is "community" a mask for ugly oppression?

One of my favorite students said to me the other day, you know X class hasn’t really turned out to be a community of learning. People are all just doing their thing as usual.

I was at Home Group last Sunday night and we were wrestling with the controversy from Hebrews 6:6 and one of the insights that my wife keeps feeding back into our talk about Hebrews is – to think about the ways in which any writer addressing Jews must be thinking of the problem of the individual and the community. Steve suggested that in many ways Jesus, his teaching, and the teachings that radiated out from Him were probably fairly radically individualistic for that time and place. And I think that both of them were pointing out that people (like us) who live in a radically individualistic society really struggle to figure out the hermeneutic wriggle we must do in order to apply such passages to our life.

If you live in a world where faith is so collective that you struggle to have a sense of personal agency (and piety) then Hebrews (and other scriptures) make perfect sense – but when you live in a world so jagged with individualism, how do you read the salve of “community” into passages written to the collectivist world?

We came up with some decent answers, but I did get stuck on the question a little bit. I’ve noticed that Community has become a kind of ideological battleground. People from the right and left in almost every setting are vying for it – and I’m not just talking about governmental politics now.

At the little evangelical school where I teach, the fundamentalists (who currently control Student Life) have a term called the "community agreement." Rhetoric which COULD BE a helpful way to get students to own their own role in taking responsibility for their own actions as well as the actions of others. A way to figure out that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Ironically, instead it’s actually a cloaking device by which an increasingly Byzantine set of rules and regulations is enacted and perpetrated by an incredibly centralized oversight mechanism.

The term is also used well (read: in ways that resonate with my experience). Romanowski uses it as one of the key challenging points for contemporary media mythology. I participated in a group (at work again) called a learning cluster – part of a larger national (and beyond?) movement toward learning – in – community. The same favorite student told me that he had experienced a sense of community amongst filmmakers on campus....

I feel embedded in community these days. There are several axes around which these social networks form. But I also feel keenly the precariousness of all of them. Set adrift from the assumption that anyone will live for their whole life in just one place. That language patterns, family systems, land or work set few constraints on our mobility. Aware that some of the patterns of interaction in these groups are just being initiated and realized. Aware that other patterns have reached a pattern of rigidity which threatens some of the members.

I wonder if there is sometimes a temptation to confuse community with the feeling of social support? Or the experience of celebration? A sense of shared aesthetics?

What * is * essential to community?

Here’s my start:

Continuity

(Balancing) Coherence

(and) Diversity

Relationship

Tradition

Movement

Shared Experience

(somewhat) shared vision (which is a kind of coherence)

(partially) shared past (a kind of continuity + tradition)

Elements of community that I'm suspicious of: (and please feel free to deconsruct my suspicion)

intimacy (i'm not suspicious of it qua it -- i'm suspicious of it as an assumption and prerequisite for community -- since it seems most likely to emerge within homogenous, mutually satisficatory relationships...)

stability (b/c it seems like communities that over-fixate on finality -- tend to become rigid more quickly and maybe even get confused about whether they've arrived at their destination long before they should...(?) i'm reflecting my derridean tendency toward the endless deflection of final meaning....)

impermeability (both from within and without -- i *know* that this is a reflection of my individualism -- but i just get so stuck on the PROBLEMS of small communities which are non-integrative (both abstractly and in terms of their members)...)

Is there an irony in Me (one voice, one man) announcing autonomously what community is? There would be if it weren’t an invitation…. Your thoughts?

sorry to be so long winded....

i'm off to see a bunch of plays at the Actors Theater. It's a birthday weekend. Thanks, Lynn!

~peace