The cracks in community (Part 1)

The deepest loneliness occurs among the richest friendships

One of the consistent themes of things I have read, recently and a while ago, is how necessary community is, that set of close and thick interpersonal connections between people that endures through time. This, we are told, is a cure for our disconnectedness, our transitoriness, our loneliness, for the ills of the modern individualised transitory existence.

I really think this is true. I think we are made for interpersonal relationships, and those work best when they are exactly those close, thick, persistent ones. And yet, and yet... community is not a panacea. It doesn't in and of itself solve all our ills. Nor does it come easily. And even when it comes, some people's experience of community is always going to fall short. Some people always fall through the cracks, and when they inevitably do, we need to figure out how to

Originally I wrote this piece as a reflection on various church communities I've been in, but I found that too taxing to share. I have been in a number of churches over the years, some for a long time, some for but a brief time. I've experienced real, genuine community done well, and I've experienced the pain of being in what looks like a healthy community, in which I've felt deeply isolated and friendless.

To feel the lack of friends while watching other people enjoy rich friendships is a profound kind of loneliness. I should add some caveats - I have not always been the best at maintaining or initiating friendships. I am not, by disposition, the friendliest person. At the same time, I don't think we are responsible for being friends with everyone, that is too great a burden to bear. The danger, then, is systemic failure where there is no personal failure. What happens when no-one in particular chooses friendship, so that no-one at all chooses friendship? That is the crack into which we fall.

Photo by Brandon Jacoby on Unsplash

I don't have a remedy for this. This isn't a "here's the problem, here's the solution" post. I will make some observations though.

Firstly, telling people who are feeling lonely in the midst of thick friendships around them that they aren't in, that it's their problem and they need to make friends, is just about the worst thing you can do. It's about on a level with, "So you’re depressed. Have you tried being not-depressed? Just try being happy!"

Secondly, our churches aren't set up well for community building, not as well as we like to think they are. We live in societies that are overwhelmingly designed to make living as human beings in community difficult, because it's not conducive to our depersonalised, efficiency-driven, capitalist society. Spending significant amounts of time, especially low-pressure time, in the company of others, in geographical proximity, with a sense of stability, is very difficult to manufacture.

Thirdly, because this is a systemic way that a group fails individuals, its solution ultimately needs to occur at a group level. Realising that "oh, So-and-so needs some richer connections" and directing some people to make an effort, only solves the problem (if it does) on an individual case basis. To 'solve' the falling-through-the-cracks problem, change at the level of community cultural practice is required. And that requires far more problem-solving than I have in me in this post.

I have a strong temptation at this point to start a paragraph with, “Well, what do we do then?” and launch into solutions. But I don’t know. It’s such a strong impulse for me that I can already start to conjecture a number of ideas, and yet I think problem-solving is actually the wrong thing to offer here. I’m coming to think that sometimes, just like sorrow itself, we need to sit and dwell with a problem, before we even think of fixing it. So that’s what I’m offering today - let’s sit with the cracks in community before we think about how to fix them, so that we might actually fill them instead of papering over the top.