Our liturgical theme this month has been Advent Dreams. Advent is the season of dreams, a time when the tradition encourages us to stay in touch with our deeper longing.

Our deepest longing can only be fulfilled in relationships of spiritual intimacy with Jesus and with one another. This is what a covenant community is all about.

A covenant community is an intentional community. People commit to share life together, the highs and the lows. When Jesus calls us to him, he is calling us to one another. To be faithful to him is to be faithful to one another.

Faith is never a personal thing. Faith pulls us together. It gives us the courage to support one another. For some, the even greater challenge is that faith gives us the courage to be supported. Faith that fails to generate genuine covenant community is false faith, an illusion at best.

Our parish vision focuses on the challenge of faith as a means of empowering friendship of a certain quality.

St David’s Church is a covenant community where no one stands alone. Together, we are learning to love one another as we learn to be loved by Jesus. Any time. Any place.

Although we experience the cost of failing to know how to love, we overlook the challenge involved in learning how to love. Love does not come naturally.

The deeper longing of our hearts is always for quality in our relationships. I come across people all the time who share with me the loneliness of their lives.

A Christmas party conversation:

How are you? It’s good to see you!
Well, I’m here I guess.
What do you mean? What’s wrong?
I don’t know. I’m just in a funk.
Tell me.
No. I don’t want to cry.

An email insight:

There is a show I watch once in a while, and the lead character was talking to someone (the actual plot is irrelevant), but she said, “Pick me, choose me, like me, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME!” She said it so sincerely, it took me probably 3 months to delete it off my Tivo, because she said aloud what I feel. I want someone to pick me, choose me, love me, and then I feel guilty and selfish for wanting that.

The insight of a youth:

All my friends keep moving away. I don’t have one friend I have known longer than three years. It’s sad. People just don’t stay put. It’s hard to have to keep making new friends all the time.

Call these Advent musings. They express a truth that lives inside each of us and all of us.

We know deep, deep down that the quality of our lives can only be measured by the quality of our relationships. The first and best lesson of every life really needs to be how to be a friend.

God’s dream comes down to friendship. It’s harder than it looks.