Weave yourself into community's tapestry

In Exile

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
Rome

If Rieff is right, then the answer for at least some problems for which we seek professional therapy is fuller participation within community life, including Church life, rather than private therapy.

How does community heal and strengthen us? In caption, community (life beyond our private selves and private intimacies) is therapeutic because it draws us outside of ourselves, gives us a steadying rhythm, helps us feel ordinary, connects us with resources beyond our private helplessness.

To participate healthily within community and family takes us beyond the pathology and fragility we so often sense in the recesses of our own souls. Community steadies us. It has a rhythm and regularity that helps calm and make ordinary the feelings of disorientation, depression and paranoia which can wreak havoc in our private lives.

Participation in community gives us clearly defined things to do, regular stopping places, and regular events to structure and steady us. This is a commodity that no therapeutic couch can provide. Beyond this, community links us to resources that can empower us beyond our own helplessness. What we dream alone remains a dream. What we dream with others can become a reality.

Let me illustrate it: While doing doctoral studies in Belgium, I attended lectures of Antoine Vergote, a psychologist and doctor of the soul. I asked him one day how one should handle emotional obsessions, both within oneself and when trying to help others.

He went on to distinguish this from the simplistic temptation to simply bury oneself in distractions and work. His advice is not that one run away from painful inner issues, but that solving one's inner private problems is also, and sometimes massively, dependent upon outside relationships, both of intimacy and of a more public nature.

For example: For 16 years I taught at a theological college. Many is the emotionally unstable student, fraught with every kind of inner pain and unsteadiness, who would show up at that college and slowly get emotionally steadier and stronger during his or her time there.

That new strength and steadiness came not so much from the theology courses, but from the rhythm and health of community life in the college. The therapy of community life helped heal them. How?

The rhythm of community, its constant interaction, its regularity, its demands, its common prayer, its common meals, its social interaction, all of these conspire to help steady the unsteady, order the chaotic, firm up the fragile, and give those who feel abnormal a sense of being ordinary. There is a healing and wholeness that can only come from participation in community life. To feel ordinary, it helps to be immersed in the ordinary.

More specifically for us as Christians: The therapy of community life also means the therapy of an ecclesial life, Church life. We become emotionally well, steadier, less obsessed, less a slave of our own restlessness, and more able to become who and what we want to be by participating in the life of the Church. Monks, with their monastic rhythm, have long understood this, namely, that program, rhythm, public participation, the demand to show up, and the discipline of the community bell have kept many a man and woman sane, not to mention relatively happy.

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with others, regular Church meetings, and regular duties and responsibilities within a community or family not only nurture the soul, they keep us sane and steady.

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