Life Together
I don't know why it is that I have such a problem reading. It has been suggested that I come from a generation who is story oriented or has even been labeled "post-literate". This seems to ring true for me: I know how to read; I can read when I have to; I don't prefer to pick up a book but I love story; I have great desire to know what is in certain books but not to read them. All this to say that I have not yet breached halfway through Bonhoeffer's book called Life Together.

I will track a little through my thoughts and experiences though in a "life together" house where I am currently living, called OIKOS, and through the book as far as I have gotten.

Theme 20: Living together/ community/ fellowship of the followers of Christ is a privilege. More often than not, we get sick of one another and can take "only so much" thus resorting to once a week encounters for a couple hours maximum. Where in the heck did we come up with this idea? If I remember Acts 2 correctly they were meeting together daily and sharing everything in common. Paul preached until one dude fell out a window half asleep. So what if you're tired or distracted or pained or drugged or artistic or dull...come and BE WITH THE PEOPLE.
On a personal note, I have recently undergone the "thumb of God" crushing the little pride that rears its ugly head every chance it gets slapping around the people in my OIKOS. I learned, 'again', about asking for forgivness. But I also learned how bouyish my OIKOS can be when forgiving- encouraging me to get back up again and keep going. J even put it in terms of Mission Impossible, "don't hit the self-destruct button". I could just see the little cassette smoking along with all the valuable information and in my case, a dream and potential to serve God in a way that I never would if I decided to "smoke".

Theme 27: "God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself.....So he becomes, first an accuser of his bretheren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself." What a destructive, devicive tool of Satan to kill the OIKOS. Community is not created or ordained by one person- it is formed of natural causes by the group and the variety of individuals are what gives it shape.

Theme 29: Just a little reminder that being thankful for the small things renders God more likely to bestow the great things.

Theme 34: The danger of human love: seeks itself, doesn't regard truth, only desires for itself and thus has potential for "hatred, contempt and calumny". The spiritual love referred to several pages later is founded upon the Word of truth. Such a different concept than we dwell upon normally: serves rather than desires. "... Life together under the Word will remain sound and healthy only where it does not form itself into a movement, and order, a society, a collegium piaetatis, but rather where it understands itself as being a part of the one, holy, catholic, Christian Church, where it shares actively and passively in the sufferings and struggles and promise of the whole Church" (37).

I see some contemporary translation necessary here: I think that since recently the word "movement" is used favorably to term the Church, I will keep it as positive, but specify that what we should be warned of here is the institutionalization, organization, and pure management of an local Church or group of believers. There is inherently organization in an organism which lives and breathes but the function of the organism is more important than its organization. I don't sit around all day and tell my heart to beat or even ponder why it keeps pumping. I live each day and each moment as they come at me and all my parts react as they should.

Holy= set apart and pure to a certain purpose, Catholic= universal, Christian Church= local gathering of Jesus followers and (do I dare say it?) searchers. It was put to me recently that maybe our churches should be full of people searching and "recovering", not 'pretty' people. I'm tired of keeping my sin a secret, tired of hiding the 'bad girl' in me because of some institutional congregation, meeting in some huge building, projecting some unspoken rule against confessing sin to one another because we are all now repented and clean. I'm looking for a place I can keep coming clean, just as Jesus blood continues to cover me yesterday, today and forever.