Communities that Smile

        By: Jim Taylor

            A newspaper reporter interviewed Bob Thompson, while he was still minister of Trinity United Church in Vernon. As often happens these days, the interviewer expected to hear about the mainline churches sliding towards oblivion.
          Bob disagreed.
          "So what gives you hope?" asked the reporter.
          It is, perhaps, telling that Bob didn't think of such ministerial functions as presiding at communion, offering prayers at municipal events, or filling out forms for the national offices.
          "The older women," said Bob. "A lot of them are widows. A lot of them are scraping by financially. But they have such a zest for living. They're joyful!"
          The reporter's pencil stopped moving. "That's interesting," he said. "Most of the older women that I see are just the opposite. They're crabby and bitter."
          They might both be right.
          When I look around our church on a Sunday morning, I see about a dozen women, all of whom, I'd guess, are 80 or older. (Unless they volunteer their age, I don't ask.) But there's not a grumpy face among them. They join in committees and study groups, in yard sales and bazaars. They sing lustily. They pay attention, and enjoy their relationships.
          In other situations, I frequently see frowns, grumpy faces, and mouths with the corners chronically turned down.
          I'm not sure which is cause, and which is effect. Does going to church make one group bright and cheerful? Or do they get involved in church because they're naturally bright and cheerful?
          Maybe it's a bit of both. In the traditions of the faith community, they find what they were already looking for.
          "We need a path," writes Marcus Borg, in The Heart of Christianity. "We are lost without one. Community and tradition articulate, embody, and nurture a path. They provide practical means of undertaking the path, not as a requirement for entering the next world, but as a path of reconnection and transformation in this life."
          I like Borg. He refuses to be imprisoned by the past, but he also values it.
          "Religious community and tradition put us in touch with the wisdom and beauty of the past," he says. "They are communities of memory. There is value in being in touch with the past. Not only does it contain wisdom, but it can deliver us from our limited way of seeing that we seldom recognize as a form of blindness. There is much to be said for being part of a tradition centuries old rather than one made up yesterday."
          Left to myself, I could probably get all too frustrated with the shortcomings of any congregation. Or, for that matter, any social organization. Our manifold weaknesses get under my skin. I chafe at our imperfections.
          But when I look around, when I see how that community can make a difference to others, I'm reminded that it's not just about me.
          What I bring to the community nurtures the whole; the whole, in turn, nurtures me.