embodiment

The following quote comes from Roberta Bondi in an article through Christain Century, Nov. 2, 2004. I was reading this morning in preparation for today's sermon (i know, leave me along about sermon prep).

These words remind me that was is of ultimate importance for an authentic spiritual community, the communities the emerging world is trying to facilitate, is more concerned with embodiment than intellectual pursuit or elitism seeking to justify its existence. I especially appreciate the last sentence below from Bondi.

"While I had continued to read and be profoundly moved and strengthened by the early monastic abbas and ammas, I was happy where I was, teaching Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac to small classes of students. I didn’t want to leave. But the imagined voices of my early monastic teachers wouldn’t leave me alone. "You have a choice," I heard them saying. "You can continue teaching Semitic languages which you enjoy, or you can act on what you know -- that we have saved your life over the years, and we can save the lives of others as well if you chose to teach them about us."

What could it look like for a community of forgiveness and hope to embody the very existence it seeks to understand and describe? At what point does embodiment shift to become more important than philosophical constructs or argumentation? I truly believe the emerging community, in its seeking authentic expressions of life through faith, at its heart desires to be a community embodying this truth in its own fractured and fumbling way. It is not a claim of truth by what it says, but by how truth itself becomes embedded in its very ethos; reflecting fruits of this very truth, of love, peace, patience, kindness, etc.