Wherever Two or More of You Are Gathered in My Name

 

Friend Xerxes wonders why Jesus had only twelve apostles.

The Buddha had ten.

Timothy Leary, at s lecture I attended, claimed that all social changes are accomplished by small groups who all know one another.

One thinks of the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy, Burroughs, Snider. Or the little group of folksingers in Greenwich Village circa 1960. Or the Inklings. Or the group of friends who, along with me, built the Editors’ Association of Canada.

It must always work this way, because in a larger group, the ways of the world begin to take precedence. The germ of any true vision is not enough to sustain so many when the idea is clearly counter to the larger consensus. For the larger consensus will always be hostile to any such destabilizing insight.

This is why it is important that scripture is almost always misquoted as “wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I with them.”

This misquote implies that Jesus is not with you when alone in prayer, and leaves you when you stand against the group, or your society. Making Oskar Schindler, Nelson Mandela, or Jesus himself, the bad guys.

The actual line, from Matthew, is

“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

If the individual alone is thus excluded, so is the Catholic mass.

The passage refers to this phenomenon, that only a small group can stand against the world. An individual will be crushed; a larger group will be assimilated.

Which, incidentally, is why attendance at mass is not enough. The church is there to administer the sacraments, but everyone needs a prayer group.