Choosing to Be in Community

Sometimes you have to hear something you know in a new way to really understand it. This past Sunday I was chatting with a member of WES, waiting for the line to the post-Spring Festival brunch to get shorter. Like most Sundays in my life, it was a hectic morning: getting the family ready to go, arriving at WES and helping people find what they needed to put the morning together, attending to some of the little details that make a Sunday "happen." And at that particular moment I was hungry for brunch myself, and worrying about whether people were finding places to sit, and trying to focus on the conversation. The conversation in which this member, gesturing around him, said something like, "Look at all of these people, choosing to be in community together. It's so great." And you know, it was! It is! All of the details of a Sunday, all the details of any day in a congregation's life, really boils down to something as simple, and remarkable, as people choosing to be in community together. It's common for clergy to complain about consumer culture, about the way that people choose this congregation or that church or this synagogue because they want to get something, because they like this music better, because they've heard this one has great donuts. The idea behind the complaint is that American society has lost its staying power, that we have choice in so many aspects of our lives that we bring it to our religious lives too, and expect the congregation to mold itself around our interests. And there's something to that (in fact, I gave a whole platform about that once). But this past Sunday, I thought instead about the power of choice, and that a culture of choice makes it all the more wonderful when what we choose is to be together, to be in community. So here's a shout-out to the WES member who reminded me that there's a reason we run around on Sunday making sure all the details fall into place--and that, even more amazingly, we choose that reason, every week.