August 21, 2022 - Pastor Message
04/19/2024THE YEAR OF HEALING
COMMUNAL HEALTH
“Let us hold unswervingly to our profession of faith which gives us hope, for he who made the promise deserves our trust. We must consider how to rouse each other to love and good deeds. We should not absent ourselves from the assembly, as some do, but encourage one another; and this all the more because you see that the day draws near” (Hebrews 10:23-25).
The word “community” has ancient roots that predate even Latin, coming from an Indo-European word meaning “to go together”. It is the same root word for “common”, meaning, “shared by all”, and those two expressions accurately spell out the central meaning of community. It is the group that is shared by all and that goes together through this world, whether we’re talking about a civil community or a faith community.
Being so, communities take on a life of their own that is more than the sum total of the people within them. People come together to form a community, and their individual decisions both positively and negatively impact it. But the community also impacts the individuals within it. We saw a powerful example of this dynamic during the COVID pandemic. As the disease spread throughout the world, communities reacted by imposing restrictions on individuals for the safety and wellbeing of all. We may agree or disagree with these restrictions, but they powerfully impacted the freedom of individuals. At the same time, individuals made decisions that impacted the community, such as the brave and tireless work of our healthcare providers, who each put themselves at risk to help the whole community.
This interaction - individuals impacting the community, and the community impacting individuals - is the basic principle behind the need for communal health and healing. The health of a community on all levels - physical, psychological, and spiritual - greatly impacts the health of the individuals within it. When communities are healthy, they raise the health of the individuals within them. So, for example, when a community has clean air and water, a great emphasis on respect for one another, and a strong sense of the divine, the people in that community will experience better physical, psychological, and spiritual health than a community with pollution, social division, and irreligiosity. Such an unhealthy community needs communal healing to lift all members to better health.
But what can help bring about this communal healing? That’s where we see the importance of the impact of individuals on the community, and the key step in that process is community engagement - getting involved in our community, making connections with others, and working together to improve the health of the community. As the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews above urges the early Christians, communal healing requires that we “not absent ourselves from the assembly, as some do”, but that we “rouse each other to love and good deeds.” We need to recognize our interconnectedness with others, reach out beyond ourselves, and place our God-given gifts at the service of the community, whatever those gifts may be. We have many opportunities to do exactly that right here at St. Boniface, our faith community, and our larger local community. May we each think and pray of how we can work together for communal healing today in the post-COVID world, and then may God give each of us the grace to step up and do it for our own health and the health of all.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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