These items from “The Bascis”, does indeed make a great group/church litany.
Together– None of us can become free alone. We will spend one hour together every week, sharing our struggles and joys.
And yet the church seems to be content to hand over the gift of ourselves and the gift that is us that God has set forth, and leave us to fend for ourselves against the culture. Of course they say “Go and God be with you”, but what is missing is the embodiment of that litany. The idea is that the “Go” is to be set in the context of being “sent forth” from a people who form us and pray for us, and to do so, they have to know one another. So little effort , if any, is expended to stress the “alternative community” which makes “community” a living concept that goes beyond the stale, empty, “corporate” (as in corporations) notions of community. These latter notions hold out community as a “feel good” selling point so that people will hang around and be consumers and contributors.
Time– In the beginning, we will set aside at least 15 minutes a day for personal prayer and scripture reading, with the intent of getting to know Jesus and sensing how much God loves us. We also will commit to pray for each other
This is just for starters. This is a BARE minimum. But start someplace we must (kind of sounds like Yoda, doesn’t it—–“Start someplace we must”) but seriously, to “break in” to our routine with a much more “open-ended” possibility inherent in living in habitual seriousness with prayer and Scripture is so elemental that it is often totally ignored. And so we excuse ourselves on the assumption that such small portions cannot possibly work miracles. But I do think that such small doses draw us in and engage that hunger that lies often buried deep within, behind our busy facade that we place such emphasis and expend so much energy in maintaining.
Task– Jesus loves us deeply and passionately and calls us to give back to others. We will seek to find the task that God has for us to do. We want to be with those who are suffering and to help change the unjust structures that cause the suffering.
What a foreign concept that seems so clear and yet so neglected and avoided: that God calls us for a purpose at any given time, and continues to call us into new things. And again, it’s not meant to happen out of community, and its meant to bring us into close contact with the broken and suffering. I’m reading a chapter right now in Marsh’s The Beloved Community called Building Beloved Communities: Dispatches from the Quiet Revolution, which is a chapter that tells a story of several who have left what was surely more “successful” prsopects as our society holds them out, and placed their lot in community with struggling, wounded, seemingly hopeless and depressing communities. But what they found was what amounts to success as God defines it; that in casting our lot with the least of these, we find our deepest purposes, and discover the purposes for which we have been given gifts to offer, and we also discover the gift of “the other”.
Take– We will take hold of Jesus, the Liberator, who tears us away from the worldly values and systems that bind and kill us. We will name those things in ourselves that keep us from living in a new way of nonviolent love and freedom, and offer them up for healing.
The bolded part, calling us to “Name those things” is a work of a lifetime. Elizabeth O’Connor explores much of this work of “naming those things” in her book “Our Many Selves”, probably the most impactful book I have ever read. One reason for that is that I did it with some others. But the “goings-on” that we face in those battles we face within as we confront the “many selves” that show themselves in different contexts, which bring out the “unlovable” and “rejected selves” in us, and seek transformation for ourselves, in naming our “selves”; our many selves.
Tell– As we are being liberated and freed, we will tell others about the Source of our new freedom.
What other choice do we have? It’s a ntural.