Several weeks ago at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where I serve as rector, our congregation was invited to reflect and write down ways that they have encountered God’s hope during hard times. When I looked through the responses later, here are the ways people had experienced hope: small acts of kindness, grandchildren, nature and animals, vaccination, family gatherings and chosen communities, meeting God’s Holy Spirit in prayer and worship.
It became clear that many of the ways that we meet God’s hope in the hardest times are all about connection. Connection to God in church and everyday spiritual practices, connection to God through the beauty of the natural world, and most of all, connection to one another.
Our namesake, St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthian church, had a bit to say about how we know the hope and presence of God through our connection with each other.
As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you."
Our human lives are entangled with each other, as interwoven as the parts of one body. Social psychologists have called the connectedness of our emotional and spiritual states, “emotional contagion,” that is to say, the way we feel and our attitudes are remarkably contagious in community. The decisions each of us make connect us to our neighbors here and across the globe: the coffee or peas or bananas we buy, music or programs we absorb, books read and websites perused map our connections across the world. But this goes beyond contemporary globalization. Consider that the water on our planet circulates through towns and homes, people and animals, clouds and hurricanes and back again, and always has.
In her book I am, I am, I am, Maggie O’Farrell includes an odd and poignant description of visualizing breathing another person. As the writer embraced and smelled a person she loves, she imagined the molecules of them leaving their skin and going into her body. That’s not just poetry, it’s also science! We are always in flux and flow and exchange with each other.
Studies have shown that talking to houseplants, giving them the focus of our carbon dioxide, leads them to flourish and creates emotional satisfaction for the plant collector. The emotional, aesthetic, and biological pieces of our beings are interconnected.
Everything, everyone, is connected, and we cannot say to each other: I have no need of you.
But is it enough for us to say so? Is community connection something that we achieve, check off a to-do list and move on? No, this is a commitment and call we must revisit and put into practice again and again.
The church at Corinth had forgotten their call to mutual care and love. They’d shifted away from the deep conviction of their proximity and connection, the understanding that other people are the means by which one experiences God’s presence and hope. They had forgotten that if they want to meet Christ, to see God’s vision and presence, they must follow the way of love, the teachings of care and concern for each other beyond the moment of their gathering for worship. Paul was calling them back to each other, reminding them that they are all connected to each other. Without love, all the church stuff is just noise, a clanging gong or a cymbal.
Can we hear Paul’s call back to one another, too? Where might we need to turn in care to other members of the body in our families, community, region and the world? Let’s remember that we are connected and need each other, and that through each other we encounter God’s hope in the world, and treat one another with respect and care.