Back To Black

We went to our local independent cinema to watch this amazing film. I say amazing because as well as been well performed it was totally non-judgemental. Those of us who were Amy Winehouse fans had read a lot in the papers about her addictions and her relationship with both her father and with Blake, her husband. But this film took all that media judegmental attitude out. It told a story where we were left to not even make judgements on anyone in the story but to just watch, to feel and to get some sort of understanding. Not an understanding of why but just of what was, I think.

I’m looking at Show Not Tell with my writing group and we were saying that often films are more tell because all the showing comes in what we are seeing. But what we saw here were people living their lives with all their issues, hopes, expectations and humanness.

What struck me about this was how all her family and friends knew she had a problem with alcohol and yet often fudged around the subject. I wondered how often we do that with people we love. We know there is an issue but we don’t want to say much because we don’t want to hurt them, are fearful of sounding like we are judging, and also don’t want to lose our relationship with them.

This made me think of this quote

Sometimes discernment causes you to see things that are not nice and as Christians, we can dismiss it as we think “that’s not how a Christian should think!”

https://www.cwmprayer.com/

I often feel that we are not “taught” or even expected to learn how to say things in love. Yes we hear the “I speak my mind” but often that is followed by “and I don’t care what they think”. As children, whether Christian or not, we are often told that “if you can’t say nothing nice don’t say nothing at all” [quote from Thumper in Disney’s 1942 version of Bambi]

But how do we truly live so we are supporting each other? How do we live as today’s meditation from Henri Nouwen says?

The discipline of community makes us persons; that is, people who are sounding through to each other (the Latin personare means “sounding through”) a truth, a beauty, and a love that is greater, fuller, and richer than we ourselves can grasp. In true community we are windows constantly offering each other new views on the mystery of God’s presence in our lives. Thus the discipline of community is a true discipline of prayer. It makes us alert to the presence of the Spirit who cries out “Abba,” Father, among us and thus prays from the center of our common life. Community thus is obedience practiced together. The question is not simply “Where does God lead me as an individual person who tried to do his will?” More basic and more significant is the question “Where does God lead us as a people?”

Meditation Landing

Note Nouwen says it is a “discipline of community“. It isn’t something that just happens. We need to see it as something we have to make time for, make space for, really fix ourselves into. I think too often we don’t commit to community – whether this is our families or our friendship groups – but sort of expect it to happen. Yet we don’t deal with our issues, our needs, our reasons why we get hurt when someone says a certain phrase which triggers something but we don’t know what.

I think because we are full of our own issues/traumas and are holding on to them we often use those groups we are in to meet our needs. So we don’t call someone out because we want to still be with them, or we call them out in a mean way because we want a fight. We don’t know how to speak out in love because we don’t believe we are loved.

I think, to live in this “discipline of community” and to know how to speak into each other’s lives fully we need to know we are loved unconditionally just as we are, need to know those other people are loved unconditionally just as they are, need to know how to say thing without us having an agenda, and then whether the other person does as we’ve suggested or doesn’t change at all that we carry on loving them and accepting them unconditionally. We need to not be “supporting” them to get our own needs met.

But I believe is can only come fully when we know that someone bigger than ourselves, which for me is the Creator of the Universe, sees me as amazing with all my faults and issues. As Jesus said “love your neighbour as you love yourself” but you do have to love yourself first.

[I’ve covered the Love yourself so you can love others in many posts so please feel free put one of those phrases into the search bar and reread old posts]