Why We Need Community (and why I have to write about it) - Part 1

I’ve meant to write down some of my thoughts about Community – what it is, and why I think we need it – for a long time. But something has always held me back. And I think that that something is fear: fear that I don’t know what I’m talking about. After all, I only spent nine months living in an ecumenical community in Amsterdam. Many of the people I lived with had spent years there and even been born there. What do I really know about it? Any way you slice it, I’m a rank beginner.

But. I have in fact begun. When I signed on to be a volunteer in a half-way house three years ago, I was like most twenty-first century adults: I had no idea what community was, and more importantly, no idea that I desperately needed it. And I imagine that most of the people reading this now will be in the same place I was then. So maybe it’s worth sharing what little I know.

Even though I’ve been back in the US for two years, I find myself still thinking about community living constantly. One reason is simply that I miss it. But another is that now that I know what it is, I see the lack of it everywhere; it’s a yawning void in the hearts of my generation, an unmet need that we don’t even know we have.

Throughout history most humans have lived in an intimate proximity to each other: in large, multi-generational families under one roof; in tiny villages where everyone knows everyone; in tribal groups setting up tents together in the wilderness. Not so anymore. Now we consider people living in communities to be eccentric at best, freaks at worst.

Which is too bad, because I think that people were really intended to live together. And the fact that we no longer do is what makes us feel lonely and disconnected in the modern world.

So I am going to write something about community living here not because I’m an expert on the subject, but because I have experienced it and most people have not. And because it’s something that so many people are missing. Even if, like me a few years back, they don’t even realize it.

What is ‘community’?
‘Community’ is actually a word we throw around pretty casually. When someone says “my community,” they might mean anything from the neighborhood where they live to the Greater Jacksonville Metropolitan Area, a region of around 100 square miles with over a million people living in it. Honestly, I feel that this might be stretching the definition of ‘community’ just a little. For starters, I think in a community you should at least know everyone’s name. Sorry, Greater Jacksonville Area. I don’t know most of your million souls personally, so you don’t get to count as part of my community.

I’m going to dial it back a little. When I say ‘community’ throughout the rest of this post, I’m going to be referring to something very specific: a group of people living in the same space and sharing time and resources among themselves. My community has to be mutually interdependent on each other so that they stay involved in each others lives. And despite great strides in telecommunications technology, we haven’t eradicated the need for physical proximity to really keep in touch with people. So my community needs to live, if not in the same house, at least on the same street.

Mind you, they don’t have to live in a compound in the middle of a desert. For some reason the communities that get all the press anymore are the weird ones where the members wear funny clothes, grow their own food and share wives and children. Are those communities? Sure, and Libya’s a vacation destination. But you don’t see many people buying tickets.

If you want a picture of what an ordinary community looks like, it’s best to start by thinking of a large family. In fact families are communities, the one form of community that most of us are still familiar with. ‘Community’ is just a broader definition of family that doesn’t require all the members to be related. But just like your family it’s chaotic, loud, somewhat dysfunctional but somehow completely indispensable.

Once, community living made a lot of sense: it allowed large groups of people to pool their resources to acquire food, raise children, and defend their families against enemies. Technology has freed most of us from having to worry about these kinds of survival needs on a day-to-day basis. It has opened up a lot of choices to us that ordinary people didn’t have throughout most of history. And that’s a good thing. But unfortunately, when given these choices people seem to consistently choose to go it alone and not to participate in any community. And I think we have lost something very valuable in the process.

We’ve lost a sense of belonging, of having our own place in the world. We’ve missed out on being surrounded by people who care about what is going on in our lives. We’ve passed up the chance to learn from our elders and share in the growth of young people by rubbing shoulders with them daily.

Instead we’ve compartmentalized and sanitized our lives, refusing any relationship that is not on our terms. We have peers – friends who are into the same kind of things we are into – and we have significant others – expected to all by themselves fill our need for human connection – and everyone else we pretty much keep at arm’s length, except for obligatory holidays spent with family.

In a sense it’s hard to blame people – relationships are messy. Even the ones we choose inevitably seem to go south and cause us a lot of heartache. Everyone has had that roommate or that friend of a friend they just didn’t click with. Who would willingly choose the endless drama that would doubtless result from living in a community, the equivalent of having dozens of roommates?
These fears aren’t entirely unjustified. Get a group of people together, force them into close, daily contact and sooner or later those little annoyances and frustrations will bubble up into arguments over the most insignificant of things.

And yet, with the right community, the right perspective and a little patience most of these problems can be overcome. And then through it all you might discover as I did that there’s something incredibly rewarding about sharing your life with others.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2 coming soon. If you're interested in reading specifics about my time in Amsterdam, check out the blog I kept while I was there called Chinese Apples. My friend Brenda also writes about community living on her blog So This Fits How?