Faithfully Related

Some of you may remember that last year I wrote that I believed that to become part of a faith community required a "conversion to vulnerability." What this conversion is the risking of being known in an ongoing relationship with others. My belief in this conversion has only deepened. We are indeed faithfully related. We come to find our common ground in God. This is how we grow into Christ.

"Faith is about relationship. You talk about having faith in someone, how powerful it is when you feel that someone has faith in you, and how important it is to a relationship, and what a gift it is when you put your faith in someone. It is different from being able to define them or control them. So faith is about relationship in this way. It is about being faithful, faithfully related to someone. That means making a commitment, growing in that commitment over time, going through good times and bad times, staying with it as much as you humanly can, or starting again if you stopped. It means eventually realising that the relationship is taking you beyond yourself, beyond the ego, beyond the ego’s attachment to good times rather than bad times, beyond the ego that says, when it runs into a difficult period, ‘I don’t want this; I don’t need this; this isn’t what I signed up for’."

Father Laurence Freeman, World Community for Christian Meditation, November 4, 2018 

photograph: San Leandro, October 2018