And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone. | 1 Thessalonians 5:14-15
I was reminded in a conversation over coffee this morning about a great essay I read in my two weeks off (yes this is what I do to relax). It was in a compilation from Marilynne Robinson, and the title of the essay was Imagination and Community. While the essay finds room to talk about book reading, democracy, and cynicism, the core idea is one of love and community; primarily, how love and community play off of one another. She says:
I would say for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.
I find this definition to be extremely helpful to our concept of forming community. Too often, we wait for love to develop before we are willing to give any relational commitment. We sit back and ask people to prove themselves, love us well, and make themselves worthy of our friendship and devotion. Then we give up on them because: ‘they didn’t really know or understand me.’ If we build community this way, we will always have a reason why people are not worth the trouble.
If we go into it choosing to imaginatively love people we barely know, committing ourselves to the process of growing in love, then we can form a community that creates love, rather than a requires it as a prerequisite. We are not bound by the quality of the other person’s love, but by the veracity of our own dedication. It allows us to invite more and more people into the community because our imagination is not as limited as our social capabilities.
This is what the church must aim for, rather than the ideal, perfect group (however it is that you define that), we must strive for imaginative love for people we do not know. This imagination is different than expectation. This is not a call to create an ideal of community to work toward because this will simply make you unsatisfied with those around you. Dietrich Bonhoeffer warns of this in his book Life Together, where he says:
The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.
Imaginative love means loving for the sake of the community, rather than community for the sake of love. It is only when we do this that the mess of people we call the church will ever make sense to us. These are not people who will always love us well. These are not always people we want to love. These are not people we have loving feeling towards. These are always people that we can commit to imaginatively love. God promises to use this love, however imperfect it is, to serve those whom we have committed to, and to, in turn, benefit us. Robinson ends with this:
It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community.
Imaginative love has the ability to surprise us with both its effectiveness and its purpose. It gives us a place to fit as we give a place to others.