Building Meaningful Community

Two acquaintances of mine are going to set aside all other commitments this year to spend six months living with a small group of people from different countries, whom they don’t yet know. With this little international community, they will practice living simply, do some studying, and then go out to share their faith with other people.

I was surprised to hear of their plans, and even more to hear that in recent years more young Catholics in Singapore have been showing interest in similar ventures.

“It was really the idea of community that drew me to this,” one of them explained to me. Funnily enough, the other friend had the opposite perspective: “What made me doubtful about this was whether I could accept living in community,” she said. “I like living on my own and having my own space.”

Despite their seemingly different viewpoints, I think they were both united in realising the centrality of community in the work they were going to undertake. They could see that community living was not just a means to the ends of simple living, gaining knowledge and evangelisation. They realised that community was also an end in itself.

I didn’t have that insight when I first decided to try religious life. I had visited the sisters and knew that they lived in small communities, but the most I had thought about it was, “Sure, I can do that. I usually get along okay in groups.”

Only when I was in it did I realise how difficult it was. Living in community is not like living in a boarding house where you share the premises and occasionally get annoyed at the habits of other, but in essence have the choice about how much or little you want to get involved in the other person’s life. It engages your whole person and involves a deep encounter with the light and joys, darkness and vulnerability of the other - and your own.

Scott Peck, M.D. has a very insightful book about community-building and peace in which he describes four stages in the development of true communities (read a clear summary of them here). He posits that every community goes through at some point a stage of chaos in which individual differences emerge and the group tries - with the best of intentions - to obliterate them, which is a painful and fruitless process. But true community can only come about when the group members can empty themselves of their preconceptions, expectations and solutions, stop trying to change each other, and begin to show their vulnerability, fragility and brokenness to each other.

I read Scott Peck’s book when I was going through a particularly difficult patch in community living. Religious communities are not spared from conflict and tension! Surely this is the cause of struggle and pain, for true community involves little “dyings” to ourselves. But, as Peck says, extraordinary healing takes place in true communities. Thankfully I can say from personal experience how wonderful it is to realise that you are loved by a supportive community and so empowered to go out and share your own unique gifts with the world.

You have probably realised by now that I am speaking not only of communities in which one lives, but also other meaningful communities in which you might be a member - a community of faith, of friends and colleagues, etc. I remember now in particular, with gratitude, a youth group I belonged to as a teenager that, in its acceptance of me as I was, helped me to grow. Perhaps the interest of the young people I spoke of at the start of this post in “experiments” in community living reflects a wider desire in all of us for meaningful community.

It is certainly a challenge for us, in this world where technology holds so much potential for relationships and yet has become a source of alienation, to create spaces for meaningful community. And yet perhaps this is the necessary key if we are to have peace in the world.

For our efforts to live peacefully and lovingly in community bear witness to the possibility of - and indeed brings about! - a world in which such fraternal love is realised between different peoples. As Pope Francis said in an apostolic letter in 2015:

“Living the present with passion means becoming ‘experts in communion’... In a polarised society, where different cultures experience difficulty in living alongside one another, where the powerless encounter oppression, where inequality abounds, we are called to offer a concrete model of community which, by acknowledging the dignity of each person and sharing our respective gifts, makes it possible to live as brothers and sisters.

So, be men and women of communion! Have the courage to be present in the midst of conflict and tension, as a credible sign of the presence of the Spirit who human hearts a passion for all to be one. Live the mysticism of encounter, which entails ‘the ability to hear, to listen to other people; the ability to seek together ways and means.”

Food for thought:

What is my experience of meaningful community; of the “mysticism” of encounter?

How can I contribute to building meaningful community where I am now?