One of the great dreams of humanity is the founding of a perfect community where longing and belonging would come into sublime balance. From Plato’s Republic to the Basic Community in Latin America of contemporary times, the realization of the ideal has continually called the human heart. In the Christian story, it is the dream of the realization of the Kingdom of God. The perfect community would be a place of justice, equality, care, and creativity. Humans have wonderful abilities and gifts. Yet our ability to live together in an ideal way remains undeveloped. All community life seems to have its shadows and darkness. In contrast to many communities in Nature, human intensity in its brightness and darkness makes it difficult to envisage or inhabit ideal community.
The ideal of creation is community, a whole diversity of presences which belong together in some minimal harmony. It is fascinating to lift a stone in a field and find a whole community of ants in such active rhythm. Though we would not suspect it, ants also have their shadowed order whereby some colonies actually have their own slave-ants to work for them. Who would ever suspect that such negative hierarchy can be found in miniature under a stone? Nature is a wonderful community that manages to balance light and dark, destructiveness and creativity, with incredible poise. Think of the sequence of the seasons and the waves and the force-fields that hold planets in rhythm. When you examine closely any piece of a field or bog, your eyes slowly begin to discern the various communities of insect, bird, animal and plant life that coexist. What to the glance seemed to be just another bit of a field reveals itself as a finely tuned, miniature community. Each little self has its own space and shelter. It is an organic and diverse community. If humankind could only let its fear and prejudice go, it would gradually learn the inestimable riches and nourishment that diversity brings. Community can never be the answer to all our questions or all our longings, but it can encourage us, and provoke us to raise questions and voice our desires. It cares for us, whether we know it or not.
Rural communities have a special, distinctive essence. In bygone days here in Conamara, when a person got married, the whole village would gather and build a simple but sufficient house for the couple in one day. In our village, neighbours would work in groups to get the harvest in. One day, everyone would gather at our farm to bring home the hay or turf, or to cut the corn; the next day we would go to your farm. This is the old Irish notion of the “Meitheal”: the community gathered as an effective group to do the work for each other that an individual working alone would not have done in ages.
Each one of us is a member of several communities simultaneously: the community of colleagues at work, neighbours, family and relations, and friends. Such communities develop naturally around us. No individual can develop or grow in an isolated life. We need community desperately. Community offers us a creative tension which awakens us and challenges us to grow. No community we belong to fits our longing exactly. Community refines our presence. In a community no one person can have his own way. There are others to be considered and accommodated, too. In this way, we are taught compassion and care. We learn so much from community without ever realizing how totally we absorb its atmosphere.
The community also challenges us to inhabit to the full our own individuality. No community can ever be a total unity that embraces and fulfils all the longing of its individuals. A community can only serve as a limited and minimal unity. Community becomes toxic if it pretends to cover all the territories of human longing. There are destinations of longing for each individual that can only be reached via the path of solitude.
The most intimate community is the community of understanding. Where you are understood, you are at home. There is nothing that unites or separates us like the style and species of our perception. Often in a close friendship, the different ways of seeing are what bring most hurt, not the things that each does. When the perceptions find a balance in their own difference, then the togetherness and challenge can be wonderfully invigorating. When there is an affinity of thought between people and an openness to exploration, a real community of understanding and spirit can begin to grow. Where equality is grounded in difference, closeness is difficult but patience with it brings great fruits. Such community is truthful and real. There is a deep need in each of us to belong to some cluster of friendship and affinity in which the games of impression and power are at a minimum, and we can allow ourselves to be seen as we really are, we can express what we really believe and can be challenged thoroughly. This is how we grow; it is where we learn to see who we are, what our needs are, and the unsuspecting effect our thinking and presence have on other lives. The true realization of individuality requires the shelter of acceptance and the clear pruning blade of criticism. Our post-modern culture has enshrined the cult of individualism as authenticity. The irony here is that the pursuit of individualism is abstract and empty. Real individuality in all its bright ambivalence is forgotten. Individualism is the enemy of real individuality. The true path of individual longing always avoids the fast highway and travels the solitary boreens which traverse the true landscapes of creativity, difficulty, and integration.
Our world desperately needs to come in from the lost islands of desiccated individualism and learn to stand again on the fecund earth where vibrant and vital interaction can happen between people. Matthew Arnold speaks of islands separated by the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” Our world is facing so many crises ecologically, economically, and spiritually. These cannot be overcome by isolated individuals. We need to come together. There is incredible power in a community of people who are together because they care, and who are motivated by the ideals of compassion and creativity. When such a community develops and maintains its own vision, it will not fall into the trap of being the prisoners of reaction and beginning to resemble more and more the opposition. It will not deconstruct in the introverted power games, but maintain its care and critical focus. When such a prophetic community is nourished by prayer and animated by Divine Longing, the harvest of creativity and belonging which it can bring is unlimited. True community transfigures absence.