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Sarah Chambers: On Community and Communion
We would like to say that there is an enormous difference between community and communion, just as there is between spirituality and spiritualism, just as there is between Eros and agape.
Community describes a group of people coming together for the sharing of resources for the common good, while communion has to do with soul-to-soul communication, or at least the attempt to establish such.
Community and tribalism have a great deal in common, although the latter has come to mean a rather war-like stance of "us against them" in many parts of the world. This was not true of some earlier tribes and is not true of all tribes today.
We would hope that all of you might strive for community during the coming decade. This does not mean that you must necessarily live in one another's laps, and it certainly does not grant a license to commit physical, mental, emotional or sexual abuse, nor a license to ignore boundaries insofar as personal space and propriety are concerned.
Community and spirituality go hand-in-hand. In fact, we seriously doubt that you can have one without the other to some degree. We have told you that this is not a teaching about enlightenment; it is a teaching about how to understand the lessons of the physical plane, and how to work with the overleaves in order to progress through the ages of the soul or essence.
Time and observation has taught us that when there is true community, there is also a high degree of spiritual seeking within that community. We do not speak of the type of spirituality achieved by the mystics, although many of them live in community and, as a matter of fact, have formed some of the most enduring communities. In the successful community, students would have a ready-made common bond in the teaching. With this local contingent, all are mature and older souls, so that bond would also exist.
Community can only exist if it is understood in its entirety - the reasons for its existence, the methods for perpetuation, the glue that holds it together.
Communion on the other hand is necessary for many who have soft overleaves and who desire very intimate contact with other. Warriors, Scholars and Kings find communion very difficult, if not impossible to achieve. These have very strong personal boundaries and feel violated by too much intimacy. We must also say that very few of them desire this deep an intimacy, and, in fact, find the notion of this fairly repugnant. Servers and Priests frequently seek this spiritual closeness with other fragments, but tend to withhold negative information about themselves in the less mature cycles.
In the mature and older cycles, Servers and Priests often find themselves in relationships that encourage the closeness of communion. Artisans and sages, less frequently than Servers and Priests, but certainly more frequently than Warriors, Scholars and Kings, seek communion, but have difficulty achieving it because of the innate inability to focus for long on one item. They desire it, but only through practice with meditation and concentration, can they hope to achieve it.
Warriors, Scholars and Kings must eventually come to grips with their lack of intimacy, then they, too, will seek communion, but this often does not happen until very late in the cycle, and then only between essence connections as a matter of course. Ironically, the Warriors, Scholars and Kings are better at forming community than are the other roles, primarily because they know the importance of "safety in numbers," and community does mean "a number of people joined by common bonds." People in these roles are very willing to assume leadership in community.
Priests and Servers like community, but would rather not assume the responsibility for one; Sages and Artisans tend to mistrust community because they see clearly all of the "terrible things" that could happen if we all tried to live together. Usually, if there is essence bonding in a community, terrible things just will not happen. There will be too much work to do, and too much spirituality in the group to allow those terrible things to even come up.
"Culling the herd," is a characteristic of a good community leader. This leader must be able to see who is functioning and who is not; Warriors are very good at this. Non-functioning people do not belong in communities, unless the entire community is built around a specific need, such as care of the aged or care of children with special orthopedic problems.
Beware of those who just want to "hang around" with you. They will not contribute to the community.
Source: Copyright: Sarah J. Chambers for Soul Weavers and The Gateway Associates Volume 2, 1996 (posted on a Yahoo group). Other articles by Sarah Chambers posted at http://www.flightofthehawk.com/articles.html
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[Editor note: the terms Warrior, Scholar, King, Server, Priest, Sage and Artisan are personality arch-types. See our Personality Game section for more details]
Michael Speaks: The Legacy of
Sarah Chambers (Volume 1 and 2). Center
for Michael Teachings, Inc., Lulu Press (March 2013). http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/michaelteachings
This page is http://www.itstime.com/sarah_community.htm
Page updated: May 11, 2023
