"Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone. Because they cannot stand the loneliness, they are driven to seek the company of other people. There are Christians, too, who cannot endure being alone, who have had some bad experiences with themselves, who hope they will gain some help in association with others. They are generally disappointed. Then they blame the fellowship for what is really their own fault. The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is not really seeking community at all, but only a distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man. The disintegration of communication and all genuine experience, and finally resignation and spiritual death are the results of such attempts to find a cure...
"Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (pp. 76-77)
1 comment:
Ooooh, I like that . . . and I am getting that book the next time I order from Amazon.
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