Called to Community. Thomas Merton
Called to Community
The Life Jesus Wants for His People
Compiled and edited by Charles E. Moore
Foreword by Stanley Hauerwas
Plough Publishing house
Published by Plough Publishing House
Walden, New York
Robertsbridge, England
Elsmore, Australia
www.plough.com
Plough produces books, a quarterly magazine, and Plough.com to encourage people and help them put their faith into action. We believe Jesus can transform the world and that his teachings and example apply to all aspects of life. At the same time, we seek common ground with all people regardless of their creed.
Plough is the publishing house of the Bruderhof, an international Christian community. The Bruderhof is a fellowship of families and singles practicing radical discipleship in the spirit of the first church in Jerusalem (Acts 2 and 4). Members devote their entire lives to serving God, one another, and their neighbors, renouncing private property and sharing everything. To learn more about the Bruderhof’s faith, history, and daily life, see Bruderhof.com. (Views expressed by Plough authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Bruderhof.)
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PRINT ISBN: 978-0-87486-743-5
EPUB ISBN: 978-0-87486-782-4
MOBI ISBN: 978-0-87486-783-1
PDF ISBN: 978-0-87486-784-8
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Life in community is no less than a necessity for us – it is an inescapable “must” that determines everything we do and think. Yet it is not our good intentions or efforts that have been decisive in our choosing this way of life. Rather, we have been overwhelmed by a certainty – a certainty that has its origin and power in the Source of everything that exists.
Eberhard Arnold, Why We Live in Community
Foreword
Stanley Hauerwas
Community is dangerous. This is easy to forget at a time when we often hear calls for more community. Of course, it’s quite understandable that many people today feel the need for it. After all, we live in a social order that has confused freedom with the isolation of the self. We may think we know one another, but our “knowing” only intensifies our isolation from one another. This is because, although we bump up against one another, we share no common story and no corresponding judgments about what is true, good, and beautiful. As a result, we become strangers to ourselves and to those we call friends. In such a social order, people too often confuse community with being a crowd. And crowds are intrinsically dangerous.
We live in a time when people think they should have no story other than the story they chose for themselves when they had no story. The story they chose is, they think, the story of freedom. The only problem with this belief is that none of us actually did choose this particular story. As a result, lives lived according to this false story are subject to self-deception and self-hate. Lives so constituted are often quite destructive for any attempt to sustain community life across time.
I began observing that the loneliness created by such an understanding of freedom and autonomy produces a hunger that can be dangerous – and hunger is the right word, indicating as it does the physical character of the desire and need to touch another human being. That is why Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, resists being called a communitarian. MacIntyre resists calls for community because he fears that in this place and time such calls are bound to lead to nationalistic movements. Those who hunger for community should never forget Nuremberg. I share MacIntyre’s worry that the label “communitarian” does little to help us understand what kind of community we ought to desire.
All the more, how fortunate we are to have this book! This is not a book that celebrates community as an end in itself. It is written by veterans of community living who know full well the pathologies of community life. I suspect these reflections will make many readers question their assumption that they are called to community. The stark realism of these essays makes clear that when we are dealing with people we must be ready to confront one another with truths about ourselves that we seldom want to acknowledge.
But interestingly enough, the very fact that such confrontation is required is why we cannot live without community. Therefore this book is a treasure of wisdom gained by those who have discovered the necessity of community for our being human.
I can only hope that it will be widely read, because I am certain that contained in this book is the future of being Christian. ◆
INTRODUCTION
Charles E. Moore
how would you go about destroying community, isolating people from one another and from a life shared with others? Over thirty years ago Howard Snyder asked this question and offered the following strategies: fragment family life, move people away from the neighborhoods where they grew up, set people farther apart by giving them bigger houses and yards, and separate the places people work from where they live.1 In other words, “partition off people’s lives into as many worlds as possible.” To facilitate the process, get everyone their own car. Replace meaningful communication with television. And finally, cut down on family size and fill people’s homes with things instead. The result? A post-familial, disconnected culture where self is king, relationships are thin, and individuals fend for themselves.
On the whole, this destruction of community has only been compounded by the advance of digital technology. As Sherry Turkle observes in her book Alone Together, the web’s promise of “bottomless abundance” has left millions inwardly and relationally famished. We live, Turkle suggests, in a “culture of simulation,” where real, tactile, face-to-face relationships of loyalty and intimacy are all but a memory. Ours is truly an age of isolation, with relationships that may be friction free but also very shallow and fleeting.2
In a culture of connectivity, where we have countless people to text and tweet, millions are under the illusion that a networked life is a rich, meaningful life. But community is more than connectivity. Although it is easier than ever to communicate and stay in touch with one another, we are fast losing the ability to commune with one another. We know how to text, but we don’t know how to converse. We exchange vast amounts of information, but find it increasingly difficult to confide in one another. We no longer know how, or think we don’t have the time, to give each other our full attention. Though we may not be alone in our virtual worlds, we remain lonely. Our lives lack cohesion: we live in pieces, in fragments, lacking any overall pattern or any steady, identifiable community in which to belong.3
Social commentator Michael Frost suggests that our culture has become like an airport departure lounge, “full of people who don’t belong where they currently find themselves and whose interactions with others are fleeting, perfunctory, and trivial.”4 Nobody belongs there, nobody is truly present, and nobody wants to be there. We’re tourists who graze from one experience to another, nibbling here and sampling there, but with very little commitment to bind us to one another. We exist in an untethered “nowhereness,” under the illusion that we are free. And yet, as Robert Wuthnow observes, “community is sputtering to an undignified halt, leaving many people stranded and alone.”5
The disappearance of community has led to a plethora of human and social problems, which have been exposed and explored in countless books. The question this collection of readings seeks to answer is what we can do about it. Many social commentators have addressed the problem and continue to grapple with it. New structures of belonging have been proposed, many of which hold promise. But as good and viable as these may be, the main thrust behind this book is that the answer lies in the hands of God’s people. We need more than new structures. We need a spirit-filled life that is capable of combatting the corrosive ideologies of our age. Only when the church lives out its original calling, as a contrast community and foretaste of God’s coming reign, is there