Community as a Verb
What neighbourhood looks like
Welcome to Writing Home, a newsletter about turning aside from the big path, the one that was meant to lead to the future, and looking for the tasks that make sense now. I have a longer essay in the works about rescuing “charisma” from Max Weber, but meanwhile today’s post is inspired by goings-on in “the neighbourhood”, which is what I sometimes call this corner of Substack, but also in the actual neighbourhood of the small town in Sweden from where I write to you. It comes with a couple of invitations:
Paid subscribers are invited to join me on Zoom this Sunday for a live conversation with
in the week of publication of her book, Fully Alive. (You’ll find the link below the paywall on this post.)For anyone who wants to travel further with me into “the work of regrowing a living culture”, there’s a five-week online series starting a week today (and tomorrow). Full details here.
There’s nothing about a bunch of people living in one place together that constitutes community. If it did, each of the places we live in would embody and regenerate a common unity that binds people to it. What if community isn’t the result of people conjuring village-mindedness together, but the act of doing so together? A verb, rather than a noun. The constant process of communing, as opposed to the static existence of a community.
It was half past nine the other night when I read those words in
’s essay, The Permanent Vacation.1 I was still online that late because I’d had a call earlier in the evening from Mats, the chair of the community music and dance venue on the edge of our small town, asking if I could help put together an advert. The local news sheet had a space on its front page, but they would need the artwork first thing in the morning.Half a year ago, Anna and I joined the group that runs the venue. It’s a folkpark called Skogsvallen and it has an extraordinary history, but that’s a story for another day. To be honest, I wondered at first what I could add to the skills of the others around the table. The carpenter, the supermarket manager, the nurse, the guy who drives tour buses and knows the music industry inside out: all of them seemed to have far more to bring to the practicalities of this shared undertaking than I did, which is kind of funny, seeing as I spend a good deal of my life talking about “the work of regrowing a living culture”. Then one time in a meeting, we were talking about posters, and I started throwing one together on my laptop as we spoke, and the others looked at me like I was doing magic.
Now, I’ll admit, when I picture rolling up my sleeves and throwing myself into the “process of communing”, I’d prefer to be somewhere in the scene conjured up in this wonderful post from
:Someone’s out in the garden weeding the tomatoes, and someone’s writing a letter to a friend. A guy’s playing fiddle on the front porch and a little kid’s collecting eggs from a coop. Somewhere out there beyond the billboards, in the middle of a bleak subdivision, a woman is feeding her sourdough starter, which over time has incorporated molecules from every member of her household.
And should you someday cross the threshold of our school, you’ll find that weeding and sourdough feeding are part of the rhythm of our days. But when it comes to getting involved with what’s already going on around us, it turns out my amateur efforts at graphic design are where things fit together. After the meeting, I found some old Skogsvallen programmes from the 1970s and decided this was a tradition worth reviving, so this afternoon I’m picking up the first printing of the programme for the summer of 2024.2
I tell this story because there’s a clue here to what “the constant process of communing” looks like: so much of it is just mucking in, figuring out where the skills you’ve picked up can be useful, perhaps with an awareness that what matters most is glimpsed now and then, out of the corner of your eye, a side-effect of the tasks we throw ourselves into together.
In another post at the
, Frances tells how she and her friend Katherine invited their neighbours to a meeting to discuss setting up a “collective”, sharing gardens, composting and keeping chickens together. They thought a couple of people might turn up, but on the day, half the households on the street were represented.This was similar to her experience of last autumn’s online series with a school called HOME:
When I signed up, I assumed there would be seven or eight of us who wanted to know more about living cultures and how we can participate in them. To my surprise, there were close to 90 people from all over the world on that first call.
“There’s a hunger in all kinds of people for good work,” Frances goes on. “There’s a hunger for beauty and homemade bread and community.”
That autumn cohort was a particularly large one, but I feel the shared excitement that comes when people show up for these series and realise what a range of other people have been drawn to this invitation. Even more so when, months later, I hear the stories of people putting things they spoke or heard about on our calls into practice.
Some of these people awe me with the audacity of the work they are doing, so it’s helpful to be reminded of the moments of self-doubt that are also a part of their reality, as in the latest post from
of , where he describes being sleepless at 3am, after a recent Gratitude Feast, out walking with thoughts like these running in his head:Adam, you’re crazy for working so hard to put on these Feasts for no charge. You even forgot to pass around the newsletter signup sheet last night. That was such a stupid mistake. No one’s going to keep you or the Farm in mind. No one cares. No one will show up for the Farm Frolic next Sunday to help dig the corn mounds or volunteer to contribute money to cover the Farm Budget. You are just going to break your body and end up slowly dying in your tiny house. Alone.
And then he returns to the early morning farm to find five friends have shown up and are already taking care of the leftovers and the washing up.
But I take inspiration, too, when I catch wind of smaller undertakings among people I got to know through these series: one who told me the other day that a dozen neighbours had shown up for the first gathering around the firepit he has made in his urban garden; another who had a similar turnout for a meeting to organise an apple day this autumn in her village, gathering and using fruit that would otherwise go to waste.
In the build-up to each new series, I have to remind myself and re-learn what it is we are doing. Here’s where I’ve got to this time, with a week to go: we’re weaving stories and ways of seeing that may just make it possible to show up differently, in the places where we find ourselves, to practice the small acts of hospitality and conviviality and invitation, to see them within a longer story of humans being human together, and of what is called for in the face of the troubles around and ahead of us.
If you’d like to be part of the weave this time around, then there are still places available in the Thursday evening and Friday morning groups that start next week. Each group will meet weekly for the next five weeks over Zoom, with recordings available to catch up if you can’t join live for one or other of the sessions. The full invitation and the booking form are on the school website.
And this brings me to the other invitation I made at the top of this post. Among the voices in the weave of the first of our online series, I remember
and her ability to bring gifts from her deep involvement with Christian theology and the ground-level hard work of Beautiful, Terrible Community, as she put it in the title of a recent post.In the four years since that series, Liz and I have kept each other company on the journey of writing books and bringing them into the world. Next week, it’s publication day for her book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, in which she sets out to share the treasures of the tradition that has shaped her life with people who might never cross the threshold of a church.
This is not a book that is out to convert or convince anyone. The thing about Liz is that her faith is so clearly a matter of direct experience, even as she is aware of being unable to defend it on the terms of the highly-educated modern urban Western world which makes up so much of her identity. Caught between the two, she tells the story of how she fell in and out of faith, and then found her way back to it – and she asks herself which parts of what matters most deeply to her might be available to those who don’t share her experience, or who end up on the other side of that line. For a flavour of what I mean, you can listen to her recent conversation with John Vervaeke:
Among the readers who I imagine may find the book helpful are those who have been left puzzled or troubled by the resurgence of Christianity in some of our online neighbourhoods in recent years. It struck me a while back that the noise around this often focuses on dramatic mountain-top experiences, mystical encounters and unexpected conversions. A lot of attention is drawn by stories of charismatic men whose worldviews have recently been turned upside down. I’m not saying those stories aren’t part of the picture, but I found it a relief to read a woman in her forties who has been deeply involved with church for most years of her life since her teens, writing about the role that prayer plays for her in navigating the everyday realities of parenting, marriage and local community.
So I’m looking forward to welcoming Liz as the latest guest in this season of “overheard conversations” – and you are warmly invited to join us, to listen in and bring questions of your own. The live Zoom call is open to paid subscribers to Writing Home (or to Liz’s
Substack) along with a recording of the full session, while free subscribers will get access to the first forty minutes of the recording.The Zoom details are below the paywall on this post – and I’ll send out a reminder ahead of the call.
Finally, if you’re really feeling the pull to join us, but the paid subscription is a barrier, then get in touch. (The same goes for Further Adventures in Regrowing a Living Culture, where we have some pay-what-you-can places available.)
DH
Zoom details for Sunday Sessions #6 with Elizabeth Oldfield
The call lasts an hour and starts at 8pm CEST which is 7pm BST, 2pm EDT or 11am PDT. Use the Zoom link below to join the call: