The Final Community

One thing for which I have always wished, but never had and never will is the sense of belonging that comes from being born into a small community, going to school with the same people from grade one to the moment of strutting across the diploma stage, and then living the rest of life among those to whom there is that unique sense of belonging.  I came to this community some thirteen years and while I have been accepted and claimed, I still wear the tag of an outsider who was married to my wife, Lynn, some one who was born here, grew up here, and belongs here.  It is the nature of small town communities where belonging is such a birthright that those not born here are always different.     

In these recent days my grief and sense of loss keeps me going to the local cemetery where my wife of 53 years is buried.  I stand there midst a community John O'Donohue calls "this silent field" in his poem entitled, "On Passing a Graveyard."  It is a more inclusive community made up of the old timers and newly born, those who are born into the busy community where lives are lived and those like myself who are always "the outsider," the affluent and the poor.  There is nothing among the raised stones which divides.  In this silent field, everyone is the same and comes as one who belongs.   

But, it is not the last community.  At times it seems like the final gathering place, but our faith enables us to see "that land that is fairer than day"  and the gathering of those who all wear the whites robes that have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.  (Revelation 7:14)   The community of the raised stones is not the final community for it is eternally transcended by the gathering of the great cloud of heavenly witnesses spoken of in Hebrews 12:1.  There in the heavenly place is the final community where God's grace enables us to dwell not as an outsider, but as one who belongs, not for a fleeting moment, but for eternity.  This heavenly community is the one which has the last word for those who seek the Home promised by the Christ.  It is where we belong.