It’s Sunday, and the place I should be is among my family at Calvary Baptist Church, but I’m here, at 601 Herring, watching Grey’s Anatomy and plotting the remainder of the day. I’m not a terrible person for wanting to read about Dorothy Day and sleeping in, for catching up on crap TV shows and waiting on the Red Sox game at 3, for working on my presentation and taking a sabbatical from things for a morning.
I believe that we are believers together, that in the gathering of the local body, Christ is present. I believe that to willingly ignore that is to deprive oneself of the presence of Christ. But in every relationship, there is a dynamic of sameness and distance, of together and apart that must be maintained. Jesus sets this pattern with his disciples, by his unity with them and his departure, by being in the boat and heading out to the wilderness, by unity with the Father yet distinction. And so, this morning, I exercise distinction that I might be part of the unity.
It was a morning for sleeping until 9, for not going for a run, for admitting that Grey’s Anatomy is completely ridiculous but that it’s kind of an intriguing drama, and that even after watching Knocked Up, I think Katherine Heigl is pretty hot. It was a morning for becoming more situated in a new house, for mulling over where boxes need to go, and for what to do with the remainders.
It was a morning for being distinct after weeks upon weeks of being unified. We need these times, not as absolutes, but as the necessary complements for coming back together. We live as one body, and breathe as one body and we cannot ignore this. But in this living and breathing as one, we live and breathe as a reconstituted one, a one that lives together as parts.
