THE COMMUNAL

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Barbara, as well as her husband Peter, has been a close friend and associate of John English for years. She was part of the original Christian Life Communities established in Kitchener and Guelph. With Peter, she served a term as co-president. Along with participation in the CLC, she is engaged in the ministry of spiritual direction.

BP - When did you begin to realize the importance of the communal?

JJE - I think that in 1973 a group from Rome, the Christian Life Community, came and suggested that we become the centre for CLC. In 1975, I gathered a group of people together and most of these people had done Annotation 19. Out of my spiritual direction, with women religious and their difficulties, I felt that my one-on-one direction wasn't really meeting many of their basic issues with their superior, the governance of the communities, and the way the religious were interacting with each other. With Remi Limoges, Margaret Brennan, Suzanne Breckel and Gordie George we began what we called the "Discernment Christian Governance Workshop". This program was basically with women religious councils. The workshop was about ten days long. We developed a whole set of exercises, a great number of them known as the Communal Graced History Exercises. At a meeting with some other Jesuits in Milford, Ohio I talked to George Schemel. George was doing something similar at Wernersville, PA and so we decided to come together and see if we could just work and talk around grace-full, social structures. Out of that came ISECP - Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person.

BP - If you were to highlight only one aspect of the communal and its importance to the spiritual life, what would it be?

JJE - I think that the basic message of the Gospel is that we are to love each other and we are to take care of each other. Is it just taking care of them with compassion or is it to work with them to develop what we call just structures? This of course ties in with the whole liberation theology movement and the whole faith and justice thrust of the Jesuits. In the gospel passage where the two sons of Zebedee want to have their special place and Jesus says very strongly, "I didn't come to be served but to serve" and he said we are to be the least with each other. We get this sense of the communal.

BP - How has your image of the communal evolved over time?

JJE - The sense of the community was going to be the instrument to spread the kingdom, the instrument by which just structures got developed, and the instrument for helping religious congregations of women deal with their issues. At the beginning we worked basically with "how do you help a group make a communal decision" and "how do you establish those structures that will create communities and help them in turn make decisions". Gradually, in doing this kind of work what became very significant was the sense of communal spiritual consolation. What starts to develop is a new sense of identity as individuals start to identify their individual selves with a communal group. Out of that comes a new identity and a new spirituality.

BP - What obstacles did you see to the development of the communal or do you see presently in the development of the communal in today's church and society?

JJE - I think the big issue is the movement from an individualistic spirituality to a communal spirituality. It's not only in spirituality that this is found but it's in our Western or Northern culture where the competitive understanding of life is the dominant understanding of life in the culture, wherein we see ourselves as little, isolated monads. What that does then to the individual is to take away any sense of relationship with others and then individuals start to relate to God the way they relate to their culture and so their spirituality is a one-to-one with God. I think that the new age spirituality is highlighting that individualistic approach to spirituality. I guess there are some new age efforts where there is a kind of communal thing going on, but it's more a kind of hype type of thing rather than a charity, love kind of thing.

BP - So the hype is to get the individual in the group to feel good as opposed to mobilizing the group in the service of the world.

JJE - That's right. The reason for the communal is the service of the world, to help a group of people to move forward, to make decisions for the betterment of humanity. This changes your image of yourself vis-a-vis God. Where do you find God now? Do you find God in the vertical or do you find God in the horizontal inter-communal effort. Now, you can see this shift in the Eucharist because in the old days the priest was at the far end of a long rectangular building looking at a crucifix on a wall and looking up with his back to the people, and the people were all single individuals sitting in their pews relating to this action of God and seeing themselves, in some sense, as individuals at prayer. Now when you realize with Vatican II that it's the community that is offering the Eucharist when the priest is present, the whole communal setting changes to a horseshoe-style amphitheater and people can see each other and get a sense that the total group is offering the Eucharist. One of my concerns always in the Eucharist is when I'm looking down and I see people with their eyes closed and nobody's even looking at the action on the altar let alone being aware of each other in the Eucharistic action. The Eucharist can be presented as an individualistic spirituality or it can be presented as a communal spirituality. My understanding of Jesus is that it was the community that was offering in the Eucharist, that the community had a sense of the resurrected Jesus.

BP - Was there a pivotal experience that helped shape your view of the importance of community?

JJE - One time in a CLC situation one of the married couples was in quite serious trouble, even to the point of separation and possibly divorce. Everyone else in the group said, "We have to support these two people, not pass judgement on them but be on both sides and keep inviting them to come back to our community meetings". And that is what we did as a group. What happened eventually was that the couple did come back and they did share. These were quite painful experiences for the whole group because it was obvious these two people were not getting along. But through a series of incidents they did come back together and they did in some sense fall in love again. They told us that if it hadn't been for the CLC they definitely would have separated permanently and divorced. What happened here was a real sense of the power of community, of the way in which the sharing of your life can open two people up to each other, and make them realize they were accepted just the way Jesus accepts everybody. This would be one of the pivotal experiences of the importance of the communal for me.
            I think, to tell you the truth, two or three other things also have been significant. Here at Loyola House back in the late 1960s early 1970s we were giving one-to-one retreats to individuals, so you could say it was an individualistic one-to-one directed retreat. But what was happening at that time was that we were working as a team ourselves and there was a kind of communal preparation and a communal carrying through of the Spiritual Exercises, even though it was happening one-to-one. When we started working with groups of religious councils we were doing it as a team and we saw what this communal interchange could do to a group. That again was another experience of how significant communal sharing of one's deep inner life is. This whole sense of the significance of the communal and how it can heal, and how it can become creative, and how it can move a group forward into the future is critical, or pivotal.

BP - What do you see as the hope filled signs in the development of the communal in today's church and society?

JJE - Well, in today's society the global village is the sign precisely of that sense of the communal. The biggest issue here is that we're moving towards it from the viewpoint of Western capitalism and that is individualistic in thrust and origin. We are becoming more conscious of how we are inter-dependant. As the population of the earth expands we have to find a way of living together because the competition will kill us off. We've got to find ways of dealing with how to keep people alive, as far as food is concerned, and how to keep them with a certain lifestyle without destroying our earth. That becomes a communal effort.
            The church is also becoming more and more conscious of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are three continents where the communal is much more present to people than in our Northern and Western countries. Whether North America will ever be able to embody the communal is a good question. When I speak to some people from Latin America or to aboriginal peoples they don't see this individualistic spirituality as a big threat to them. In fact, their issue is that they are so communal and so inter relating that what is important for them is the independence of the individual. Now, when you get into that question you get into something really quite deep because it involves the difference between community and collectivity. The collectivity involves the well being of the total group, and the individual can get lost in that. The idea of the community though, is that you protect the individual at the same time that the individual becomes conscious of his/her inter-dependance. John McMurray, the late Scottish philosopher, speaks about two understandings of persons: the individual as a person and the community as a person. Personhood is present with the individual and also with the community. You can't isolate them, in a sense, because my existence is dependant on my relationship with you and our existence is inter-dependant all the time. This applies to spirituality, too, of course. There is some sense that the church has taught a lot of this but we have not been able to put it into practice. I think that in practice this one-to-one relationship with God, with Jesus, is the dominant spirituality in the church. The Pope himself has some criticism of Western capitalism just as he has a strong criticism of communism.
            These are really big issues and I think that the communal comes into place because it is important. How are we going to appreciate and deal with each other? What is communal spirituality? We haven't even asked the question yet. Communal spirituality is where I shift my image of myself and my image of others and I become aware that I am not saved alone. The whole salvific act is a communal action. I have to discover that I am saved in the context of everyone being saved. There are two levels of salvation. There's the level of salvation as we live through our life, and there's the level of salvation at the moment of death. Good theology, good spirituality says these two should be identical. As you're living your life you should have a sense of being saved. Where do you get this sense of being saved? In the communal, of course. Or you can pray with the gospel message that Jesus is my saviour. But the thing is that Jesus is our Saviour and then I discover I am saved with you and in some sense through you. That's the communal spirituality approach. To come to that, requires a great conversion because our whole culture is so vertically or individualistically oriented that when you try to move to the horizontal or communal it's very difficult. Maybe married couples can do it a little better because as they raise children they know how inter-dependant they are. But as children grow up the first thing they want to do is break away because they're independent.

BP - Where do you see small faith communities fitting into the general concept of the communal in the church?

JJE - Well, if what I just said is significant, that this requires a conversion, a change of heart, a change of mind, where do you start? You have to start, it seems to me, with the small faith communities, because there people share their inner life with each other and grasp the sense of the communal in it. Art Baranowski I think, felt strongly that a parish should be a community of communities, and indeed, the bishops have spoken of the church as a community of communities. You need a context for people to share deeply their inner life and when they do that they discover their inter-connectedness and they discover how God has been working not only with them but with others. You need the small faith communities to pull that off. It is very important, though, that the small faith communities don't become little, exclusive cliques. Their purpose is not just for themselves - although that is one of the purposes - but to assist the larger community. They are supposed to make serious decisions for the sake of the rest of the church and for the world for that matter. In Western and Northern cultures today the people get isolated so quickly that families get broken up. In the old agricultural setting the families tended to stay together and work the farm together and you could say the family was a community. It wasn't just parents and children, it was uncles, aunts, grandparents -- so you had a group of adults working together. The small faith community is basically made up of adults. You can also have children with the adults, but it's not a family in the ordinary sense for you've got different adults coming together sharing their faith. I think that is really significant in the small faith communities. It is the instrument to get the thing started.

BP - What strikes me there is not your own experience, but rather the experience of the CLC and working on a retreat team that functions communally, and your experience with George Schemel and that Scranton group that have been so pivotal for you on your own journey.

JJE - I must say it was the Jesuits as well. We found that in the small settings the Jesuits could come together, could share the Jesuit charism, and could make communal decisions much easier than the total body could make a decision.

BP - Is there anything else that we've not touched on with regard to the communal that you feel is important to be addressed?

JJE - What I think is quite important is to see how the sense of the communal is present in the Old and New Testament. This is what Vatican II is calling us to - returning to our tradition with the people of God image. In the Old Testament, of course, it was always Yahweh relating to Israel as a people and so the prophets were there to be the voice of God to the kings and the leaders. The imagery was kind of a marriage relationship between God and the people of Israel. So they had a sense of themselves as a saved people. Now, they did become conscious of individual responsibility, especially that of the leaders. The psalms are supposed to be written by King David and many of his laments are about himself as leader of the people. He even says to God, in one place, well I'm responsible for this so why are you doing this to all the people? That sense of identity actually stayed in the culture pretty well up to the Middle Ages, that sense that the King was the people and so if the King was killed something happened to the total nation.
            When you get to the New Testament St. Paul is very concerned about community and the inter- dependence of community. He has all these wonderful images of the body. Every part of the body is dependent on every other part. He has these wonderful things like, 'can the eye say to the foot I have no need of you`. Now, in Paul's instance, the body of Christ is the significant symbol and that is an old symbol also of communities -- that we are one body in Christ. One translation says we are one person in Christ, which is quite interesting. You know, of course, that in the last 20 years the whole notion of Trinitarian spirituality is coming into the fore. There are many reasons for that. It could be the strong feminine critique of patriarchy with its emphasis on God as masculine or as father. The reaction to that is to understand God as mother. But the basic teaching of the church is that God is three, God is the Trinity, God is a community, a community of persons. The prime analogy that we relate to is communal. It is three persons so united that they are one, and that is what community is about. The community is a group of people who are so united that they have a sense of oneness. There is an adage here: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in a community. There is a greater wholeness and that greater wholeness is Christ. It is the same thing as the Trinity. The three, when they operate together, are greater than the sum of the three. So Trinitarian spirituality, then, is becoming quite dominant in today's world.
            One famous writer (Segundo) said that he felt that the reason for the strong individualism in the Western world was because in the Middle Ages they emphasized God as one. Even though there was also an emphasis on God as three, it didn't get nearly the attention. When you emphasize that there is only one God, what have you got going? You have a relationship to one who is God instead of a relationship to a community which is Three. And then we are in the middle of this community that is the Trinity. When you are in the middle of a community, when you are in the middle of the Trinity, you have a new understanding of the Holy Spirit. You don't have an understanding of the Holy Spirit being sent by the Trinity into the world and into each one of us individually, but rather you have a sense of the Holy Spirit operative in the Trinitarian context.