Community

I've been thinking a bit about community, recently. A criticism often levelled against the church from within is that the people of the church have lost an understanding of how to be part of a group. We've all got too used to being individuals, and the understanding of the self gained from this has been at a cost which prevents communal action. This is a large part of an argument which otherwise seems incomprehensible to non-Christians, I think; the suggestion from people who don't think that homosexuality is wrong that we should nonetheless not allow blessings of gay marriage. (St Paul told the Corinthians that they could eat meat sacrificed to idols, but that they should refrain from doing so if their example was causing anyone difficulties with their faith. I suppose that at that time finding meat in Corinth which had definitely never been sacrificed to an idol might have involved you in more effort and more cost, but it doesn't seem to me so very equivalent to giving up permanently an entire area of your life, one which the preachers are constantly telling us is a beautiful gift from God, in order not to upset people who are often finding it upsetting for entirely discreditable reasons. But then I was raised a protestant, and the church has little authority for me.)

Anyhoo, the idea that by being individuals we have lost the ability to work as a group interests me. Two things have brought it to mind in recent days. First, there has been a cigarette ban. About the only people I know who still smoke are fellows at the college where I work; colleges are, by their nature, appropriately some decades behind the times. There has been an unwillingness to accept that, passive smoking or no passive smoking, many people are negatively affected by smoke, especially now that asthma is on the rise. Secondly, we have been taking votes in groups. It's interesting to think about how we move on from divisive votes. A decision is taken which is binding on a group of which you are part, but it is not the decision you would have taken. I suppose you have to see it as a communal act, and support it. I don't know that this is very natural to people any more. Colleges are run in a medieval fashion which predates the rise of the individual (depending on how you date that -- it's usually seen as a late-/post-medieval thing). The closest modern analogy would be communities of nuns and monks, who also live according to pre-modern rules. The monks at St Bene't's were removed to other tasks; some of them really did not want to go, and would not have made the same decision if it were up to them, but they had vowed obedience so that it was never a question of whether or not they would do it, even the man in his eighties who had spent decades here, had to give up a job he loved, and feared very much a move to inner city London. There's a hugely impressive discipline in that.