roots to happiness
Recently, I’ve been wondering: Does my ‘community’ work for me any more? I’ve been part of a little gathering of Christian searchers, church refugees, dreamers and mavericks for several years now, but it’s hardly a model of church growth to rival Mars Hill…
We share our beliefs with each other, yet we don’t always know what to do with them. As we’re experimental, it doesn’t seem appropriate to pin our colours to a mast, let alone to commit to a way, a path, a rhythm… And as I’m forever wondering privately if I and my family might move on, it’s hard to feel settled.
This week, I visited a place I mistakenly still call ‘home’. I spent all my growing years in the same small country town I was born in. I could walk to school – no 4x4 jams - and the same faces accompanied me the length of the educational journey. Although there was little to do in the town once the cinema was bulldozed, you felt a part of things, ironically, because you had no choice: you were going nowhere in a hurry. You knew, and were known by, everyone.
In an intriguing new book on community, Utopian Dreams, Tobias Jones laments the ‘uprootedness’ of life today, the worship of choice and the lack of a sense of the sacred in society. As an experiment, he lived with several ‘intentional communities’, most of which are spiritual, the best of which, he believes, are Christian.
Afterwards, enriched by the experience, he decided to stop travelling and put down some roots. He drew a circle two miles across on a map, with his house at the centre, and resolved to find community within it. Commitment to ‘place’ is like a marriage, he argues: by making a lasting decision, you dispense with choice, and gain the freedom to start living with those around you.
So, how long do you give a church, a place or a person before you give up on them? If my community doesn’t work for me, perhaps I should start working, instead, for my community. We can resist being tied down for as long as we choose, but life is short - it was the funeral of one of those schoolfriends that drew me ‘home’ this week - and I’m coming to realise that ultimately I don’t want my epitaph simply to say: ‘He kept his options open.’
Brian Draper
additional resources
Tobias Jones’s book Utopian Dreams: In Search of a Good Life was published this month by Faber and Faber.
Here is what the Observer, the Guardian and the Independent made of the book.
Among the communities Jones visited were the Danmanhur Community in Italy, which has its own underground temple and a ‘symbolic’ language of 300 carefully designed pictures, the Catholic community Nomadelfia and the Pilsdon Community in Dorset, a Christian community that helps people through depression, alcoholism, addiction, divorce and bereavement.
Brian Draper has interviewed Jones for Church Times. The article will appear next Friday, 26 January. For more info, visit churchtimes.co.uk.
If you have any stories about ‘intentional community’ life, please post them below. We’d love to hear of your experiences.
