Life in community
Saturday March 3, 2007
I had a great day here in Alaska yesterday. I went up to visit the Cathedral of St. John, an Antiochian Orthodox parish in Eagle River. I'd heard about the community surrounding the parish before I came here, and when...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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"...exactly the kind of cultural institution-building that conservatives ought to be engaged in." Don't you think this might have an appeal beyond those who describe themselves as conservative? "Isolation breeds delusion, they said, as well as authoritarianism." Amen! (thrice) One way to avoid such isolation is a constant dialogue with those who think and/or believe differently, isn't it? Americans must begin to focus more on what we have in common than on what divides.
anybody who has the nerve to separate from the mainstream sets himself up for ridicule and suspicion This is so true.
ChuckDFW: Don't you think this might have an appeal beyond those who describe themselves as conservative? This is a good point, but I confess I've never thought of it. Back in the '60s, many liberals separated because the culture was too restrictive, but why would they today? So my question is: what would a liberal community of today look like? Oneida of old? Milbrook of the 60's? And what would be the primary draw to potential members?
M_David: First, I'm was not really focusing on a 'liberal' community, unless you would also describe it as an inclusive community, which is what I meant. A more inclusive community would tend to focus more on becoming compassionate -- as opposed to emphasizing a specific set of beliefs. (Of couse, these two facets are always present to some degree.) I'd see it as a place for self-nurturance via communal activities and living, but not with the goal of separating from the world, but fostering personal growth so one could 'go forth' to nurture the world while living in community or not.
Sounds like a wonderful place. Maybe when we Lutherans have experienced enough affliction, we too will give this sort of thing a try. Most of us haven't got the news yet, I suspect.
The seed for the idea to form the St. John community began with people who were familiar with L'abri, a Christian community started by Francis and Edith Schaffer in the 1950's. Here's a link to that site and the history of L'abri: http://www.labri.org/history.html Shelley
Visiting there in the late 1990s was a significant step in my family's conversion to Orthodoxy. It is, indeed, a place of deep faith and great beauty. Glory to God!
The story of this community is fascinating. Something very like it happened here in an intown neighborhood of Atlanta called Grant Park. A group of people searching for the "primitive" form of living the gospel ended up forming what is now St. John the Wonderworker church, an Orthodox parish--though not, I understand, one accepted as such by some of the other Orthodox churches here. This church seems to do a great deal of good working with the poor and homeless.
A correction to Shelley's post above- the seed for the idea to form our community did not really come from L'Abri. I just got off the phone with Fr. Harold to confirm my understanding of that. He was sent here as a missionary for Campus Crusade, which has never had community-building as part of it's strategy. In some important respects I think the term "Intentional Community" is misleading in regards to St. John's. Our development seems to have been much more spontaneous and organic than that. "Intentional Community" suggests to me a group of people sitting down and saying- "OK, we all agree that we think I.C. is what we should do. You guys look for some property, you guys write a vision statement, we'll write the by-laws governing membership, financial support, etc, etc, etc." Fr. Harold said his only mission was preaching the Gospel to whomever God brought to him to hear it. God indeed blessed him with a group of enthusiastic young people who gathered to hear it. What united them was not a desire to form an I.C., but a desire to desire nothing but God, to know and do His will and follow wherever that led. And where it ultimately led (quite to their own amazement) was the Orthodox Church. That is the essential, absolutely critical difference. If having an I.C. just for the sake of having an I.C. is the goal, or from a desire for the personal and social benefits you believe an I.C. offers- even if it's in order to have a superior personal spiritual life- it becomes merely another idolatry. If God is first, everything else will happen as it should- good, bad, or ugly (I mean according to our fallen perception of things, knowing that in fact "all things (good, bad, or ugly) work together for good to those who love God"). Purpose in your mind and heart to have no other desire in life but to follow Him- subordinate every other personal preconception of how your life should be, what political affiliations or positions a "real" Christian has. Just ("just"!!) follow Him. That is all that we are trying to do here, and I'm afraid that people who visit us expecting to see what they expect an I.C. to be like will be disappointed. We own our own houses, raise our own families, and work out our salvation day to day in the midst of our friends and neighbors (terms not necessarily synonymous!). Evidence of our failures and shortcomings would be easy to find... we are sinners, whose only hope is in the eternal mercy and love of our great Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who shows us the Way- death to self, life in Him. That's all!
Thanks for that clarification, John. I guess I was working from a loose definition of "intentional community." I meant simply people who didn't just wake up one day and say, "We live next to each other, we must be a community." Y'all tried to live within close physical proximity to each other, and to the church, and are aware of yourself as a community set apart in some sense (at least the neighbors of yours that I talked to see you that way). Which is all to the good, in my view.
Just a minute: Merton stayed at the same building in 1968 when it housed a short lived community of Roman Catholic contemplative (?) nuns. Their venture was a failure - a photograph of the community in the St. James House news letter perhaps reveals why. St. James House only dates from the 1970's.
I visited St. John's a couple of years ago, in June 2005. It was a beautiful church and grounds. The cemetery down the road with the spirit houses was a moving sight as well.
"A group of people searching for the "primitive" form of living the gospel ended up forming what is now St. John the Wonderworker church, an Orthodox parish--though not, I understand, one accepted as such by some of the other Orthodox churches here." This community in Atlanta entered canonical Orthodoxy a few years ago, and its leader, Jacob Myers, was ordained to the priesthood at St. Seraphin Cathedral in Dallas. http://SaintJohnWonderWorker.org
Yes, Stuart, you're right about the nuns who used to be in that house. Maybe I should've made that clear, but I didn't think it was relevant. When Merton was there, it was a Catholic convent, sort of. I believe the nuns never did solve the problem of how to get water to the house; the 1964 earthquake caused all sorts of problems in this way. Anyway, for me, it meant something that Merton had once lived and written in that building.
St. John's in Atlanta also has a very small apartment building next door, where a few members of the church live in community.
Yes, certainly do see ourselves as living intentionally in community- Fr. Marc himself has used the term Intentional Community , and the benefits of stability and community were stressed early on. Just wanted to clarify that we did not begin by trying to purposely copy L Abri or any particular model of I.C. More like spontaneous intentionality ? Evolving intentionality ?
My wife is concerned that I may have given an impression that we are merely co-located members of the same church, just attending services together. If I did, I certainly exaggerated- it is more than that. I think it is a testimony to the power of stability and community (under God, in the Church, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit!) that so many blessings and benefits come from that the fellowship and hospitality, the raising of families and shared celebration of births, baptisms, graduations, weddings, new families, and the final birth into Eternity . And on a more mundane but critically essential level, the asking and receiving of forgivenesses, without which we d have blown apart years ago. Lord, have mercy!
Sounds like an intentional community like the Amish or Mennonites. Cool.
Well, populate your Amish/Mennonite community with the cast of The Simpsons and you'll be closer to the reality! Ha!
excerpt: "The biggest threat facing them in this regard is economic. According to what they said to me, the founding members are going to be hard-pressed to pass their houses on to their children. Because land is scarce in the Anchorage area (most of it belongs to the federal government), housing costs are surprisingly expensive. Their average-sized houses are valued at several hundred thousand dollars. Their adult children can't afford to live in the area, which was rural when the community was founded, and they all struggle to pay property taxes. They are trying to figure out a creative way to use 50 acres of undeveloped land they own to make housing possible for the next generation, to keep the community alive." taking a page from the e.f.schumacher's distributist playbook - has the community considered the land trust model? people own their homes as private property but the appreciating land values are retained by the community. http://smallisbeautiful.org/clts.html excerpt: A Community Land Trust (CLT) is a form of common land ownership with a charter based on the principles of sustainable and ecologically-sound stewardship and use. The land in a CLT is held in trust by a democratically-governed non-profit corporation. Through an inheritable and renewable long-term lease, the trust removes land from the speculative market and facilitates multiple uses such as affordable housing, village improvement, commercial space, agriculture, recreation, and open space preservation. Individual leaseholders own the buildings and other improvements on the land created by their labor and investment, but do not own the land itself. Resale agreements on the buildings ensure that the land value of a site is not included in future sales, but rather held in perpetuity on behalf of the regional community. The first community land trust was formed in 1967 in Albany, Georgia by Robert Swann and Slater King, seeking a way to achieve secure access to land for African American farmers. The movement has grown to include over 200 community land trusts throughout the US and is widely understood as the best model for developing permamently affordable homeownership opportunities in regions of escalating land prices.
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