borne our sins and forgiven us. And it is in community that we learn how to serve and be served, how to give and receive. It is in community that we love and receive love. Without community we remain fundamentally alone, one-dimensional and disconnected – not only from others but from ourselves and God.

Ultimately conversation is the greatest gift of community and the fundamental means by which community is in the Spirit is attained. It is conversation that sustains marriage, friendship and congregational life; it is conversation that enables us to work together effectively.

Most of all, though, it is in conversation – with friends and with family members, peers and with people who are older or younger than us – that we grow in wisdom, grace and strength. It is through conversation that we are encouraged, that we fill one another with courage. When we are encouraged, we are able to overcome our fears or at least keep them at bay – and know that our fears do not drive the engine of our hearts and lives.

Conversation involves two simple acts or elements. The first is the discipline and grace of listening. There is probably no greater service that we give one another than to listen. When we listen to others, we attend to them, honour them, accept them and respond to what matters most to them. Nothing so demonstrates that we love other people as does listening to them.

Of course we listen only when we resist temptation to say something, to teach something or worse, to tell people what they “should” do before we have really heard them. The death of conversation comes when we speak before we listen, when we speak before others have really spoken, when we jump to conclusions or make premature assumptions about what they are going to say.

Then of course, conversation includes speaking. But speaking must be without innuendo, complaint, or sarcasm. It is the word spoken without pretense or posturing, the word that is the truth plainly given, without exaggeration, without flattery.

Some people seem unable to speak without being patronizing; when they speak they are seeking to control or to cover their own fears. It is bad enough to speak to children with a condescending tone; but for some people patronizing speech has become a pattern, a habit of all their speaking. It undermines any possibility for genuine conversation; their words are no longer connected to their eyes, let alone their hearts.

When genuine conversation happens, it is life to us. In the listening and speaking of conversation we have the capacity for intimacy. Through conversation we come to the honesty and humility to accept who we are and to confront our innermost fears, forcing them out into the light and finding that they are not nearly as terrible as we imagined.

Through conversation with another we come to terms with our joys and sorrows; we acknowledge and live through the pain of anger, mourning and discouragement. Without conversation we are alone – alone in our fears, and worse, alone because we are disconnected from ourselves. Ironically, the truth is that we are connected to ourselves only when we are connected to others; we are capable of true self-knowledge, knowledge that enables us to know and accept the call of God, only hwen we are in communion with others.

When we are consistent in the quality of our conversation with everyone – spouse, family, colleagues and others – God, in his grace and wisdom, grants us the special friendship of a few people, perhaps two or three. We cannot find intimacy with everyone; we cannot hope to and do not need to share our deepest fears with everybody. But in the race of God we can respond intentionally to a few people – likely, but not necessarily, our peers – with whom conversation becomes increasingly honest and true, without pretense or posturing. In my relationships with the few men with whom I have this kind of friendship, we can pick up where we left off even when we have not seen each other for a year or two. I count these friendships – just three or four along the way – to be among the most precious gifts that God has given me, second only to the joy I have in married life and as a father.