A congregation of the United Church of Canada
Connections
“How’s that for a small world?!”
Recently my spouse and I had the director of the community choir we sing in and their spouse over for dinner. We are just one year into the choir, so we are still getting to know these new friends. As our dinner conversation flowed on we discovered a remarkable number of connections that we all shared. Some of them we knew already – such as we knew that the director attended the same music school where my spouse and I studied (and met), but the director was in their graduation year when I was a frosh so we didn’t meet back then. But we shared the same profs, and conductors, and ensemble experiences, and practice rooms, etc.
The surprises came as we added their spouse to the mix, and I learned that they grew up in Peterborough, where I taught high school music. And, as you have probably guessed, they went to the same school I taught in, and had fond memories of their music teacher, whose job I moved into when they retired. So we shared common experiences of long hours making music in that same classroom, and performing on that same school stage, and walking those same halls.
As conversation turned to work life, we learned that the director’s spouse worked for over 30 years in a place where we happened to know some people who worked there too. And yes, of course they all knew one another well, and were good friends. That couple happens to be congregants of Faith United. How’s that for a small world?!
Here were two people who’d we never met before joining the choir, yet as we got to know one another we realized how interconnected our journeys had been. In these days of ever-increasing individualism, with technology that allows us to connect world-wide in an instant but we primarily use it for individualistic purposes, with alienating events like pandemics that make us leery to get close to people, it was such a breath of fresh air to have such connective dinner conversation.
This is one of the great things churches can offer our communities in this season. Church is, by definition, connective. We celebrate our interconnectedness through Christ, through Spirit. We offer safe gathering space where people are encouraged to bring their whole selves, not just their best Instagram pics, and be really real with one another. And in that sacred space of sharing lives we realize just how interconnected we are. We need to do some work on finding ways to nurture that connection with our online congregants to enrich their relationally connective experience too.
To connect requires risking vulnerability. You have to reveal something of yourself to connect with another’s vulnerability. We can do that with confidence in church because our supreme core value is love, love, love. Centred in God’s love, we reach out in love, and we connect and support one another in love. What a gift such connections are. I hope you’ll risk vulnerable conversations with one another at church, and especially with folks you may not know well – yet. I suspect you’ll be wonderfully surprised at the richness of the connections.