Anam Cara

Many of the astronauts who have voyaged into space have had amazing experiences. As they moved further and further away from the earth, many of them were overcome with emotion and affection for that diminishing little blue planet called earth. Raised infinitely out of their individual communities, they gradually had a total view of the earth. Looking through the accelerating infinity of space, their hearts were touched with tenderness for home. Similarly with us, within the solitude of our own individual light we can never glimpse our collective brightness. All we see are frail candles, stuttering in the wind and the dark. Yet this should not make us insensitive to the embrace and the potential of our greater light. What kind of luminous view the dying must have as they slowly ascend to leave here?

The Shelter of Community

One of the great dreams of humanity is the founding of a perfect community where longing and belonging would come into sublime balance. From Plato’s Republic to the Basic Community in Latin America of contemporary times, the realization of the ideal has continually called the human heart. In the Christian story, it is the dream of the realization of the Kingdom of God. The perfect community would be a place of justice, equality, care, and creativity. Humans have wonderful abilities and gifts. Yet our ability to live together in an ideal way remains undeveloped. All community life seems to have its shadows and darkness. In contrast to many communities in Nature, human intensity in its brightness and darkness makes it difficult to envisage or inhabit ideal community.

The ideal of creation is community, a whole diversity of presences which belong together in some minimal harmony. It is fascinating to lift a stone in a field and find a whole community of ants in such active rhythm. Though we would not suspect it, ants also have their shadowed order whereby some colonies actually have their own slave-ants to work for them. Who would ever suspect that such negative hierarchy can be found in miniature under a stone? Nature is a wonderful community that manages to balance light and dark, destructiveness and creativity, with incredible poise. Think of the sequence of the seasons and the waves and the force-fields that hold planets in rhythm. When you examine closely any piece of a field or bog, your eyes slowly begin to discern the various communities of insect, bird, animal and plant life that coexist. What to the glance seemed to be just another bit of a field reveals itself as a finely tuned, miniature community. Each little self has its own space and shelter. It is an organic and diverse community. If humankind could only let its fear and prejudice go, it would gradually learn the inestimable riches and nourishment that diversity brings. Community can never be the answer to all our questions or all our longings, but it can encourage us, and provoke us to raise questions and voice our desires. It cares for us, whether we know it or not.

Rural communities have a special, distinctive essence. In bygone days here in Conamara, when a person got married, the whole village would gather and build a simple but sufficient house for the couple in one day. In our village, neighbours would work in groups to get the harvest in. One day, everyone would gather at our farm to bring home the hay or turf, or to cut the corn; the next day we would go to your farm. This is the old Irish notion of the “Meitheal”: the community gathered as an effective group to do the work for each other that an individual working alone would not have done in ages.

Each one of us is a member of several communities simultaneously: the community of colleagues at work, neighbours, family and relations, and friends. Such communities develop naturally around us. No individual can develop or grow in an isolated life. We need community desperately. Community offers us a creative tension which awakens us and challenges us to grow. No community we belong to fits our longing exactly. Community refines our presence. In a community no one person can have his own way. There are others to be considered and accommodated, too. In this way, we are taught compassion and care. We learn so much from community without ever realizing how totally we absorb its atmosphere.

The community also challenges us to inhabit to the full our own individuality. No community can ever be a total unity that embraces and fulfils all the longing of its individuals. A community can only serve as a limited and minimal unity. Community becomes toxic if it pretends to cover all the territories of human longing. There are destinations of longing for each individual that can only be reached via the path of solitude.