Community

Groups, family, neighborhoods, work colleagues, town, village, city. We live in community nearly all the time. Yes, there are solitary personalities that shun others, prefer the simplicity of living alone, doing for themselves, and avoiding others as much as possible. To truly live the solitary life, living off the grid in the woods or forests is the likely locale for such an existence.

We have read tales of such people. We wonder about their ability to truly do for themselves – food, clothing, housing, medical care – and all the rest of what we take for granted. The solitary existence is not likely in our modern day. We depend on so many others to live a quiet life with the least complexity. That is not very possible; just imagine this person trying to make an appointment to see a doctor!

Complexity of the social order does require reliance on others. But the sense of community is something else entirely.

Ask a member of a religious order what community means. Priests, nuns and other ‘cloistered’ people live in community. They will tell you what this means. It has deep meaning for them.

A city dweller like a Chicagoan, will have a different definition of community than a religious community member. Community in that sense has more to do with identity of belonging to a larger social order; I am a Chicagoan means loyalty or fealty to the larger urban area of the city of Chicago. That is a very general definition of community. No, what I’m getting at is the close, personal identity with place and its denizens. How does a citizen of a small village feel about community identity? Much more personal and meaningful I’ll bet.

Community within a local church is very much identifiable. Belonging and helping one another is almost automatic, a relational expectation, in such a setting. Expand that out to a small condo building and its residents, or a neighborhood. People in those settings see themselves living with one another in proximity. They share a local reality that is similar with one household to another. They experience similar things in daily routines, daily problems, and frequent good times. And bad.

The bad times are often when communities recognize one another. They see their lives as interdependent. They rely on each other for their common good. They celebrate the good outcomes together as well.

Family is community. Extensions of family are community. So are neighborhoods whether it is a block of homes or several, or a hallway in an apartment building or condo building. When people allow such relationships to exist, they grow and flourish into community.

We will know it when we see it. I just wish we would actively learn to see community in our lives and work toward larger affiliations of those communities. This is how a region or large city thrives.

We all need that thriving for our own family and self to thrive. It starts small and grows.

That’s a good thing. Work for it!

September 28, 2022