Searching for a collective mentality

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently said this:

"Religion is a matter of the collective mentality, with all that this implies about having to take responsibility for corporately-held teaching and discipline: so religious allegiance can be seen as making over some aspect of myself to others in ways that may compromise both my liberty and integrity".

It got me thinking. What value do I place on my own liberty: the freedom to make choices governing my behaviour, spending, future plans and current plans? And if I partake in a collective mentality do I exclude myself from making decisions about myself, absconding, if you please, from personal responsibility?

I don't think this is what Rowan is saying. I can be, and am, at once responsible and culpable for the decisions I make in my own life whilst also, sacrificing some of my liberty for the sake of living communally. That's the beauty of this adventure. It requires an understanding of the cost, agreements about what those corporate values and behaviours are and much patience as we work out what this means in reality. But we fall down together and rise together. At least that's the hope.

Community

When you become a Christian you are immediately welcomed into a dynamic community - that of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It takes time to work out the different characters and beyond a lifetime to know them fully. However through it all we learn how to be taught, how to rest, how to receive, how to serve, how to grow and most importantly how to love.

We receive unconditional love and acceptance from the very beginning, however long it takes for us to accept it fully or even in part.

The more challenging part of community for me is the human embodiment of it - the church. Being part of a church community should be a physical manifestation of everything listed above - and there in lies the challenge.

We actively talk about and look to live out, giving people love, serving them, helping them to journey more closely with The Community that is God. But it seems we are less active in learning how to receive it.

Being a natural introvert, I have accepted the slightly annoying part of me that means I have to go away and hide from people every once in a while, in order to remain me, full of life and energised.
What I hadn't realised is that some of that "introvertness" was in fact just selfishness. Me wanting some of me, to myself, by myself. But that meant I was unwilling to receive from, give and rest, in the community.

I do think that individual identity and space are important, for so many different reasons. But I also know that in the west we, I especially, prize them more than is proper. It is pride that separates me from those with whom God has placed me.

It is in The Community that I find my ultimate identity, as a child of God. But crucially it is in the community, that I discover who that is, and importantly, acceptance of it; firstly from those around me and secondly, if a lot later, by me.

But I have happily discovered that in close community, where acceptance is there, if only I would receive it, I can rest and love, as I am loved.

Shaped by my environment

I hate getting on the tube when it’s sunny. You see, as a Scot am I conditioned to make of most of the good weather. Never mind that it is April and we have, hopefully, a whole summer of this to come. Growing up in what is legended to be Scotland’s wettest town, I became used to wet play days and cracking open the sun cream when the thermometer creaked over 18 degrees. Summer lasted approximately three weeks between May and June; always during exams, never in school holidays.

Today I chose to get the bus home from work, taking me twice as long as normal to travel from Westminster to North London. As I sat on the top deck watching office workers sprawled haphazardly in Parliament Square, basking by the National Gallery and licking ice cream cones in Camden, I wondered why I had this impulse to make the most of the weather. Sure, my childhood environment dictated my behaviour to a certain extent but does my current one do the same? As I was still sat on the bus and not subterranean in a sweaty tube train, I reckoned it did and anyway as a geographer I ought to know how man and society are shaped by the environment.

It got me thinking. What kind of an environment do I surround myself with? How do my untidy bedroom and my nondescript office affect me day to day? More importantly, what spiritual environment do I choose to spend time in? Living in a community of like-minded but wonderfully different people can have its challenges but these are far outweighed by the benefits. The pleasure of sharing joys, disappointments and early morning prayer. The comfort of tea, movies and home cooked food. But most importantly the knowledge that I am living in an environment of love that will question me, at times rebuke me and coax me slowly, but surely, into a deeper relationship with God. This is the environment that I want to shape me.

Jen