On community

A friend recently told me that he is searching for a sense of community, and has never really found it. Perhaps he came close during his tenure in the seminary as he trained to become a Catholic priest, but later he left the church, feeling it was too involved in politics and power, dogma and judgment. The church has misused its role in the world, he said. The church should be teaching people how to be compassionate.

Tom is looking for a way to become more compassionate, and to translate compassion into doing for others. He believes a community of like-minded people, who have the same spiritual goals, could assist him in this process. It got me thinking about community—when community fails and when it succeeds, and why.

What is community? The American Heritage Dictionary says it is “a group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.” According to that definition, towns are communities, as are states and nations. But I don’t think that is the meaning that Tom had in mind. The dictionary also defines community as “a group of people having common interests” and “sharing, participation and fellowship.”

Preceding the word in the dictionary are related words, such as commune, communication and communion.

Can “community” exist in the deeper sense of the word? The communes of the 1960’s folded because, for the most part, members were joined in their beliefs about larger matters (non-commercialism and working for love and peace) but they bickered about small things. They became political, self-serving and mistrustful, undermining the very ideals the communes had formed to uphold.

Can true community exist unless people are united around a strong common purpose, or around survival? The Jews of Warsaw during the 1940’s fought against Nazi tanks with nothing more than fists and heart. The Warsaw ghetto became a super community, totally interdependent, almost one organism. The book “Mila 18,” by Leon Uris, made the city during that time period seem like a magical place to live, to make a stand and even die, and perhaps that was because the stakes were so high. Certainly bands of humans fighting for survival pull together into community, and often display great acts of compassion and heroism. But what about us ordinary Joes and Josephines? Can we find a sense of belonging and purpose by joining together with others of like mind and purpose in our technological, speedy world?

Certainly this happens day-to-day, in quiet, small ways. Two friends visiting another sick friend is, in a sense, a community enacting a compassionate deed. Families that struggle through the strain and heartache of living together, who perform acts of kindness and sacrifice and work to respect each other’s boundaries and needs, are exhibiting community in its deepest sense. And projects such as Sullivan Renaissance and last weekend’s Litterpluck promote community by inspiring towns to pull together, organize and beautify. Perhaps this is the scale we should be looking for—groups coming together for short periods of time to accomplish a common good.

Groups of people do better when someone takes on leadership. It is a difficult and often thankless job to facilitate a group, to provide guidelines for behavior and to inspire. It takes great courage. The risks often outweigh the rewards. A leader will no doubt alienate more people than he or she will endear. But the right person can be enormously effective. The civil rights movement was galvanized by a single soul—Martin Luther King, Jr. Many others came before and after him, but he is the rock of the American non-violent protest movement, and his spirit lives on.

Communities must also embrace the notion of diversity. Too much like-mindedness can lead to arrogance, elitism and even evil, as was propagated by the Ku Klux Klan or Hitler’s Germany. We need many voices in our midst to tell us when we are becoming too complacent or when we are just wrong-headed.

It may be, as my friend Tom says, that our world is pushing rapidly toward crises on many levels. We are at great risk of hurting our planet beyond repair ecologically, and our rampant population growth is going to make the world unsustainable in terms of natural resources, energy and food. Hatred and greed motivate us in harmful directions so much of the time.

Perhaps we will find ourselves once again in urgent need of viable, strong communities, centered on a passionate purpose. It seems that humans must enact the same histories over and over until we get it right. But now the stakes are getting higher. If we enter a world crisis, and we don’t get it right this time, it could be none of us will be around to care.

- Mary Greene, Associate Editor