Fellowship
From Ian Lawton:
It ultimately comes down to what you expect from fellowship. Do you expect to be spoon fed answers, or do you see fellowship as a place to share wisdom? Does fellowship shrink your life by making you tribal, or does fellowship expand your life by taking you out beyond your own perspective?
Alice Walker wrote in The Color Purple:
Tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for [God] to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
If a religious fellowship is about finding the God of a particular tradition from outside of yourself, an inclusive spiritual fellowship is about sharing the innate human desire to connect to something larger than yourself, by any name or description.
We all want to believe in, connect to, and serve something larger than ourselves. If you make money or fame your larger goal, you will surely be eaten up by ego. If you make your desire to show love and compassion to a growing group of people your larger goal, you will live a full and peaceful life. This sense of something larger than yourself goes by many names, including God and Higher Power and Nature. Fellowship offers an awesome opportunity to get in tune with this sense of something larger than your limited perspective by any or no name.
Fellowship reminds you that you are part of a village which in turn is intimately related to a universal life force. The African Mandinka tribe in Gambia has a beautiful naming ceremony for young babies. On the eighth day of life, a newborn is brought to the village centre. The mother holds the child before the father who whispers the name in the baby’s ear three times. No one else knows the name at this time. The child is the first to hear their name, the first to know who they are. Then the father takes the child out beyond the village gates, holds the child high above his head and tells the child, “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself.”