As the days turn into weeks and our new normal continues, I’ve found myself wrestling with perhaps one of the most profound, emerging truths. Don’t get me wrong. I’m believing the truth has always existed. But consistent with the prudent process of maturity, maybe previously I couldn’t have seen it. Maybe previously I wouldn’t have been humble, reflective, or something-enough to recognize what’s now so obviously real.
Hence, with all due respect to our INTJ’s or ISTP’s on the Myers-Briggs scale, DISC styles S and C, and our trendy Enneagram 4’s and 5’s, we need community.
Allow me to say that once more…
We need community.
Let us resist defining what community looks like; let us not dictate to our aforementioned introverts that they be forced into uncomfortable manifestations of gregarious sociability. But the learning here is that the need for community is not personality-based. This shutdown is acutely unveiling that.
The concept of “community” comes from from the Old French comunité — meaning “community, commonness, everybody” — which comes from the Latin communitas — “community, society, fellowship” — from communis — “common, public, general, shared by all or many.”
Commonness… everybody… shared by all or many…
What has been made glaringly obvious by this shutdown?
What is shared by all or many.
In one way, I’m thankful for the realization. I mean, as a nation — as a planet, perhaps — we have spent so much, often passionate effort in finding our identity in some sort of society-severing pursuit, valiant as we have convinced ourselves the effort may be.
Remember Robert Putnam’s fascinating work from 2001, Bowling Alone… “Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work — but no longer.”
The Harvard professor addresses how we as a society have depleted so much of our social capital; we have “divorced” community. He continues with the precarious consequence that “people divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”
It’s as if we have forgotten what’s shared by all or many.
It’s as if we have forgotten — or at the very least diminished — community.
My sense is we have diminished community by only equally valuing those who share our experience, circumstance, conviction, or ideology. And the moment equal value is reserved only for such likemindedness, we have made community something less that what it is.
We all need nourishment. We all need freedom. We all need to navigate through life in a healthy sort of way. Heck, we even all need toilet paper.
But the point is that we need each other; we need community.
No doubt what has personally, humbly helped me most is attempting to discern the biggest thing we have in common. If we can do that, then hopefully we will not value anyone lesser.
Hence, holding this truth to be self-evident, every human ever on the planet — each of us — was created in the image of God.
Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic — with great respect for wherever you are — that’s the biggest common denominator I can think of: created in the image of God. And the more we look at others that way, the more we’re able to resist paring the common down to something lesser… the more we recognize what community really is.
So as we wind through these days, allow me one more question: when all this is over, when we’re at the end of COVID-19, what story will you tell?
If we say we learned we need community, such will be a very good story to tell.
Respectfully…
AR