Kathleen Norris book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has taken its place among those volumes I read again and again. She writes well. More importantly, she nearly always says something worth saying, more often than not in the form of a brief story or a single well-crafted sentence.

Like many of us, Norris dares to hope that a church might be a community even as it nurtures the individual. She admits, though, the difficulty of achieving both goals. Rather than write a dry essay on the subject, she tells a story from Benedictine life in the Philippines.

A Benedictine sister told her of what the sisters chose to do when they were in serious disagreement. Some of the sisters felt it their duty to join street protests against the oppressive government in power. Others thought such actions improper (to put it mildly). The nuns called a group meeting to pray and talk the matter through.

Those who had joined in the protests explained they were driven by a sense of religious obligation. The nuns who disagreed spoke their piece as well. Something remarkable happened then. They decided that those who wished to join the public protests should go on doing so. Others who wished to support them but not march in public would prepare food and provide medical services to all the protesters. Finally, those who disapproved would pray for everyone.

Norris writes that the sister telling her the story laughed and said, "If one of the conservative sisters was praying that we young, crazy ones would come to our senses and stay off the streets, that was O.K. We were still a community."

What a novel idea! Community requires that we hang together, listen to one another, be for one another in any way possible, pray for one another, and grant one another space in which to follow God as best we may. I wonder what would happen were a Baptist church to act in such a manner.