My heart is full tonight. I have read Unleashing the Scripture (and yes, I want to blog a few things from it, and talk a bit about how Hauerwas embodied his subtitle: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America.)

Then I stopped at Border’s on the way home and was about to buy “A Hauerwas Reader”, but I got a coupon for $5 off any purchase starting TOMOROW, so I’ll wait (maybe even just order it from Amazon, and maybe do one of their “combo deals” and get another Hauerwas title that looks good, A Community of Character

I also realized I had The Peaceable Kingdom in my “stack” at home, and I found myself reading something that happened to have come from that book when I was looking at the “Hauerwas Reader”, so I resolved to pick that up when I got home. I did. And I have never read a more enticing Foreword than that which David Burrell wrote for The Peaceable Kingdom. More on that in a bit. Then the preface and the first 4 pages of Hauerwas’ intro, and I am hooked. I’ll have to scan some big sections so I can cut and paste some quotes, so MEATY is what I have only begun to read.

Then I looked at the copy of Call to Commitment that I had taken off the shelf and added to the “stack”. I noticed its subtitle as immediately and directly relevant to the Hauerwas emphasis on the “Peaceable Community” : An attempt to Embody the Essence of Church. And embody it, they have, in Washington DC and for the American nation as a whole; a light and example of the kind of EMBODIMENT that is so sorely needed.

A quote from Brad’s post on Leaving Fundamentalism:

We have a longing for community, a need for a creative outlet, and a desire to experience the mystical and deeply spiritual aspects of God. What is relevant to our culture? As I look for the places that are sought after, I see coffee houses, concert venues, places to hang out, places to be a part, and places where we can express ourselves, places where we can just rest, read, or just be still with God, places where we are both productive and rested. This is Church, a place where everyday-life and spirituality mesh.

The Church of the Saviour in D.C. has been in my heart and on my mind for almost 30 years. I cannot shake the impression that community and its stories have left upon me (and I don’t want to). Elizabeth O’Connor’s writings are so descriptive, and so in tune with the journey that Community has had since its beginning in 1947. I deeply want to get to one of their Servant Leadership National Training events, and begin to explore what it is I can do to help start some concrete face to face community that would also draw deeply upon the online community tools to keep in touch at all hours, as a true community of Christ’s Church should, and is called to do. I strongly desire to make my online community of friends whom I have found via this “Theoblogical” blogging a part of a structure that also encompasses a sort of ecumenical extension to this Peaceable Community. Peaceable Kingdom strikes a chord in me , especially in times such as what we face today. I may have to journey to D.C. real soon if they have any such events happening. There is what seems to be an extension of that in Greensboro in just a couple of weeks, but I am doubtful that I could arrange something for a Wednesday-Saturday gig that would require me to ask for 3 days off work, what with my weeklong vacation moving in fast (June 18-25, up at Lake Erie).

I just feel somethign is brewing; I sense that some “embodiment” is about to start taking shape (well, what has already begun here, and with “connected” fellow travelers like Eric, Brad among others. I just know , and am becoming even more emphatic that there HAS to be a face to face element from which to flow into the online world, even though in the face of an absence of such, I don’t know what kind of state of isolation I would be in if not for my online brothers (and sisters are of course , also welcome)

The longing expressed in the above quote from Brad’s article on Church: The Rules Have Changed is central; we gotta have that “Third Place” ( a reference to a book called The Great Good Place, a great sociological study of “Third Places” introduced to me by a good friend Larry up at Old Saint George’s in Cincinnati. The author, Ray Oldenburg studies how “Third Places” (after Family and Work) where people “hang out” and seek community . Many such places Oldenburg studies are bars and pubs, some coffeehouses, and also he covers a lot of ground about the disappearance of such places in American life (and how Europe seems to be holding on to such places much better than us in the U.S.) Highly recommended book. Another book later Celebrating the Third Place, has a chapter written by my friend Larry, and you can see some of the skeletal beginnings of a website I had begun (here) for them using a bunch of Flash and some database backend and hooking their bookstore into Amazon and a thing called AllConsuming. I sometimes long for the continuance of that project; it wasn’t quite done, and we had big plans for it, and Larry basically saw to it that I kept hope alive in the latter half of 2003 by paying me expenses and a little stipend to come to Cincinnati every 2 or 3 weeks while I was unemployed. There are lots of pictures, and we had started integrating blogs and a forum, but then a lot of change happened there, and they’ve sold the facility, but there’s still a lot of anticpation that perhaps the new owners will want to carry on its “Third Place” characteristics.

This has been a long post. Thanks for reading/listening.