It seems that the most difficult part of community is the part where we start to get close to one another. In fact, the closer we live and associate with one another, the greater the chance that we will be repelled by one another.

The highways of America are a prime example. If there is one place where we get close to one another every day, the highway is it. America's interstates are America's most accomplished community if proximity is the primary characteristic of community. If I pass a 100 people a day on the highway, that's 36,000 a year, millions in a lifetime. Where else can I get that close to someone? I mean, today alone, I only drove a mile or so, but I got close to 30 or 40 people.

But I really never got that close to them, did I? The rules of the road, following the lines that mark the lanes, I got within feet of all those folks, but in my heart, I was miles away. I was on my way someplace, by myself just as they were. We did not stop to find out where they were going and they did not check with me to see how things were going in my life. We were close, but we were not community. Our cars were like giant magnets that drew each others car to within a few feet of each other, but suddenly repelled each other as we got too close. It's a strange effect.

It is also a strange picture of many places or churches where we attempt community. Community happens when we stop thinking of ourselves and where we are going and we take a break with someone else in order to understand them and their destination for the day. Our fenders come to a halt, we turn off the engine, we park alongside one another and pull up a chair and offer ourselves by assisting others in their journey. We stop focusing on self and we become community, if only for a few moments. We break through the barrier that would repel us and join someone else in their joy and journey.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in An Altar In The World:

The wisdom of the Desert Fathers includes the wisdom that the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self--to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it. All you have to do is recognize another you "out there"--your other self in the world--for whom you may care as instinctively as your care for yourself. To become that person, even for a moment, is to understand what it means to die to your self. This can be as frightening as it is liberating. It may be the only real spiritual discipline there is.

By myself, I can never practice this spiritual discipline, simply because it requires another to set me free to practice it. It requires community. Let me use the words of Hebrews to vow a vow, to meet together more frequently, more intentionally, more communally.

Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Hebrews 10:25