Notes for the Week Third Sunday after Pentecost June 21 2020

Dear friends,

It takes all kinds.  All manner of folks to make up a community.  Walking along the streets of my neighborhood, I came across this wall community. Each member must have spoken to an artist’s heart and, as a result, found welcome to become part of this community in particular. 

Perhaps the artist knows the story that belongs to each member. Are they friends of the artist or each an artist’s discovery?  Are they neighbors, members of the family, or simply strangers, now bound together on a communal wall, perhaps waiting to see who will next join them, maybe bringing about the need for a grand re-shuffling for position of prominence.  Or, maybe there is no prominence.  Where you land is where you were meant to be.  It could be that newly arriving faces simply join in at the end of the line, which must soon be turning right or left with a different landscape to view. 

Maybe there was simply a plain fence before the coronavirus crept along its side.  Maybe the virus touched off a need for the artist inside the fence to find people, even if they had to be painted.  Maybe, if you can’t have a dog, you paint one and you put him in the place of prominence, always on guard against other dogs who might wander past the fence gate.  Or an inordinate number of delivery people. 

Maybe the artist simply ran out of room inside the house, and what we readily see of the community on the outside is just part of the story.  All the rest might be living on the walls of bedroom, bathroom and hall.  These days, we don’t usually know much about who lives in the houses we walk by, or what keeps them going, or how they view the world. We tend to think all perceptions of the world should somehow match our own, and we tend to keep our own communities behind the private gates of our acceptance.   We don’t hang them out on a fence for all to see.  We’ are rather afraid of judgment. 

Who are these people, why are they out on the fence, are the paintings a boast of someone’s talent, or does the artist decide if they are good enough to hang outside?  We will never know unless we ask.  The next time I walk into that part of the neighborhood again, I’m going to search for the wall of community.  There’s a story to be told, and by asking to hear it, I well may find myself becoming part of the community, too.  If I’m hung out on the fence, I hope I’ll be next to the dog.  Or I could be told, in so many words, to get lost again.  That would be too bad.  If there is no story to be shared about a community, well, that leaves it simply hanging on the fence.  It just doesn’t get anywhere.

When a community makes itself visible, filled with untold stories waiting for the telling, then people tend to come knocking on its door, wanting to hear them.   When they do, they might recognize a bit of themselves in each, and they want to hang out with the wall of stories, too.  It’s the way Jesus told us to build His Church.  And you can read all about that in Matthew 28. 

We journey together,

Mother Esme+

“Oh how good and pleasant it is

When brethren live together in unity. (Psalm 133:1)