Becoming Living Community
This week’s rhythm of loving evolution: Becoming
We engage in processes of becoming to deepen the transformative work and play of evolution, participating in our growth from divine being, as God is beckoning us here and now.
The Becoming offerings below invite us into personal and communal deepening in our divine becoming. They can be practiced in WeSpace groups and our daily lives today and throughout the week ahead. Rather than one-time experiences, we encourage ongoing and repeated practice to better support our growth and evolution.
If you missed it last week, we encourage you first to read the Beckoning article informing these processes:
“Our Christ Commission – Divine Communion”
ICN Living Lineages Series
Every healthy community needs compelling gathering energies and generative value. Community in and of itself, for itself, is not enough. In living community, the ties that bind/bond us are not solely the mental agreements and commonalities of individual preference, but the experiential qualities that mark the field among us each time we gather. These are the deeper lived values and ways of being together that have a collective life and can be felt when we enter the field—which is not bound to particular individuals, leaders or abstract ideals.
Here are some of those qualities commonly experienced in our community gatherings and groups.
Qualities of Divine Communion in Living Community
A Field of Love
Post Tribal
Companionship and Entanglement
A Field of Love
When we come together, we are participating in a shared field of love. By “field,” we simply mean a common space, not defined or limited to a particular place or time, that has certain shared energetic qualities in the environment—felt and experienced by degrees of our conscious awareness.
The more we have opened our hearts and learned to flow into these sorts of fields, the more we will feel it. Many of us are used to coming together in the shared mental field, discerning ideas, agreements and disagreements, and commonality of thought. Often learning from one another, the mental field has its benefits but also its limitations.
In the field of love, deep calls to deep. We learn to speak with the vernacular of the heart. We find among us a community that is present with one another in genuine care. With deep listening that doesn’t just hear the other, but feels with them. Participating in the mutual flow rather than the individual filter of self-absorption and evaluation from the place of separation.
Brought into the common space, unbound from the cage of individualism, we can be with one another in ways our soul longs for—with spiritual intimacy, authentic vulnerability, honest trust, and more.
Perhaps we are not used to being together with others in such a way. Non-sexual intimacy is often scarce in our culture. We have been hurt before, finding ourselves on the outside of belonging. We can have trouble being our most authentic selves with one another.
In the loving field, we can find the space to further become who we long to be—who we know we are. We can hold the tensions and oppositions within ourselves and one another through the process and into something more. In this way, we can come into genuine transformation, which is never just a function of the mind learning, but the heart and body becoming. We get there together.
In what ways are you feeling drawn to enter further and deeper into the field of love communally?
Post-Tribal
Our personal and collective identities are not hard boundary markers that divide the field firmly or demand conformity. It is not by conceptual agreements that we find our connection, and therefore disagreements and variety of experience are not breaking points. And diversity of thought and expression, rather than strains on community built on uniformity, are gifts and invitations to further evolution and growth.
This is post-tribal community. Where folks are not ostracized because of differing beliefs and experiences. It all belongs in the field, following the collective flow and reality of the life of the larger collective organism. In this way, the healthy boundaries are not built by gatekeepers, but by the energy of integrating that which serves the life of the whole. That which feels dissonant or runs counter to the flow is welcomed as invitation, with trust that we are all seeking to find our way and find our place.
It’s not perfect, of course—there is always struggle in community—but in a more open field of integration, we can be together with one another in the way of love that does not divide in the manner we have so often experienced before.
This is directly related to the personal empowerment and ownership that each of us brings to this integrated approach. We all take ownership for our place in the field, in the community. As part of the life of the whole. As such, we have a harder time setting ourselves up against the institution, guru, or leadership.
We are integrated into the life of the community and the movement of who we are together. We don’t need to constantly look to a guru/teacher for direction. We don’t need a program handed to us in order to take action. We can be that which we seek, for we are all in it together. We are all it, together.
We can apply and be effective in what we feel deeply and strongly about. We can all step into our divine vocation—but not alone. For living community gives us the opportunity to come together around the organic arisings where life is calling forth and springing up among us, personally and collectively.
Where are you drawn to take further ownership and empowerment to integrate the communal field: releasing barriers, welcoming diversity, and living into your divine vocation?
Companionship and Entanglement
We are in this together. We can walk together as long as our paths are following the same way, with freedom to come and go as spirit leads.
But we also become initiated into a way of deeper connection that means that we are never truly apart. The laws of entanglement do not allow for test drives or take-backs. When we come together in deep ways, we are always connected and a part of one another for eternity.
That can feel a little scary. I grew up pretty independent in many ways and am more introverted by nature. But the reality is that this is happening all the time already. The story of our separation is a fable in service to a false world. We can only go so far alone, because we are never truly alone.
Our external interconnection is always affecting us in the world of systems and interdependent structures of living. Interiorly, our interbeing is constantly affecting and playing amidst the many parts of a song that we don’t write or sing alone.
And so we might as well consciously choose who we most want to play with. Sharing in the concerts of our deepest longings and truest identities—which are not limited to only that which we encapsulate personally. For in our mutual indwelling, we are becoming much more than we can identify of ourselves individually. We are the music of the symphony. The Christophany Choir.
We are invited to be taken beyond our individualism, which was never really real in the first place. We are opened up to the freedom of no longer being stuck and confined to our narrow preferences and limited personal experiences.
Don’t those just feel too small? Isn’t there something tiring in just staying in the algorithm of our limited mind and singular will?
The invitation to something more is found in what we can call the divine reality of the body of Christ. This is the original vision of the church that could be the living presence and energy of God in a collective life. An organism of love and generativity for the transformation of the world. The resurrection of Christ today. Christ in all of us. Divine Communion.
Is there one person, one group, or one area into which you feel called to take one step into deeper companionship and interbeing?
Why We Gather
All of these qualities and more are not just descriptive aspects of what we’ve found by coming together, but are also the aspirations of what we want to still be even more.
They are present and still becoming.
A community dedicated to the mystical practice of consciously evolving and participating in the work of God—the loving evolution of Christianity and the world. The becoming of heaven in and through the earth. Embodied and enacted in our very bodies and being, personally and collectively.
To learn together and practice in these new ways of being together. There is no way we can learn them alone. We cannot become them individually. We deeply need the “We” to be all of that which we are and are becoming.
You are part of this great Christ commission, the divine communion we share in together. You don’t need to come join, for you are already co-missioned with the spirit of God who lives and moves and has our being in us all. And, you can step into this living reality more and more.
This is a core living lineage not just of ICN, but of who we truly are—resurrected life in divine unity with God, with one another, with all things.
As we attend these qualities of Divine Communion in Living Community: a field of love, post-tribal, and companionship and entanglement, we revisit the questions from each section above. Which one do you feel most compelled to be with now:
In what ways are you feeling drawn to enter further and deeper into the field of love communally?
Where are you drawn to take further ownership and empowerment to integrate the communal field: releasing barriers, welcoming diversity, and living into your divine vocation?
Is there one person, one group, or one area into which you feel called to take one step into deeper companionship and interbeing?
Commitment action step:
What is the dedicated response you will commit to now, in community, to further Christ becoming in our lives today?
Statement of WeCreating Authorship
This article was WeCreated with authoring by Luke Healy and editing support from Beth Biery.
All of the wisdom, creativity, and spiritual emergence in ICN comes from the communal field of wisdom and spirit speaking in and through the “We.”
All text in this article is human-authored without the use of AI, according to our AI policy: 0 out of 10
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN