Crowd or Community?

"The more beautiful parts don’t need this special care. But God put the body together and gave more honor to the parts that need it. God did this so that our body would not be divided. God wanted the different parts to care the same for each other. If one part of the body suffers, then all the other parts suffer with it. Or if one part is honored, then all the other parts share its honor." 1 Corinthians 12:24-26 ERV

The Covid 19 outbreak among the foreign workers in packed dormitories in Singapore is a grim reminder of our dependence on another and our need to care for one another. It is a time for reflection to seek the truth so that we will not be blinded by fake news or propaganda and even lies. Truth will set us free but fear will keep us in bondage. It is a time to choose between living as a crowd or as a community.

Crowds are fickle and easily manipulated. It is easier to control crowd behaviour with legislation than to encourage social responsibility through education. It is easier to medicalise death than to journey with the dying. It is easier to commercialise medicine and to profit from illness seeking behaviour than to promote healthy lifestyles. It is easier to institutionalise spirituality which encourages superstitious and superficial religious practices in pseudo-communities than to encourage faith building practices in communities of love. 

And we can see the disastrous effects of politicising the pandemic in the United States of America which has become the Divided States of America when political leaders are motivated by the lust for power instead of being motivated by the power of love. The most effective way to control a crowd is through fear and greed but it is only love that will build community. 

Our human hearts are deceitful and we are easily deceived and swayed by our emotions. When our emotions are aroused, our feelings take over our thinking and we take leave of our common sense. Common sense so often becomes uncommon when we are not aware or attentive to our thoughts and feelings. But God knows our hearts as the psalmist reminds us:

"O Lord , you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord . You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand!" Psalms 139:1-6 NLT

We may trust God but God knows that our hearts are fickle and that we cannot be trusted. Jesus saw that the Jews were beginning to trust Him because of the miracles He performed, but he did not trust them:

"Because of the miraculous signs Jesus did in Jerusalem at the Passover celebration, many began to trust in him. But Jesus didn’t trust them, because he knew all about people. No one needed to tell him about human nature, for he knew what was in each person’s heart." John 2:23-25 NLT

Jesus was proven right by the events leading to his death on the cross. The crowds welcomed him into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with shouts of "Hosanna!" only to cry out, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" on Good Friday. Jesus was crucified because of the crowd but He rose from the dead to empower us to live in communities of love with Jesus as our Prince of Peace and our Shepherd of Love. This was what happened after Pentecost. The disciples were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they not only preached the word of God with boldness but lived out their faith with love:

"All the believers were united in heart and mind. And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. The apostles testified powerfully to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great blessing was upon them all. There were no needy people among them, because those who owned land or houses would sell them and bring the money to the apostles to give to those in need. " Acts of the Apostles 4:31-35 NLT

Henri Nouwen noted that community has little to do with mutual compatibility. We may be brought together by similarities in educational background, psychological makeup or social status but these can never be the basis for community. He saw that community is not rooted in the attractiveness of people to each other - true community is grounded in God who calls us together:

"The mystery of community is precisely that it embraces all people, whatever their individual differences may be and allows them to live together as brothers and sisters of Christ and sons and daughters of his heavenly Father." 

We are living in the dawn of a brave new world for humanity where we can live together as the family of God in love. The Covid 19 virus is thus not the enemy but a love message from God as Laurence Freeman reminds us:

"This isn't an easy language to learn. But it could not be simpler. Keeping this in mind, struggling with the strange idea that Covid-19 could be a love message, let's try to reflect on what the message 'I love you' might mean."

It may mean a judgment of God for we have traded the truth about God for a lie and worshipping money and using people instead of loving people and using money for the glory of God:

"Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior, and gossip." Romans 1:28-29 NLT

But we can also see it as God's discipline and a wake up call. The Covid 19 crisis according to Laurence Freeman may only be the first of a series of crisis to wake us up to our need for a new vision of reality and to cultivate the values of contemplative consciousness. To develop communities of love we need to rediscover the poverty of spirit and to be healed of our sins of greed and gluttony so that we can live simple and compassionate lives.

The discipline of contemplative prayer is not to help us find peace of mind but to lead us to the mind of Christ so that we will experience the peace that is beyond all human understanding and not dependent on the absence of trials or suffering. It is not a journey to have 100% happiness in life but the spiritual adventure to have 10% holiness in our daily lives. It is seeking to have a change of heart produced by the Spirit and to be a person with a changed heart who seeks praise from God and not from people (Romans 2:29). 

We will then become a people seeking to be the Body of the Risen Christ - to build a community of love in which each one is concerned for one other. To do so we need to turn back to God and to open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit. We need the Holy Spirit to purify our hearts from the love of power and fill them with the power of love as well as to renew our minds with the truths of God. 

It is love and truth that will deliver us from the evils of the mindset of a crowd that is obsessed with greed and gluttony. It is love and truth that will lead us to the joy and peace of a community rooted in the resurrection power of the Risen Christ. And so in our silence and solitude let us pray:

"Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Hold o’er my being absolute sway!
Fill with Thy Spirit ’till all shall see
Christ only, always, living in me."