Community, Plus

FRI., APR. 21, 1989, 2:11 PM
UNION CLUB, BOSTON

The concept of community can be put into academic words that sound both wonderful and meaningless. Community is one of My best creations, and even as I realize that some of the sciences in your culture have studied and written about it I refuse to give it up. Therefore what I shall tell you this day is about Community, Plus. Hear, o son.

Community usually has a describable, definable environment, though this isn’t absolutely necessary. Yet land forms, buildings, homes and all that the term “environment” means can be considered fundamental, in one sense, to community. I have encouraged your perception that your farm is an environment that helps build a special kind of community that is a “plus” to regular classroom existence. At the same time I encourage you to see the health educators who read your Ruminations as a special kind of community, one without a common environment.

Most basically, a community is people who are together about some aspect of their lives. This, of course, means physical bodies, but the bodies are not important in what I envision. The intellectual mind and the emotional being are more crucial to My description of community. The true focus, however, is Our Wellspring of Human/Spiritual Interacting, a continuing process that both represents community and builds or detracts from community.

It should be no surprise to you that I can dissect this Wellspring even farther and affirm that Community, Plus is community in all of these other dimensions, all unified by spirit that is acknowledged as coming from and energized by Me, the Holy Spirit. Spirit generated in other ways can also be a part of community, but there is nothing more active and pervasive than My spirit. I want to help build community, and spirit is My chief means. Thus, when you have a class at the Farm, and you “invite Me in” prior to the meeting and when there are references to Me, subtly or directly, the community has the best chance to grow and develop.

Another way of stating the goal I urge you to achieve during these last years of your active career is: create Community, Plus in each class you have. Spend time in devising or revising or improving teaching/learning approaches that contribute to this end. Don’t teach about community as a desirable “institution” or state of being, but try to arrange for it to develop. Know that you can’t create it as such, but you can help it grow.

Community is both an expression of health and a means of enhancing health. When individual souls are healthy they have desires to be part of a community, or, better communities. Though there are limits to how active you can be in some number of communities, healthy people rarely remain only in one. You remember your high school days as a healthy time, and you have recalled a number of communities in which you functioned, contributing to and growing from each. Even as you didn’t realize it, your continuation in the community of the Church and in the youth fellowship (with that wonderful camp picture as a reminding assurance) enhanced your spirit so that you could function better in the other communities. I knew even then that you would come to Me in this truly friendly relationship we have now.

This city is more of a community, because of its long history, than some newer cities in this nation of yours. And then I’ll have to say that because of differences in cultures, in income, in perceptions of life it is not as much of a community as, say, Carbondale. So communities rise and fall, grow and recede, integrate and disintegrate. I mostly let this happen as normal cycles in life. Occasionally I respond to fervent prayers or to circumstances that I wish to change for purposes of My own. You are well aware of My Way and Ways.