We are a community of two. Our minds may strain in opposite directions as we hash through a family problem and how to handle it, but we strive to haul our opinions into one solid approach, a tip of the hat to unity. Our thoughts and our feelings may bridle at each other's thoughtless words or our forgetfulness. But we talk things through, sometimes with cautious courtesy, fragile as spun glass. Together we believe in the Holy Name of Jesus, and his Presence sifting the honesty or lack of it in our souls. We believe in the Trinity, the Holy Community that dwells within us and calls us to live in unity and harmony as They do. We are poor imitations of that Community; we fight; we are selfish. But - we try.
We are each an anchor for each other in the many shifting, lifting, and settling storms of life, tucked into an anchorage of a house as old and weathered as we are. A dreaming house, alive with events and memories. Every room is redolent with community memories sacred as sacraments, - lining the walls and ceilings, sunk into the furniture, angel hordes of ghostly footprints covering the carpets.
We remember and see the evidence. A child's head dented a ceiling - here; a child's scrawl graffitied this cellar wall; a child living with us shattered this piece of siding when he learned his mother had been attacked by her husband. Parents and children, sisters and brothers, cousins, neighbors, and grand-children have breathed on the walls and sunk into the furniture, left stinky banana peels under beds, and scorched the ceiling paint over toasters set on fire; surrounded the table and stained tablecloths for birthdays and wakes. They all troop through the dreaming house and keep us company, a community of love that spans cities and across the divide between heaven and earth. Each person who has crossed our doorway has been and is a holy anchorage for our souls. No more perfect than we are. But - loved.
The Holy Trinity, that Holy Community and Family of Love, sits and reigns and whispers love words in our souls from the moment of our conception - and from then on, our hearts and souls hunger for community. We literally cannot live without it. We search for those people and families and communities to be holy anchorages for our souls - and no one or nothing can measure up to the Holy Trinity. Everyone and everything is a pale shadow of the existence which is THE Existence, and we weep in silence, our hearts on fire with longing for our first and only true Home with the Trinity.
Yet, in each person, each family, each community, we find a sacrament - those whose faces, voices, hands, love words, hugs of comfort, speak of Christ and Trinity and a family of love, to give us hearts' ease - if only a little, yet enough to hold our souls steady in the storms of life. Every tree is heart-stopping and life-giving in its full-leafed green regalia, or the diamonds glinting in the winter snows dressing its branches; in every crest of a wave and call of a sea gull, there is an anchorage of hope in the beauty of the world. The laugh of every grandchild is a pure sunrise in my soul. The tears of every grieving relative or friend is rain to soften my heart.
My soul has found anchorage in a youth retreat house and teens witnessing about their struggles with drug addiction, the room full of teens rapt and wrapped in supportive prayer. A Mass at a Carmelite convent has lifted my heart as ethereal, singing voices waft out from behind cloister walls and I know no wall divides our souls. My soul has found anchorage in a home for ex-convicts as we eat around a small table, then do dishes together, our fingers touching as we pass the plates, and their blood runs beneath the skin as mine does, and their hearts bleed from loneliness as mine does.
Day after day, the community of Trinity inside me leads me to new experiences of sacred community in my life, people to be anchorages for me when I just have to share my joy or burst, or when my grief sends me slinking to a dark, airless cell of isolation, and I need people to drag me out into the sunlight and fresh, saving air. My Church is such an anchorage for me.
Perhaps we may have different political or theological perspectives, but our minds are united in searching out the Will of our God. Perhaps we come from different social strata and have different financial burdens, but our hearts are united in praise of our same God. Maybe from time to time our membership gets agitated by rivalry or jealousy, or we disagree about parish policy, or we unconsciously hurt each other's feelings. But we listen together to the Gospel; our hands link up during the Our Father; in the aisles, before and after Mass, we can share with each other about our arthritic aches and pains and surgeries and about our children's troubles or family births, weddings, or deaths; always, at a deep, family level we accept, we understand, we pray for and with each other.
We have inspired each other to have stronger marriages, and helped each other through the hurt of divorce. We have welcomed the babies of married couples and single mothers. Our membership is black, brown, yellow, white; straight, gay, lesbian; old and young; all prayerful, all beloved.
Our Church community is an anchorage for the neighborhood. We all contribute bags and food to our food pantry; we haul in gently used clothing to our clothing ministry; many of us make a pilgrimage through the neighborhood on Good Friday, reading the Passion out loud as neighbors some out on their porches, watch, and sometimes pray with us, even ask the deacon and priest for a blessing for their homes. Our Bingo players from the neighborhood know there is a basket and sheets of paper in the Bingo hall where they can write down their prayer intentions and they'll be prayed for at Sunday Mass.
The Church building itself is redolent and alive with the ghosts of parishioners from all the many years past; they sit in the pews, just out of our eyesight; their voices are a whispery counterpoint in the choir; their laughter and tears follow us as we walk the aisles and enter the small saints chapel. They are our living link from the past to the present to our heavenly future, our anchorages. We know and believe that they are praying us to Heaven.
My husband and I sit across from each other at the family room table. He brushes my spilled salt into his hand; I wash his butter stains from his place. Together we are community. Each one of us is a living stone, set in the Community of the Body of Christ. Each one of us is a living city, filled with the memories and imprints of thousands of lives, from the past and present. We each are an anchor-hold for each other and for so many others. We will never, ever travel to Heaven alone. So many other souls are attached to ours in love; we belong to so many communities that deepen us and enrich us, unite with us in one mind and heart. This is what we're meant to be - never isolated or drifting rudderless or alone. This is how we humans can and MUST BE Trinity.