The Beadle Bard…

Martin Buber says when people associate their lives together, when they gather around a living middle then community can arise mong them.

If we stubbornly chose to live our lives in close proximity to other people that means there will be times when they see us weak and vulnerable, times when they experience flashes, even prolonged periods of our darker shadow side, the side we like to hide.  As night follows day, there will be times when we mess up and make mistakes.

Life lived in the presence of others, if it is to be life that is lived truly will be glorious sometimes, yet often it will be inglorious even tedious. Sometimes it will be energising & synergistic, often it will be painful – even self-defeating. Sometimes there will be intense joy yet at other times there will be boredom- even sadness.

Yet here’s the thing. When a group of people make Jesus their rabbi, when Jesus becomes the living middle, then all that chaotic mix and clash of egos and different hard-edges opinions begins to become plastic and malleable and refined in the fires of love. What makes community possible is that they fail and they fail and they fail… The value of that failure is that they are failing forwards and they are doing it together.

And when people who associate their lives together don’t fail, they are magnificent in the quality of community that arises among them.  Together what they can achieve is just so much more ! They participate in the Great Reversal and they change the world. They are truly God’s alternative community who are establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth.