Anam Cara

Spirituality that cuts itself off from religion can go totally astray and become entangled in the worst networks of deception, illusion, and power. We are all aware of the horror stories of individuals whose minds have been taken over by cults and sects. These individuals are offered emotional warmth and belonging. The price is the handing over of the individual mind. Cults are instinctively adept at mind altering. They seduce and exploit the natural longing for the spiritual. Unlike a great religious tradition which demands and requires the critical loyalty and inner opposition of its theologians, a cult has no theology. The counter-questions are neither invited nor allowed. The cult manages to hold you prisoner while making you feel and believe you are liberated and free. You could even feel pity and worry for those outside the cult, the lost ones who have not yet seen your light. The cult operates an efficient dualism, which separates mind and heart and splits self and society. It snares your longing in a sinister trap. The rise of cults testifies to the awful loneliness of post-modern culture. They are attractive because they seem to present a way of belonging that offers consolation, certainty, and purpose. Even though they do not actually deliver any of these possibilities in any real or truthful sense, their followers certainly invite us to look at the crisis of belonging in our society and religions.

Our Longing for Community

Each one of us wants to belong. No one wants to live a life that is cut off or isolated. The absence of contact with others hurts us. When we belong, we feel part of things. We have a huge need to participate. When this is denied us, it makes us insecure. Our confidence is shaken, and we turn in on ourselves and against ourselves. It is poignant that we actually are so fragile inside. When you feel rejected, it cuts deep into you, especially if you are rejected by those whose acceptance means a lot to you. The pain of rejection only confirms the intensity of our longing to belong. It seems that in a soul-sense we cannot be fully ourselves without others. In order to be, we need to be with. There is something incomplete in purely individual presence. Belonging together with others completes something in us. It also suggests that behind all our differences and distances from each other, we are all participating in a larger drama of spirit. The “life and death of each of us” does indeed affect the rest of us. Not alone do we long for the community, but at a deeper level we are already a community of spirit.

There is a Providence that brought us here and gave us to each other at this time. In and through us, a greater tapestry of creativity is being woven. It is difficult for us to envisage this. We live such separate and often quite removed lives. Yet behind all the seeming separation a deeper unity anchors everything. This is one of the powerful intimations of the great religious traditions. The ideal of community is not the forcing together of separate individuals into the spurious unity of community. The great traditions tell us that community somehow already exists. When we come together in compassion and generosity, this hidden belonging begins to come alive between us. Consequently, a community which is driven by power or too great a flurry of activity and talk will never achieve much more than superficial belonging. The attempt to force community usually drives the more creative and independent people away. We do not so much build community as if it were some external and objective structure as we allow community to emerge. In order for community to emerge, we need time, vision, and a certain rhythm of silence with each other. It is impossible to grasp what makes community at its heart. We often hear the phrase “community spirit,” which recognizes that community is not so much an invention or construction of its members, but a gift that emerges between them and embraces them. We do not make community. We are born into community. We enter as new participants into a drama that is already on. We are required to maintain and, often, reawaken community.

Perhaps community is a constellation. Each one of us is a different light in the emerging collective brightness. A constellation of light has greater power of illumination than any single light would have on its own. Together we increase brightness. Yet no star can move away outside the constellation in order to view the overall brightness. It is interesting how perspective is such a powerful force in determining what we see and what we miss.