by Mary Scifres
The Gift of Community: Seeing Potential
This is the gift of community—seeing the possibility for something better in one another, and encouraging the transformation necessary to bring it about. Bringing out the best in one another is a gift we can offer every relationship we are in. The creation story of Genesis 2 proclaims, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” [71] Humans are created to be in relationship, to live in community. Our ability to work together, grow together, and adapt with the seasons of our lives has allowed us to survive in the past and strengthens us to thrive in an ever-changing world.
As Beast’s community works together, they are able to help him see himself differently, and to imagine new possibilities. They strengthen his faith and hope, encouraging him to develop behaviors that will draw out the man trapped inside a beast’s body. As Belle perceives Beast with the eyes of her heart enlightened, she too becomes part of his community of encouragement. In turn, Beast does the same for Belle. Together, they strengthen one another on this transformative journey of new understanding and mutual affection—even as they are supported by a castle full of servants who surround them with strength and encouragement along the way.
Two Are Better than One
Early in Jesus’ ministry, he surrounds himself with twelve named disciples and dozens of other followers who travel with them. Forged into a close-knit community, the disciples travel in pairs to do the work Jesus was doing in the world. To their great surprise, they are able to teach and serve and heal in miraculous ways—in ways they wouldn’t have believed possible. Depending on the account, Jesus sends either twelve or seventy-two to serve in this way. Most scholars surmise that many others remained behind, supporting the ministry pairs with funds, food, and shelter upon their return. Jesus forewarns them not to waste their time with those who do not receive them and their service; these disciples are told to “shake the dust from their feet” and move on to communities who will.
Jesus’ advice is instructive: We shouldn’t waste our time trying to help those who don’t want to be helped. The disciples clearly take this advice to heart, for when they return from their travels, they are energized and enthusiastic about the deeds of power and acts of love and healing they are able to offer while working together. As Ecclesiastes says: “Two are better than one, for they have good return for their labor.”[72] When we seek to achieve transformation by ourselves, the task seems daunting. But when we seek the same transformation in community, the task seems almost easy. When we work together, the return on our labor far exceeds the sum of our individual efforts.
Researchers have discovered that Canadian geese flying together in v-formation are able to travel 70% farther than they are able to fly on their own. The geese honk their encouragement to those in front, as they break the wind and provide lift for the geese flying behind. When the lead goose tires, it drops back to the rear of the formation where the resistance is lightest, while another goose moves up into lead position. And if a goose is injured or becomes sick during the migration, two other geese will stay behind to protect it from predators until the goose either recovers or dies. This is the power of living and working in community.
By working in community, we develop a synergy that unlocks new worlds and the creative awareness of how to access those worlds. The divine image within each of us connects together to shine more brightly when we help one another broaden our perspective, raise our awareness, awaken new perceptions, and strengthen the courage of our love. Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus means when he says, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”[73] For the light that shines within us when two or three gather together far exceeds the light we can shine on our own. You and I may be the light of the world, but our individual light is tiny in comparison to the light we create when we shine as the light of the world together. Just as an enlightened community shines a mighty light to brighten the world, a supportive community illuminates the transformative road of love.
When Communities Receive Our Gifts, Everyone Grows
Communities receive and reject opportunities for growth and transformation, just as individuals do. While the religious authorities try to turn the people against Jesus, his life and teachings continue to bless the communities around him. Lepers and prostitutes receive his healing and guidance. Mary Magdalene is not only healed by Jesus of multiple demons, she joins his close group of followers, becoming one of the only female disciples named in scripture. Tax collectors, like Matthew and Zacchaeus, transform their former lives of usury and self-absorption into lives of compassion and generosity. A motley group of fishermen become healers, teachers, miracle workers, and spiritual leaders in their own right. The more they embrace the transformative love and teaching of Jesus, the easier their continued growth in faith and love becomes. As they grow together in their understanding of and relationship with Jesus, their ability to help others grow and transform expands.
This is the truth of transformation. Every act of personal and communal transformation lays the foundation for further growth. Personal transformation strengthens the potential for communal transformation, and communal transformation supports the journey toward personal transformation. When we help others, we are strengthened ourselves. When communities support our individual journeys toward transformation, we move forward more quickly and grow more steadily. We expand to new and unimagined heights through the power of community.
Creating Life-Giving Transformation
Growth leads to more growth, just as contraction leads to more contraction. Change occurs in either case, but when we embrace life-giving transformation, we create the conditions for further life-giving transformation—both individually and communally. We see this in Beast’s castle community. When we first meet these strange creatures, we encounter a community that has adapted to their unusual circumstances. Lumiere continues to romance the woman he loves, even if she has become a feather duster. Cogsworth still runs the household with dignity and dependable efficiency, so worthy of his clockwork form. These servants remain unfailingly loyal to their master, even if he has been outwardly transformed into a beast. Their adaptability creates its own sort of community transformation, as they forge a new castle community.
Even as they sleep in cupboards or hang out on tabletops, these servants embrace the fullness of their humanity, continuing to serve their master as they had before the enchantress’ spell. Rather than despairing and fostering anger or resentment, they dream of a better future when they will be “human again.” As they longingly dream of a better future, they hope to help transform their prince’s beastly heart into one capable of giving and receiving love. Just as the servants dream of becoming human again, they dream of helping the prince become fully human for perhaps the first time in his life, as he grows into a compassionate man with a loving heart. This community yearns for Beast’s transformation as deeply as he does, and its support is an example to all who seek to support one another on our journeys toward transformation.
The servants’ love and compassion for Beast has remained steadfast over the years. Indeed, it may have even expanded—for while they are still gentle with him, they are also firm in ways that were probably missing during his youth. When Belle arrives at the castle, they openly and honestly express their hope that she may be “the one” to help Beast break the curse. They are equally open and honest about their expectations that Beast not give up on himself or them. The servants’ hope grows, and their optimism for the future expands, as they help Beast court young Belle—encouraging the friendship growing between them.
As the castle community embraces hope, they strengthen Beast’s self-confidence. As they radiate hope and enthusiasm for the future, Beast’s wariness fades. And as the servants offer Belle hospitality and encouragement, her comfort and joy also grows. The castle servants even strengthen their resolve to help Beast control his temper. Perhaps strengthened by Belle’s courageous personality, Mrs. Potts and Lumiere lecture Beast in the fin
er points of anger management, reminding him that he must learn these lessons if he is ever to earn this beautiful woman’s love. Slowly, Beast receives their lessons and opens himself to their gift of hope. A loving friendship forms between this strong-willed woman and this impatient beast, in part because they accept the support and guidance of the castle community.
To Grow or Not to Grow
Growth begins with a choice. At some point, Belle and Beast must decide if and how their relationship will progress. Will they allow themselves to continue to grow with each new awakening, or will they pull back? Will they allow the changes they have experienced to become the foundation for future growth and transformation, or will they resist the change? These are questions we all must face when confronted with opportunities for growth and transformation. Will we lean forward into the unknown and embrace forward growth, or will we turn back toward the familiar and shrink to our former selves? The choice is ours.
The same questions can be asked of communities. Will they support our journeys toward growth and transformation, or will they pull us back into old, familiar patterns, even if they purport to hate those patterns? Visit any Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and you’ll hear as many stories of families supporting addiction as those supporting recovery.
To grow, or not to grow; that is the question. Communities are just as likely to resist growth and change as they are to encourage it—perhaps in the foolish hope that stability can guarantee predictability. Whether the community is a family, a neighborhood, a town, or a group united around a common purpose, communities that resist growth and change are communities that choose death and self-destruction over life and rebirth. Ironically, it is the communities that try to avoid change who suffer the most when change is thrust upon them. Change is unavoidable, but the choices we make can help determine whether this change is life-giving or death-dealing.
When Communities Hold Us Back
Human communities are funny things. Unlike Canadian geese, most people don’t like flying in formation. When a goose falls out of formation, it immediately feels the increased wind resistance and the loss of lift from the bird ahead and will quickly move back into formation. This is rarely true of people. Some people pride themselves on their pioneer spirit and on going it alone. Other people have no interest whatsoever in making another’s life easier. Sometimes it’s even challenging to know which communities and relationships are supportive and life-giving, and which ones are not. Communities that appear kind and loving may in fact be cruel and judgmental. Communities that appear antagonistic and challenging may in fact be supportive of growth and transformation. Not all communities are interested in expanding perspectives, deepening perceptions, growing love, and embracing life-giving transformation.
And, of course, communities (including communities of faith) are not static. Communities that once thrived and served the world with passionate purpose and loving generosity can experience declining membership and turn inward. Becoming obsessed with not losing additional members, faith communities can turn self-protective and self-absorbed; spending more time reliving the “glory days” of the past than offering love and service to anyone outside of their walls. At the same time, families that had once been filled with dysfunction and sorrow can break free of their destructive patterns to emerge beautiful and loving—embracing transformational growth as they learn to appreciate, support, and love one another.
Like Belle’s village and Beast’s castle, it is not always clear in the gospels which communities are being transformed like butterflies and which ones are being hardened like concrete. Nazareth is Jesus’ hometown, the place where he grew up in love and safety. But this all changes when this quiet community becomes offended by his teachings in the local synagogue. Jesus’ neighbors find his prophetic preaching so offensive they chase him out of town with the intention of throwing him off a cliff.[74] Belle’s relationship with her hometown is equally complicated. At first the villagers praise her beauty and begrudgingly admire her aloof independence, even as they fail to understand her. But when they feel threatened by Beast’s appearance in the magic mirror, they lock her away as they seek to destroy the new life she has embraced with her beastly friend.
As their hometown children grow into adults of transformative love and revealing light, both Nazareth and Belle’s village resist growth and transformation. Rather than receiving Jesus’ and Belle’s love and light as gifts, and embracing the promise of growth and change these gifts bring, both hometowns harden their hearts and close themselves off from the power of transformation. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”[75] In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Belle says it this way: “It’s just that I’m not sure I fit in here.”[76] In Nazareth, Jesus cannot perform the miracles for which he is so famous. In Belle’s little village, she is both admired and ridiculed for her love of books and her daydreaming ways. Even when she tries to teach a young girl to read in the 2017 film, the schoolmaster chides her. He can’t imagine why would girls need to read, let alone invent washing machines or think for themselves!
In a world filled with rising crime, civil unrest, and an outbreak of bubonic plague, Maurice chooses this small village to raise his young daughter because it seems safe. While provincial and small-minded might be a strange fit for his creative temperament, Maurice chooses the safety of this town over one that would be more open to creativity. Perhaps Joseph and Mary made a similar decision in settling in their hometown of Nazareth after returning from Egypt. Nazareth was a small town, far away from the centers of Roman power and Jewish politics—a town where they could raise their mysterious child in relative anonymity.
Parents around the world raise their children in similar communities, hoping to provide their children this same sort of safety and security. Over time, however, if our hometowns resist our efforts to grow into the fullest versions of ourselves, they can transform from warm, swaddling clothes in a cradle of love to cold bonds of confinement. The tight wrap of that warm cradle is no longer comforting. As our dreams urge us to look through the bars and to strain against the familiar limits, we begin to push back against efforts to keep us small—until we finally crawl up and over the barriers into a broader world filled with expansive possibilities.
Growing Beyond the Borders
Even in Jesus’ early years, he crawls up and over the barriers of convention—wandering away from his family caravan during their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and remaining behind to listen and learn in the temple. Jesus even pushes against the barriers of temple life at the tender age of twelve, as he questions the priests and proclaims his own knowledge and wisdom. The heroes we admire often push these limits early in life, as they yearn for a larger worldview than the one they were born into.
As we yearn to know more, as we strive to grow, and as we seek to answer God’s call in our lives, our expanded worldview leads to more yearning, striving and seeking. As we stretch the boundaries that seek to hem us in, small towns and hometowns can entangle and trip us up. Even people and places that nurtured us in the past may limit us moving forward—urging us to limit our dreams and shrink back into old patterns of behavior. Perhaps we understand this more clearly as teenagers than at any other time in our lives. Even Jesus rebels in his 12th year. Without notifying his parents, Jesus remains behind in Jerusalem to question and debate with the temple elders. Later in his ministry, Jesus advises his followers to become as children if they hope to enter God’s kingdom. Jesus seems to understand that there is more to childhood than childlike innocence. Growing up requires us to move beyond existing barriers. Teenagers realize instinctively that they must push against the limits of old patterns, and create new paradigms if they are to define themselves in adulthood. To fully grow, we all eventually push against and move beyond familiar barriers—learning to grow in new ways and make our own discoveries. This adventurous quality in children and teenagers is easily lost in adu
lthood, but is essential if we are to successfully embark on journeys of transformative growth.
As Belle yearns for more than her childhood village can offer, she sings her truth into the void: “There must be more than this provincial life.”[77] New people, new places, new experiences, new adventures call her away from her small town. Inquiring of her father, “Do you think I’m odd?”[78] Belle confesses she doesn’t really fit in. Somehow, her hometown isn’t feeling like home. She yearns for something more. Yet, when Maurice finally gets his invention to work, Belle doesn’t join him as he sets off for the fair. Instead, she remains behind in her little house inside the borders of her little village. As much as we want to break free, it’s hard to actually leave. Even the adventurous Belle doesn’t ask to accompany her father on his journey into the wider world.
Jesus’ childhood experience couldn’t have been that different from Belle’s. Surely Jesus outgrew Nazareth long before he left town around the age of thirty to begin his ministry.[79] What was it like for this amazing man of God, this messiah, miracle worker, healer, wise guru and teacher, to be confined in Nazareth for so long before embarking on his ministry? What was it like for his community to know they raised a man beyond their ability to understand?