Koinonia expresses togetherness, a sharing in the efforts and struggles of living in a difficult and hostile world, which we may not be able to do on our own.
But can each of us really stand alone?
Living out a sense of koinonia gives us the assurance that we can all live out our life fully – no one will feel deprived of the basic necessities of life, food that we can all enjoy, shelter to comfort us, a solid moral education to soothe our troubled souls … we can all give the best back to the Spirit, the source of all goodness.
But we are not living out koinonia, and this may be the crucial point why we cannot understand our faith properly. To live out koinonia is to have a sense of kinship with all creation and to be deeply intimate with our Father God. Loving brings concern, and the desire to help – the desire to care for the other.
In times of aimless ruminations, we may ask, “Why is it quite difficult for me to have compassion on a streetchild who has turned into a thief?” or “Why is it difficult for me to care for the environment in my life, as I would do for my family or work”?
We are all living in our own little worlds, separated from what lives in the outside. We have set up tall borders and thick curtains to protect this private space for ourselves, but a space so personally private that we hardly have any time to take a peek and see the plight of other people.
It is an insulated space, a space where we obtain things from the outside for our consumption, and deposit the waste by simply returning it back; we have dedicated our precious time to keeping our spaces clean and orderly, mindless of the chaos we may be creating outside of it. We are responsible only for ourselves. Our inclinations to think that we can love only what we cherish within our spaces, becomes the mentality that kills koinonia.
