..a regular blogger. Or any number of other things that I would like to be.
I've had a series of huge moments lately, moments in which ideas and the wisdom about how to use them come like a gift. There's no other way to describe it. And though the pace of life lately has been about 15 miles over the speed limit, I haven't had to steer--that's being done for me.
My thoughts have been playing lately on the boundaries of three of my most significant interests: theology, sociology, and creativity. And how each of them has it's own window on what it means to be human in relationship with other humans. The further I go into community and the more complicated my community gets here in Austin, the more that I realize there is nothing more challenging, more draining, and more enriching than the community of people on a spiritual journey together. God, the Trinity, is community; the social system is community, with claims on us, whether we recognize it or not; our families, blessing or curse, are community; our friendships, whether deep or shallow, are community. The ties define us, as we define them. Yet it is so common to let these ties get sick, ignore them, or misuse them: we let individual choice trump commitment to relationships, we choose isolation over connection, we drive further inward to "protect" ourselves and those around us, only to drag our ties along with us.
The East African writer Malidoma Some talks about the way that the Dagara people, living in modern-day Ghana and Burkina Faso, see the role of the individual in community. He says, and I love this, that when a woman in the community becomes pregnant, everyone gets together to talk and divine, through ritual, what the unique purpose of this new human is for the community. Individual purpose is at the center of what it means to be human: and individuals are NOT interchangeable cores with attained knowledge and skill sets. If a human does not live in their purpose, they suffer and the community suffers. They need the community to determine their purpose, and the community needs them living in their purpose in order to be healty.
Also, purpose is closely tied to the idea of "genius", which they think about very differently than we do. Genius is not some general quality, given through random biological mutation or chance. Genius is each individuals link to God, their unique "channel" for spiritual power, that must be discovered and opened in order to allow spiritual power to be channelled to the community. We are all geniuses--we just each have unique genius.
HOWEVER. I don't know how to be in community. I don't know how to be a good friend, a good daughter, a good sister, a good student, a good ... whatever. But maybe that's the point--community isn't about me, individually, achieving success in a collection of individual identities (friend, daughter, student, sister). Maybe it is about recognizing the ties, commiting to the ties, feeding the ties, submitting to the ties that are already there. Lord knows, we are never able, no matter how hard we try, to get free of them.
I don't know how to be what I already am. And THAT problem, I'm certain, is at the core of what it means to be human.