Quotes About Community

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

Our idol of the autonomous individual is a sham; the truth is we expect everyone to be the same, and dismiss as elitist those who are working through a call to any genuine vocation. It may be that our culture so fears the necessary other that it has grown unable to identify and name real differences without becoming defensive about them.

I believe that where local congregational life is concerned, it is best to give the Holy Spirit all the room we can, because the Spirit has a way of reminding us that what we think is right—even what we think the Bible spells out as right—is not necessarily letter-perfect in the sight of God. If God did not choose to work in ways that confound us, grace would not be amazing. It would not be grace.

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in a church congregation, but especially so in a monastic community. The person you're quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you're committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life.

When people speak in the same tone of voice about a "personal deodorant," a "personal trainer," and a "personal Savior," I suspect that what they really mean is "private." I've got mine; too bad about you. But Christianity, like its ancestor Judaism, is inescapably communal.

I believe we all agree that, for the health of Kansas, nothing is more important than education.

Loneliness isn't relieved in a crowd.

for those ascending the social ladder, other people are only rungs. And this is a town of climbers." (page 237)

You shouldn't get to live in society and give nothing back. People complain about their taxes, yet they do nothing for the community. That makes me furious.

When he brought it to me four years ago, Rodney King had just arrived, I was involved in the clean-up of L.A. and I guess it was part of my experience.

I think she was in a book club for a while, but she quit when they stopped talking about the books and started talking about personal things like their feelings.

It is not enough to provide material relief to those experiencing extreme deprivation. We need to craft solutions that can knit these hard-pressed citizens back into the fabric of their communities and their nation. With

Recent research has found that when a new Walmart opens in a community, it causes an overall loss in jobs in that community

They're just weeds, love, they don't belong anywhere.' Her granddaughter stuck out her bottom lip and furrowed her brow. 'That doesn't seem very nice. Everything belongs somewhere.

Random acts of kindness were certainly scarce in this place and sometimes came from the most unexpected source.

Here was gossip, cooking, boot- and diaper-drying and all the other business that man has ever performed before a fire. Here also could always be found someone with the soul of a concierge who could lead you through the maze of woolen-walled corridors to the room within a room that you were seeking, telling you meanwhile every detail of what went on behind that particular khaki curtain. As

No matter how big and strong you are, other people can help you if you let them.

She wanted them to live in union with God and with one another. Silence was at the root of that union, for God was 'the friend of silence':

she had seen the poverty of the rich and the wealth of the poor, and the value of bringing the rich and poor together

It was to be a place for the forgotten, the abandoned and the homeless who faced a terrible illness alone. Unlike the Gift of Love home, it would have the capacity to accommodate women and children as well as men.

But what do the boys say about my staying on, sir? They dislike me dreadfully. I'm sure they won't want me to become one of them." Dr. David's whole face wreathed itself in a giant twinkle. "Hasn't thee found out about those boys yet, Martitia? Hasn't thee learned that menfolk don't tease except where there's affection to prompt it? 'Twas that rascal Clarkson himself who spoke the first yea to his mother's wish to keep thee here.

A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.

You are the average of the five people you spend most time with. - Jim Rohn