FOR THE LONGEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR

Genuine community is born only after we are first overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others...and if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world... Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight...The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

Tell me how you search and I'll tell you what you're searching for.
Ludwig Wittgenstein