[March 2002 journal entry]
The ‘non-religious’ approach to ‘community’ I am experiencing is descriptive of my sorting and prioritizing relationships as the following experiences unfolded in a simultaneous and interweaved manner during the 1970s/80s – (1) being with my first wife over the course of her disease and death (d. 1987), (2) struggling with tensions in my association – as a historian and as a theologian – within the theologically and socially/politically conservative Christian denomination into which I was born, (3) stepping into a steadily widening range of opportunities within the medical education/practice sphere. Until several years into my thirteen-year tenure as a history and theology professor (1979-1992), I continued to look for vitality in a ‘religious’ understanding of ‘community’. Analogous to the decision to withdraw artificial/intensive life-support technologies, I eventually concluded that the effort was futile, given my irreversible and no longer negotiable decisions (1) to engage in unrestricted historical inquiry, (2) to be as closely aligned as possible with victims of the broad and deep realities of innocent suffering without regard to my existential and theological costs, (3) to be as fully present as possible within the medical education/practice sphere with health care professionals who are committed to the same alignment without my having prior knowledge of their religious or philosophical convictions. I realized that my experience of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere had been dying for some time. Analogous to a boat crushed in a storm, my experience of ‘community’ within the ‘religious’ sphere had proved to lack integrity as I moved further and further into face to face (rather than ‘religiously’ filtered) engagement with the world’s ‘marketplaces’ and ‘wildernesses’. In this ‘non-religious’ approach to ‘community’, the first-order and primary experience of ‘community’ is the resolve to initiate ‘community’ in every encounter, with particular attention to encounters with victims of the broad and deep realities of innocent suffering. All other experiences of ‘community’ are valued as secondary means to sustain the first-order and primary experience of ‘community’. I do not know of ‘religious’ congregations that have in their origin and as their reason for existing this unconditional alignment with victims of the broad and deep realities of innocent suffering. One reason I persist in testing my thought in these journal entries – far beyond the expectation of anyone with whom I have been or am associated – is the desire to be consistent in my conversations that occur across the primary and secondary experiences of ‘community’.