Connections

Some years ago James Ashbrook wrote a book that explored community.[1] The book was presented in a way that would visually challenge even the most focused reader. (A first impression suggests a typesetter doused in LSD.) But it was also, I believe, a different way of looking at what it means to be together in the world. Ashbrook wrote in the midst of radically changing values - what he saw as:

• a move to being and becoming, instead of merely doing,
• immediacy, instead of the past or the future,
• other-directedness, versus inner-directedness.
• a prizing of some kinds of tolerance and diversity and
• a "drift toward an equalization of the roles of men and women." (16)

Whether his impressions about values were accurate or not, he correctly anticipated a new social reality: "Nothing stays put. Everything swings." And in the midst of that he asks, "How are connections re-established?"

For Ashbrook being connected depends on self-disclosure, which he more or less links to a holy "in-spiriting," Pentecost-like drive from within that lets others know where we are, what matters, what we intend and want. "When in-spiriting awakens humanizing and establishes communications, we do not stop with simply getting through. Invariably, we continue being together. We are joined to communing community. That is, we find ourselves in a pattern of relationships that support, strengthen, challenge, chasten, restore." (52) Ashbrook and those like him helped set the stage for what are now called Together in Ministry groups.

[1] Ashbrook, James B. Be/Come Community. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1971.