What does it mean to be in community?
In community we experience the contours of a love that
- Welcomes each other
- Reveals our identity
- Gives us our vocation
- Sustains us in our vocation
- Holds us accountable for living responsibly (growing in depth)
- Guides us on a journey
- Supports one another when extreme agonizing and ethical choices, sickness or death occur.
A true community implies a way of life, a way of living and seeing reality; it implies above all constant attentiveness as we go through our daily activities. This daily activity is also known as the daily round. It is made up of simple things - providing a meal, going to meetings, praying with and for each other - as well as recognizing the gifts of joy and celebration. It is made up of forgiving seventy times seventy-seven.
A community is being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but that they will simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets. Community is being created when we have recognized that the greatness of humanity lies in the acceptance of our insignificance, our human condition and our earth. It is made manifest when we thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness.
The Holy Spirit has worked and is working to form this community, Gardener’s House of Prayer, as a community of grace around Jesus and the story of God’s love for us. It is a physical and spiritual space that supports the test of gifts, the unity of our gifts, the diversity of our gifts, and the necessity of exercising (praxis) the gifts in love (1Corinthians 12).