"Community"
What a strange word. It's a word that elicits images of Church on Sunday morning, Friday night at the bar, Thanksgiving Dinner, a romantic walk on the beach, water cooler chats at the office, and a sitcom about college by the same name. Each image is completely different from the others but each shares a common thread, in community you are not alone. In community loneliness flees.
Perhaps that's why people crave community so much. Maybe it's the pain that loneliness brings that drives us to community. Loneliness and being by yourself are very different things, the latter is a choice, the former an emotion.
Community needs to be more than an escape from loneliness. Escaping loneliness is good, but often when the time for community ends the pain of being alone can feel so much worse. "It is better to have loved and lost," does not always apply. Community is fueled when there is a goal. Even if the goal is to invest in others, community needs a mission.
There, as always, is a catch. The mission can very quickly overtake the people, and the goal of the community can destroy the "common" that support it. The only thing worse than being lonely by yourself, is being lonely while you are surrounded by others. I think that's what's started happening to us.
We are so ready to not be alone, that we pick up a banner and start waving in hopes that people come join us. Our loneliness is sated only briefly and so we keep chanting louder, trying to rally others to our cry. Like an addict and a drug we dance with this idea of community, this lie that we are loved by the people shouting with us. Eventually the high fades, but our addiction to the cause only swells, because after all - it's all we know.
Sooner than later the cause eclipses the community and our passion the people. Our tea parties, sidewalk prophets, extremists, legalists, conspiracy theorists, vigilantes, and protesters rise out of the ashes, the people forgotten, and the charge their new drug.
When did we become so addicted the sound of our own voices? When did our hunger for relationships dovetail into a hunger for "rightness"?
We have to redeem community. It's not going to come from an organized weekly meeting, or even a common goal. Community will come back if we start paying attention to each other and ignore our tenants and decrees. If we put aside our piety and politics, then we can be whole again. Then we can stop being so terribly alone.