Wednesday, 8/13/14
Jesus told us, “Where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
Our religious life in founded on togetherness. When God took
a good look at his first human he said, “It isn’t good for the human to be
alone.”
In 270 A.D. St. Anthony locked himself away in an old fort
beside the Red Sea. Searching for God, he subsisted on scraps of food the
Bedouins threw over the wall to him. Then, after decades of solitary prayer Anthony’s reputation for holiness got out and spread.
Fifty years after his embarking on that solitary existence
men and women hermits began taking up separate hermitages around Anthony’s
fort. Then, one by one the hermits began recalling Jesus to have said, “In this
will all men know that you are my disciples: that you have love for one
another.” After that, they had begun clustering for a fuller Christian life. A monk
named Pachomius wrote a rule for monks living in common, and his sister Marry
did the same for women. That was the birth of monastery and convent life in our
church.
Susan Sarandon in a recent movie explained that the main
thing husbands and wives provided each other was a necessary audience for trivial talk.
Perhaps the
most notable triumphs of togetherness in our lifetimes has been the success of
Alcoholics Anonymous. The group provide members with the happiness that evaded
them in their solitary drinking.
In 1964 our diocese in Korea got a young Irishman as its new
bishop, and he pulled me in as his secretary. Socializing hadn’t been a big
part of his Irish church upbringing, but orders from Rome had him attending
weekly meetings with our city’s Protestant leaders. He’d come back from those
meetings asking if there was anything to Protestantism other than Fellowship.
Then, one day he returned, saying I would have to take his place at those
gatherings. He said, “Sully,
they’ve gone too far. They’ve made a verb out of it. Now we are
“Fellowshipping.”
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