Anam Cara

The most intimate community is the community of understanding. Where you are understood, you are at home. There is nothing that unites or separates us like the style and species of our perception. Often in a close friendship, the different ways of seeing are what bring most hurt, not the things that each does. When the perceptions find a balance in their own difference, then the togetherness and challenge can be wonderfully invigorating. When there is an affinity of thought between people and an openness to exploration, a real community of understanding and spirit can begin to grow. Where equality is grounded in difference, closeness is difficult but patience with it brings great fruits. Such community is truthful and real. There is a deep need in each of us to belong to some cluster of friendship and affinity in which the games of impression and power are at a minimum, and we can allow ourselves to be seen as we really are, we can express what we really believe and can be challenged thoroughly. This is how we grow; it is where we learn to see who we are, what our needs are, and the unsuspecting effect our thinking and presence have on other lives. The true realization of individuality requires the shelter of acceptance and the clear pruning blade of criticism. Our post-modern culture has enshrined the cult of individualism as authenticity. The irony here is that the pursuit of individualism is abstract and empty. Real individuality in all its bright ambivalence is forgotten. Individualism is the enemy of real individuality. The true path of individual longing always avoids the fast highway and travels the solitary boreens which traverse the true landscapes of creativity, difficulty, and integration.

Our world desperately needs to come in from the lost islands of desiccated individualism and learn to stand again on the fecund earth where vibrant and vital interaction can happen between people. Matthew Arnold speaks of islands separated by the “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” Our world is facing so many crises ecologically, economically, and spiritually. These cannot be overcome by isolated individuals. We need to come together. There is incredible power in a community of people who are together because they care, and who are motivated by the ideals of compassion and creativity. When such a community develops and maintains its own vision, it will not fall into the trap of being the prisoners of reaction and beginning to resemble more and more the opposition. It will not deconstruct in the introverted power games, but maintain its care and critical focus. When such a prophetic community is nourished by prayer and animated by Divine Longing, the harvest of creativity and belonging which it can bring is unlimited. True community transfigures absence.

Towards a New Community

Our culture is complex and fast moving. We have a sharp eye for authoritarianism and control in their direct and obvious forms. We are, in ironic contrast, almost completely blind to the huge control and subtle authoritarianism of consumerist image culture. On the one hand, we are warriors for the freedom view and on the other, simultaneously, are absolute disciples of the God of Quantity. Our crisp cynicism and compliant greed have meant that we have unwittingly severed huge regions of the invisible tissue which holds community and civility together. Our society is addicted to and incessantly nourishes and inflates the spectacular. The invisible tissue which sustains real belonging is never spectacular; it is quiet and unostentatious. In order to survive as a planet and as a society, we need to reawaken and retrieve these lost and forgotten capacities of ours. Such virtues may heal our absence from our true nature.