in community

Here are some quotes from Addiction and Grace (Gerald May, 1988) that reminds me of what I feel we achieved in Ruah, and with effort, what we may continue to achieve:

"The power of grace is nowhere as brilliant nor as mystical as in communities of faith. Its power includes not just love that comes from people and through people, but love that pours forth among people, as if through the very spaces between one person and the next. Just to be in such an atmosphere is to be bathed in healing power.

...
But like individuals, groups can become consecrated. With grace, they can become dedicated to their shared heart's desire for God, committed to the holy spaciousness through which grace shines most brilliantly. They can admit their collective temptation to fill the space with some object of attachment, to make an idol of a cause or of a charismatic leader or of a frozen image of God. When the members of a group consecrate themselves to God above these and all other idolatries, even above the idolatry of their own togetherness, they become a community of faith. Consecration does not make the community perfect, any more than our own consecrations make us perfect as individuals. But it claims the community's desire for perfection and, more important, its willingness to be transformed." p. 173