Quotes About Community

God is most great! Allahu akbar! God is most great!" and sending the most faithful grimly shuffling through the dusky, unlit streets to salat al-'isha, the evening prayer. The Sabbath

At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.

The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: "A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there's more conversation.

As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors—doors by which we on the inside lock out "the others"—Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever. The more we insiders succeed in shutting others out, the more I tend to feel locked in, caged, trapped.

If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been or if it only digs in its heels where it is now, it is a dead end or a parking lot, not a way.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable.

Do you see? The story I have to tell is so small, of the people who stayed when everyone else fled.

Even if I did speak Irish, I'd always be considered an outsider here, wouldn't I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won't it? The private core will always be ...hermetic, won't it?

Stand your ground! Don't move! Don't panic! This is your city! This is your city!

Adam sat with Havah next to him, listening to the conversation. She never left his side. They were inseparable, and not because he needed her guidance with mobility. They were all alone in the world, and they only had each other. Despite the community of love around them, they would always have a pain too deep, a woundedness, that separated them from everyone and everything in this world. So they clung to each other with a subtle desperation.

They could rename this town shithole and be accused of putting on airs.

Talking with friends about books harks back to the original impulse behind storytelling, the forging of human bonds. We have told ourselves stories not just, in Joan Didion's phrase, in order to live, but in order to live with one another.

It's much better to love on your own than not love as a group.

As each guest entered, they were handed a long wand—actually a puppeteer's arm rod—with a bright foam butterfly attached at the end, one of the thousands put together by the Muppet Workshop over the last three days.

You'll never understand the way the worlds really work until you surround yourself with people from all sorts of weird backgrounds.

We're all aliens to someone. Even among our own people, most of us still feel like complete foreigners from time to time.

I guess that during the end of the world, people don't have time to read. That

Neighbors aren't really neighbors anymore. They're strangers, for the most part.

The earth is like a one-room schoolhouse in which students of different grade levels are assembled together:

I thought about how people tended to congregate in homogeneous groups, avoiding and often fearing outsiders. This was the root of prejudice and group hatreds. "We also must learn not to just go to those people whose vibrations are the same as ours." To help these other people. I could feel the spiritual truths in her words.

Love is not an intellectual process but rather a dynamic energy flowing into and through us at all times, whether we are aware of it or not. We must learn to receive love as well as to give. Only in community, only in relationships, only in service can we truly understand the all-encompassing energy of love.

Abrir el corazón] tiene muchísima relación no sólo con la calidad de vida sino también con su cantidad, es decir, con su duración. [...] La soledad y el aislamiento aumentan el riesgo de enfermedad y de muerte prematura por cualquier motivo, entre un doscientos y un quinientos por ciento. [...] Cuando