Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Forming Community Wherever We Land

Reading an article about Dorothy Day in a Catholic magazine recently, I came across a quote about forming community and began to think about all of the communities to which we belong — intentional and unintentional. First, of course, we belong to our family’s community. We’re born into these groups and as we grow and learn about them, we’re not always pleased that these people “belong to us.” Maybe we’d like to drop a few of them off along the way. Think of Chevy Chase with Imogene Coca on the roof in “National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation.” Maybe it’s a good thing we can’t choose our families or some people would never be invited into any community.

The “community” at work can be small and intimate or large and impersonal, depending on how we define that group. Generally, we find people who work tirelessly for the company, volunteer to help out whoever and whenever it looks like someone needs a hand. Too bad we can’t file a profile and ask for just those people in our offices. The other group, the loafers and complainers, have raised “doing nothing” to an art form, specializing in busy work to razzle-dazzle the upper echelons of management to our utter disgust or surprise. These people give balance to the others, making sure we have something to grumble or complain about so that we don’t finally see what utopia ultimately means and forget to work at all. While we can choose our employment to some extent, we try not to change jobs willy-nilly thus making our work records look questionable. If someone moves or is moved to many locations, people begin to wonder.

Our neighborhoods and the towns in which we live present different types of geographic communities. I met a group of people in San Antonio who had formed an “intentional” neighborhood. Everybody who lived there chose that place because of the people in it. When a house went on the market, other people who wanted to be part of the neighborhood were informed so they would have the opportunity to buy a property there. These tended to be older, smaller homes in a working class neighborhood, but everyone wanted to live there, to form a special community where everybody literally helped everyone else. Lots of neighborhoods evolve into communities like this, but these people decided this before they moved in.

Our faith communities — small and large — anchor us in particular ways, feeding our souls, raising our spirituality quotient with life-giving opportunities to reach out to others within and outside our circles. More and more, these communities are intentional. We choose to belong, to participate, to give of ourselves and our treasures. Very recently, many of our parishes welcomed new members during Easter Vigil services. These new folks made a very specific, public choice to join our communities. There’s always room for more.