Living in the Communal Body (of Christ)

As we now reach part eight of this series, we have been with our two primary, fundamental orientations regarding Beloved Community. Parts 1-4 went through the different aspects of divine reality we integrate into our holistic experience of communion. And after, we have been considering different components of healthy and effusive mutuality, which relate to the interplay and integration of both the I and the We.

Now, we turn to how we inhabit the reality of this communal body, so that we can not only just spiritually experience the dynamics of the body of Christ, but also create and bear life from this larger being—which is who we truly are. We are this and we can act from this in service to the loving evolution of Christianity and the world.

Rooted in the ground of trust, with our capacity for connectedness growing more and more, and bearing life from the vitality of our spiritual intimacy, we find a whole new level of collective participation in a holistic vision of inhabiting the mystical body of Christ communally.

Read More
Our Vital Need for Spiritual Intimacy

In moving from Me to We, we are recalibrating from self-referentialism to healthy and effusive mutuality, which means that we relate with one another in ways that are generous, overflowing, and serving so much more than ourselves alone.

To be more precise, we are actually integrating both the I & and We in generative mutuality, as we don’t leave behind our precious personhood and sacred uniqueness. Rather, we bring our deeper, more essential-self-being into relationship and in community. In this way, we find we are not so attached to the old patterns and lesser stories of the self-referential “me.”

Rooted in the ground of trust, with our capacity for connectedness growing more and more, we are able to come into greater, generative, spiritual intimacy amidst beloved community.

Read More
Being in Trust with One Another

As we have moved with the beckoning into holistic trust with “the other,” and taken steps of becoming into trust with ourselves and others, we can come more and more into the ways of being where trust is the ground upon which we walk, the intrinsic pattern underneath, and the woven fabric of our lives in beloved community—our communal being.

This way of being in/as trust can only be inhabited, not simply thought about. It can only be walked, not drawn on a map. It has to be embodied in presence here and now rather than idealized in the abstract. And it only exists in the shared presence of communion.

Read More
The Field of Love

From the beckoning of our invitation to greater capacity for connectedness, and the loving ways and practices of becoming to grow our hearts in post-tribal ways, we now welcome another core quality of divine communion in living community, our beingin and of the field of love.

The field of love is a place of our most natural being. It is somewhere we go and something that is always around us. It is the ground of our relational being. The heart of our inter-abiding presence in communal being.

And it is here, now.

Come, let’s walk through this field of love together.

Read More
How Do We Grow Our Heart Capacity?

One of the foundational qualities of divine communion in our living, evolving, beloved community is being post-tribal. This means that our boundary markers for communal identification are not firm dividers. They are not fixed beliefs. There isn’t the need for strenuous gatekeeping and fortified barriers.

When we put walls around our beliefs or our communities, we put walls around our hearts.

Read More