A Community of Mutual Unbinding

Most of us remember the most dramatic moments in a story.

In the Gospel of John, there are some small but enormously significant details in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus that are easy to miss.

Jesus travels to Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters Mary and Martha, four days after Lazarus has died.  Perhaps the most dramatic scene in the story is when Jesus stands before the tomb and cries out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ – and Lazarus emerges from the darkness of the tomb into the light of day.

Fully awake, fully alive

The next time Lazarus appears in John’s Gospel, he is no longer standing outside a tomb wrapped in grave clothes. We find him sitting at table with Jesus and others, sharing a meal in Bethany, fully awake, fully alive.

The flow of the story is striking: Lazarus is called forth by God. He is unbound by the community. He is restored to the table-followship of community. Resurrection is described by John as awakening, as an unbinding, a releasing, a coming-back to community, to communion – because life is communion.

Many of us have inherited a picture of ourselves and each other as isolated individuals. We imagine ourselves as self-contained beings, making our own way through life. We prize independence and self-sufficiency. We are encouraged to think of ourselves first and foremost as separate selves.

Communities of mutual unbinding

Yet this is not how we actually live. We are born in relationship. We learn language in relationship. We discover who we are in relationship.

Everything we are depends upon countless relationships and conditions that make our lives possible. We are not fundamentally I-centric. We are we-centric. We arise within and through relationship. We belong to each other. At their best, perhaps we might think of faith communities, and contemplative communities like this, as communities of mutual unbinding.

Lessons from a funeral

Someone once told me that it was during her father’s funeral that she first understood what the meaning of the word ‘person’ might mean. Not because of what was said about him (though the eulogies were warm), but because of how the gathering felt, the atmosphere in which the words were spoken.

‘As I looked around,’ she said, ‘I could see what his love had meant to people. That love wasn’t gone. It was like some of him had poured into them, and was still present. Everyone there and my Dad had become more real, together.’

What she shared became very real for me last year at my father’s funeral. My strongest memory of the day is a deep sense of everyone there, and all who have passed, being intimately bound together – all present. You might have had a similar experience.

A contemplative anthropology

Western thought has for too long identified what it is to be a person with the idea of an individual life, that we are (to one degree or another) autonomous, self-contained, separate. But there is an older, truer, more beautiful wisdom. This wisdom knows that personhood is not a separate possession, an identity built on the fragile scaffolding of I and you, mine and yours, but a mystery of relationship.

At this time of conflict and division in the world, this way of seeing our ourselves and our relationship with each other and God – what you might call a contemplative anthropology – matters more than ever.

There is a kind of person who no longer lives only from the surface of things, but from the depths. One who has learned to see beyond their thoughts, beyond all that they had thought (or been told) about themselves. And who emerges, not dissolved, but widened. Opened out. Like a chalice. Open to those around them. Open and responsive to the suffering of the world.

Life in the shape of the cross: the union of wisdom and compassion

It is a life lived in the shape of the cross. The vertical of the cross is wisdom, the knowledge of God, of the oneness of being. The horizontal of the cross is love, radiating out from the centre in compassion for all.  At the centre, in the union of wisdom and compassion, the person is born. Not through self-assertion, but through kenosis, the self-emptying of which St. Paul speaks. Not a diminishment, or any sort of loss, but glory, the shining of what has always been true, the light of divine love bodying-forth in human life. In the words of the great second century teacher Irenaeus, ‘The glory of God is the human person fully alive.’ It is through this grace by which we begin to live, not just for ourselves, but for one another. To bear one another, to pray for one another, to contain all.

The heart of the one who loves in this way becomes increasingly open, spacious, encompassing – a sanctuary for all beings. The world lives in them, as they live in the world. They have become Christ’s great prayer of oneness:

Becoming ourselves in communion

A person living from this awareness does not merely pray for others with words. They have become living intercession, a place of peace, a place of love. Their life has become a living icon of the One who holds all things in a single embrace.

This is personhood. It is a paradox for contemporary culture’s preoccupation with power, autonomy and self-sufficiency. The pattern of being human revealed in Christ radiates a profound challenge for many who hold power in our world.

We do not become persons through individualism, but in communion. Not through accumulating, but through divesting. Not through seeking to possess, but through offering. Not through self-centredness, but through self-forgetfulness. We come into life through giving our life away, offering the love that is the deepest truth of who we are.

‘Take away the stone,’ ‘Unbind him,’ says Christ.

The risen life is not lived alone. It is received, nurtured and sustained, in communion.  Awakened by God in a community of mutual unbinding, we can each find our place at the table of communion.