It wasn’t until college that I realized that I had never heard the word “community” -- I mean, really heard it, heard people leaning on it than as more than just a simple representation of social proximity. But last year, the concept really opened up on my consciousness when I spent a semester living in a makeshift intentional community within the restrictions of Christian college dorm life, studying with other students and professors about Christian solidarity and the meaning of intentional togetherness. That experience taught me reams about the goodness of communal intentionality, as well as the perils of community visions that are too narrow and rigid to accompany the organic unfolding of many unique individuals being together. However, the more I learned about the richness of the notion of community, the more disillusioned I became by the popular employment of the term itself.
It is not simply an overused word: it has entered the realm of cliché, where terms become buzzwords, bearing the weight of a thousand illusive allusions. Thus, it has become fashionable in many sectors of our society to promote a certain naïve brand of communitarianism: witness Starbucks' hijacking of the term to peddle their wares globally. Unfortunately, this sloganeering lip service is dangerous, because it provides a bright, comforting facsimile of virtuous unity with none of the responsibility or reward of its actual pursuit.
I hate that I still thrill at the sound of such empty communitarian rhetoric, but it's beginning to take its toll on me. The “community jones” that has been growing in me has stretched me to convey myself in terms of neighborhood, togetherness, unity, interdependence, etc. Of course, these terms also stand on the brink of semantic binging, losing their meanings through overuse. As a word, “community” suffers from an identity crisis: it can’t decide whether it wants to be descriptive or prescriptive. As long as we merely “communify” the status quo rhetorically, we fool ourselves into feeling the buzz of a more purposeful co-existence that lacks the life-breathing implications which only hard work with one another can bring. Does such rhetoric get in the way of true community by convincing us it already exists when it doesn’t? Or rather, is such language an important first step toward truly changing the way we think and act in the world?
I think the problem is that community presents itself as being real instead of being an ideal grounded in reality. “Community” is not simply a label to be stamped onto any togetherness in the hopes of feeling better about how little we truly put into one another. For instance, a picture of agrarian farming is idyllic and breaks us out of our suburban reverie, but it rings false in my ears. Being from an Iowan farming town, I know bullshit when I smell it, particularly when it reeks of pastoral platitudes. This is my problem with pop ecology (the “going green” lip service which most international corporations have embraced in pursuit of a more “real” image). Now, I’m all for a robust local commonwealth and I consider myself a communitarian. But the more I've thought about how I imagine an ideal neighborhood openly sharing its joys as well as its struggles, I've realized how much true community I've missed in the mundane moments of my existing relationships. I began to realize that those experiences could be inspirational pointers to a life more in tune with those around me and with God.
Walking under the interstate overpass a while back, I saw a group of kids and adults painting a giant mural on the wall, one of those feel-good community scenes. It struck me that I'd always imagined those murals of cooperative, ethnically diverse, sunshiny neighborhoods as being painted by a single artist, yet here was proof that the form of community was bearing fruit, even if the painted image itself promoted a misleading vision of community.
In spite of my reservations about the content of the project (although it's certainly more inspiring than the surrounding abyss of neon signs, ad banners, and half-hearted graffiti), I was impressed by the fact that this was truly a community endeavor. Far from being platitudinous, the form of the artwork sincerely attempted to match its message. I think this scenario captures perfectly the essence of the problem prompted by oversimplified notions of community.
So what do I propose? I think it's important to begin where we are. We need to acknowledge the traces of goodness and rightness, wherever they may be found, in the people and relationships already surrounding us. As far as the linguistic issue, the beautiful flip side of a suspect communitarian lexicon is that the over-sized load of meaning that “community” implies serves as a wonderful reminder of our goal together, calling us into a more loving, intentional embrace of others around us in surprisingly ordinary ways. It is not an apathetic baptizing of the ordinary under communitarian terms, but it is instead a call to further commitment, and to re-commitment.
I think those intent on creating healthy communities together need to commit explicitly to a shared purpose, so that we have a common referent instead of the hazy illusion of unity. Unity needs a direction, a purpose, a vital telos. First and foremost, we need to see each other as worth pursuing relationally for each other's sakes, without ulterior motives. However, that kind of intentionality can quickly stagnate into a flat-souled tolerance of each other. So we shouldn't simply turn our gaze from those actually present with us toward some utopian version of each other, but we need a vision of who we could be as uniquely created individuals, together with each other in community -- a vision more in line with how God views us, how God created us to be, individually and together. Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public;” that sentiment embodies much more closely the kind of gracious, loving togetherness that the term “community” has wearied from trying to carry. So, by all means, use the word. But let it remind us that the word implies work.
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