7 - The Spiritual Practice of Community and the Search for the Soul

7 – The Spiritual Practice of Community and the Search for the Soul

In addition to mindful touch, rhythm and music helps reconnect our analytical left brains with our emotional right brains. We often describe human reason as a microcosm for the order of the universe, but forget that logic and music are similar disciplines. The experience of mindful touch suggests that the rediscovery of the soul is not through the order of the universe, but through the rhythm of the universe, or the syncronicity between the feelings of the individual and the compassion of God. It is not lyric but rhythm that helps us rediscover the soul. We do not need to find words and set them to music, but listen to hear the inner music that is beyond words to be revealed.

Therapists have discovered that rhythm is healing because it creates community. When traumatized people sit in a waiting room, there is complete silence, each absorbed in their own hurts and needs, not even making eye contact with others. But if just one begins to hum, or taps rhythmically on a hard surface, individuals waken to each other’s presence. They, too, begin humming or tapping, often in improvisational ways, and may be lifted from their anxiety and depression to feel renewed hope and test the edges of joy.

The concept of a monastic “community” has always been difficult to explain to modern people. And the idea of a “church” or “religious” community has been difficult to explain to secular people. The problem is that for modern people the word “community” implies location. It’s a neighborhood or town composed of diverse people held together by laws. Why would anyone want to reside with peculiarly religious people held together by counter-cultural rituals and dogmas?

A pilgrim band of believers, however, is not a “community” in that sense. It would be better, and more philosophically accurate, to speak of it as a religious “harmony”. It emerges out of mindful touch. It does not follow a set of “rules” created by the mind, but participates in a unique form of music in which each member of the pilgrim band contributes their unique tones and improvisations to create spiritual harmony. The essence of religious community is not the location but the chant … the singing … the harmony of many individual voices supporting one another, or better, dancing with each other. A “harmony” of pilgrims is about sharing a daily rhythm. And it is the rhythm, not the rules, which matter.

It is a mistake, for example, to refer to the “Rule of St. Benedict”. If you skip to the last chapter, so to speak, you discover that all the “rules” among to an affective experience of love. Fraternal charity is made perfect only when it is grounded in the love of God that overcomes the sense of inequality between the lover and the beloved. The “fruits of the Spirit” (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, generosity, and self-control) when fully emerge when the subject/object dualism of “analysis” is set aside. As one commentator says beautifully: The soul that loves ardently cannot doubt that it is loved in return. It is the certainty of a relationship, rather than the certainty of a doctrine, that ultimately heals the brokenness of the soul.

Such harmony is what unites people in any “band of brothers” or “band of sisters” who together experience traumatic times. A company of soldiers caught up in war, the crew of a fire truck fighting a conflagration, the team of paramedics fighting an epidemic are all examples of such harmony. Their support for each goes beyond words to hugs, embraces, and mindful touch. They create a kind of music together that is a microcosm of the rhythm of the universe.

In this sense, shared ritual in the face of dangerous times contributes to the rediscovery of the soul. Recently I listened to the story of stress faced by paramedics in New York City, and their habit of constantly wiping down and disinfecting every tool, instrument, piece of clothing, or other surface that might hide the virus. It was like watching a profoundly meaningful ritual, shared by each person, moving to the same rhythm of work. This recalls the origins of monastic “harmonies” that formed in the midst of epidemics, famines, wars, or natural disasters. The progression of discovery is from structured solitude and mindful touch, to shared harmony of fellow pilgrims or comrades, to reconnection with the rhythm of the universe; and the progression of healing flows toward the soul in the opposite direction. The rhythm of the universe, affectively experienced as love, harmonizes human beings with each other, renders solitude pregnant with meaning. It is like breathing: inhaling and exhaling. Harmony and healing.