First in a series
A FEW YEARS ago in the parish at which I celebrate Sunday Eucharist, a few parishioners formed a committee to create programs to help make the parish more of a community. I admire their interest and commitment and I am surprised at how much success they have had.
I think all communities are under a great strain today because of the pace at which we live and the multiple obligations we have. Time has become the great luxury. There is never enough time to do all that we want to do.
Several years ago, a woman told me how much she appreciated the prayer group she had joined. She said weekly meetings often went on for three hours, but she was happy to spend that time with the group because it was the one time in the week that she was with people who really cared about one another. To her, the three hours were a small investment in comparison to what she was receiving.
I think the ideal of what we would like a parish community to be is expressed in a Eucharist. The Eucharist is a community prayer. If we enter deeply into the celebration of a Eucharist, that might be the strongest and most influential experience to help us both find and form community.
Different Levels of Love
The Church is supposed to be a love community, but there are different levels of love. I believe that we can love many, even the entire human race. However, I don’t think we can have an unlimited number of friends. Building and nourishing a friendship takes a great deal of time and sharing.
In discussing friendship in the philosophy classes I teach at St. John’s University, I use an example to illustrate the nature and demands of friendship. For instance, I once knew a professor who claimed everyone was his friend. When I would walk around campus with him, I was impressed by the number of people he knew. He would call out to students: “Hi Joe. How is your mother doing?”; “Hello Mary, did your brother get that job?”; “Hello Michael. How did the exam go?”
I found the number of people the professor knew very impressive and for a time, I thought everyone was his friend.
However, when I came to know him better, I discovered that he did not have any friends. He had many acquaintances, but he would never allow people to get close. He kept everyone at a distance.
Reflecting on the nature of community, I have read some personalist philosophers whose thought I teach at St. John’s. One of my favorites is John Macmurray.
Commenting on his view of community in the Introduction to Macmurray’s “Freedom in the Modern World” (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1932, pp. 153), Harry A. Carson writes: “…these relations of friendship or community are not to be confused with the relations of an organic unity of multiple functions acting for the sake of some third, developing, larger goal. The latter relationship, in his view, constitutes a society but not a community of friends. And although all community entails a society, a society is not a community. Community is constituted by and includes economic and political relations, but it is not reducible to them. The relations of mutuality constitute the essence of friendship and community, the common experience of persons in active mutual care for one another, supporting as well as resisting and distinguishing themselves from one another.” (p. xxvii)
I think the key to Macmurray’s view of both friendship and community are the words: “active mutual care for one another.” This can take many forms. My active mutual care and support may be very different for members of my family, than it is for members of my parish. It may be very different for people who live in the same city as I do, than it is for persons in Korea. This active mutual care can be illustrated through prayer or picketing, almsgiving or voluntary service, teaching or studying.
I don’t see any limit to the ways active mutual care for one another may happen, but if it is absent from the relationship, I don’t see how we can refer to the relationship as either a friendship or a community.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, and author of “Pope Francis’ Profound Personalism and Poverty” (Resurrection Press).