My Experience of Community
-An Article Written by Bobby Sagra (Spiritual Name: Benedict Sagra)
for the Newsletter of World Mother Sanctuary
P.O. Box 1060
Mt. Shasta, CA 96067
U.S.A.
In my many years of experience living in community I have come to understand that it is really love that builds community. It was at the Last Supper that Jesus gave the new commandment to his beloved apostles, “love one another as I love you” (John 15:12). Love is the flame coming forth from the hearth when each member of the community loses oneself in sharing individual gifts and talents to fulfill the vision of the community in Christ just like the pieces of wood stacked together to generate flame. My experience of community made me understood and lived the seven qualities of the love of Jesus which a newly born community can live together. The first is that Jesus loves everyone. He has a special kindness, respect, tolerance and acceptance of everybody, especially the poor and the marginalized. The second is that Jesus always made the first step to love. When he first called his disciples along the sea of Galilee, he was the one who said the first word, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” (Mark 1:17) It was a word spoken with great love in his heart for each of them. When I am called to a community, it is a must for me to also hear this first word of Jesus, “I love you and I am calling you to leave behind everything, deny yourself, take up your cross and then come and follow after me…” (cf. Luke 14:27) All I need to do is to say in the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Here I am,…send me!”(Isaiah 6:8) The third quality of the love of Jesus is that He becomes one with those whom He loves. To the children He became a little child. To the teachers of the law He became a teacher like them. To the poor and the sick He showed acceptance, empathy and compassion. Entering a community with love in my heart I am ready to loose my own comfort zone and radically unite my feelings, my ideas and my very own life with those whom God has called me to be with. Yesterday, here in the World Mother Sanctuary I sat and rejoiced with Ann as she shared that she has called her husband Steve and they have a very good conversation. To love in this way means for me “to weep with those who weep and to rejoice with those who rejoice”. Chiara Lubich, the Foundress of the the Focolare Movement, a Catholic spiritual community for Unity wrote once, “Nothing is so small when it is done out of love.” The fourth very interesting aspect of the love of Jesus is that of mutual love. There is a saying, “love begets love” and Jesus precisely keeps on loving despite many obstacles and challenges there are in the art of loving in order to win an atmosphere of love wherever He is. He puts in love where there is no love as He did with the Samaritan woman He met on Jacob’s well one very hot noonday moment of his life’s journey on earth. The love that he gave to that woman became a wellspring of hope for her to begin her new life of discipleship in Christ. The fifth great luster in the way Jesus loves is that He said, “love your enemies…”(Matthew 5:44) Loving one’s enemies is the Christ revolution for all ages. In a world tinged with so much violence and hatred, this very dictum of Christ offers a healing option to bring about peace, harmony and justice for all. Living in a community at times I experienced that I am my most fierce enemy as my selfishness, jealousy and anger test me and block my wholehearted and free capacity to love. So in this case, I pause and I listen and be gentle to regenerate the love of Christ for me so I can love myself as I really am and be able also to love others in their own negativities, idiosyncrasy and uniqueness. The sixth golden quality of the love of Christ is that He loves without measure, expecting nothing in return. His kind of love is selfless and pure. All he wants is the good and joy of those around him. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the monastic group called the Cistercians, wrote that for him as a follower of Christ, “to love is to love without measure”. In my own life living in many different communities like the Mission Society of the Philippines, the Focolare Movement School of Spirituality in Florence, Italy, with the Benedictine Monks in Pecos, New Mexico, I experienced the personal love of Christ for me through those persons I have lived with as one of unconditional love. I felt accepted, treasured, valued and supported in my own woundedness and giftedness as a child of God. Now as Christ my Lord led my steps to the World Mother Sanctuary the more I experience this being loved by Christ through Crystal, Ann, Betsy and Susan unconditionally, just as I am. In my way of expressing my love for others especially my wife Marl, I also say, “I love you just the way you are!” Finally, the seventh characteristic of the love of Jesus is that in loving He offered Himself up on the cross for all of us. He became true to His very own words, “No greater love man has than to lay down his life for his friends.”(John 15:13) Again in my experience living with a community, this is the very pact of love that I declare, to love with the very standard of the love of Christ, to offer myself and my life for others in the community. It is this very aspect of dying to self, dying to my own worldly attachments, dying to my own concepts and ideas and living only the new life and vision of the whole in my community that validates my true membership in the community. I experienced living in the Zen Buddhist community in Marikina City, Philippines for few months and in the Buddhist understanding of community or “sangha”, a community is a place of refuge. One of the Buddhist chants says, “I seek refuge in the sangha.” As I join the community here in the World Mother Sanctuary, I consider it as my new christian “sangha”, my place of refuge and Mary, our Mother is the one I find solace and comfort as she expressed her presence daily through my companions here. One of the Latin titles of Mary is “refugium peccatorum” or refuge of sinners. I honestly and sincerely identify myself with that spectrum of affiliation to Mary. In the world beset and contaminated my all forms of ungodliness and impurity I seek refuge in the heart of Mary, our Mother here and there I find the love, strength and comfort my soul is longing and thirsting. Here in the World Mother Sanctuary I experienced the cessation of all forms of worry, fear and anxiety for what may come about. All I know and feel is the peace and assurance that now that I belong to a community here, God will supply everything I need in alliance with the mystical parlance of a catholic saint which echoes, “all will be well”. In conclusion as I write this I commit myself to love only according to the very qualities and measure of the love of Christ. I invite Jesus now to come and find a loving welcome in my consciousness so I will be totally transformed in His very own mind, so I can love deeply and humbly in my heart. Yes, there is no other way today for me, love is the only way, that is, to love everyone with the very love of Christ.
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