An Appeal for Community Life

William Stafford, in his poem titled, “A Ritual to Read Each Other”, offers a suggestion to help keep community life flowing at a meaningful depth.  His suggestion is quite simple: Learn to talk to one another to a depth.  In the 4^th stanza of the poem he makes his appeal.

“And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider-

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.”

The appeal made is an earnest request and call to be heard and to know others at a soulful level.

The opening lines of the poem asks us to know ourselves and others, “If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are",then, it seems we may fail to arrive as a community. In essence we will fail to be a community.

Perhaps we can apply this poem to church communities.   We can see it as an appeal for each individual to “Speak the truth in love”.  The poem appeals to us to speak to the deeper aspects of our souls;   to speak from and to the, “shadowy, remote important regions”, those places we tend to hide in the shadows.  It is an appeal for authentic dialogue at the level of the soul.

The appeal to soul talk is proposed in contrast to fooling each other with shallow surface babble. Sadly, often church communities are “good” at producing a lot of religious surface babble. “Though we could fool each other we should consider.”  Consider what? We should consider the fact that if we fool one another we “may miss our star”;  “a fragile sequence may break”,  “our mutual life may get lost in the dark”, and we may fall “asleep”.

We should consider- because “the darkness around us is deep”.