Disillusionment: The Key to Community

The other night I expressed how deeply flawed I was, how disillussioned I was with myself, for I knew me, and I know how flawed and wrong I am and can be. Although I was reassured by my friend that certainly it isn't so I knew in my heart how right I was in my innermost feelings. I knew and recognized my feelings, yet I did not fully understand them, or their reasons for existing. Tonight I read a passage from "Life Together" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that said' "God is not a God of the emotions but a God of truth. Only that fellowship that faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects,begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise given to it. The sooner the shock of disillusionment comes to an indiviual and to a community the better for both." It was like a lightswitch was thrown- an answer, an understanding to my feelings of inadequacy and disillusionment with who and what I am.
     For me to enter into community with God, through my relationship with his son Jesus Christ, I must be stripped of all illusions of who I think God wants me to be, be stripped of all illusions of who I think I should be, and freed from all illusions and visions of how I think community with him should be. Bonhoeffer says later, "God hates visionary dreaming. It makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his own demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly." The point here is it is not for us to dream, to try and determine what community with God and other Christians should look like. It is just for us to enter into it, to allow God to work in his model of community, not ours. He already has brought us into fellowship with him, through the blood and mediation of his son, and we are already ready to live in community with him if we can only cast aside our visions of what that should be and just enter in with him...

    As I reflect on past experiences, both personal and observed, I can't help but see the truth that Bonhoeffer was so eloquently describing. In my past was I not guilty of spiritual pride? Did I not hold others to my own exacting standards, did I not sit in condemnation of others who didn't measure up? I was wrong, for I was inflicting my visions, my standards on others, and I was woefully prideful in my own "goodness". And what of the larger model of community, the church? I cannot recall attending even one local church that did not have a "vision" or visions of what they wanted to be and/or what they desired to accomplish. I think back on past, and even recent, cutbacks of staff and programs in churches I've attended and now ask myself, "Were they striving to meet their own 'vision' or were they laying aside all their illusions and just living in community with God and allowing him to direct the direction and 'vsion' of the church?" I can't help but wonder that if God were really directing things would there ever be a need for a cutback or layoff? Are we, as local bodies of Christ (churches) guilty of being visionaries?

     "For he himself is our peace..." (Eph. 2:14). When we come into community with God, through Jesus Christ, and do so without our visions, our illusions, we find peace, I find peace. We find peace with God, whatever the circumstance, and we find peace with our Christian brothers also living in community with God. Community is a gift of grace from God, pure and undistorted, if we only enter in in our dissillusionment... Food for thought...