Movement 134

slaves to 'the cause', 'the party, 'the Reich', 'the
market', 'the faith', or some other dangerously
homogenising ideology.
So we have a good idea of what we don't
want. But that still leaves us with the problem
of what genuine community is, and how it can
be realised. For example, family, kinship, belief
and identification-with-place can all create very
powerful ties. But we know from painful experience
that these can be damaging and oppressive
as well as unifying. If a sense of belonging is vital
to whatever we mean by community, so is the
impulse to define ourselves apart from, or overand-against,
others. Inclusion creates exclusion,
and vice versa.
At the organisational, legal and economic
level of human interaction, all societies depend
for coherence on their capacity to prescribe and
defend an 'in' group, to establish codes of acceptable
behaviour for that group, and to arrive at
cultural or systemic norms. At a more primallevel
this often entails seeing other people as 'friends'
or'enemies' and treating them accordingly.
In modern mass societies, however, the
majority of people we relate to do not fit obviously
into either c ategory,and so the politics and procedures
we have developed exist to regulate, civilise
and control what is overwhelmingly "a society of
strangers" (to use the stark term employed by
Gernot Saalmann, Roger Scruton and others).
The Gospel message radically disrupts these
arrangements, however. First, it enjoins us to
think of those who are neither immediately
intimate nor immediately antagonistic to us
in a new way. They are not merely strangers or
'nobodies'. They are neighbours and companions
in the journey through the world. This is a theme
in many other religions too, and it carries with
it an invitation to connectedness and obligation
that goes beyond'natural' ethnic or the familial
ties.
In biblical terms a 'com-panion' means
someone with whom we share bread, and neighbourliness
is created by'com-passion'
- which
is not sentimental regard, as many suppose, but
a recognition of the other through the common
experience of suffering. By expanding our
compassion through shared effort and persistent
prayeritis evenpossible, says Jesus, to respondto
enemies by loving them rather than eliminating
them. This path towards renewedhuman relationships
subsists not in abstract concepts (the first
refuge of those seeking to evade responsibility)
but in the tough business of character-building
action.
In other words, it is shared endeavour and
regular commitment that creates community,
not some mystical ideal that somehow magically
enables us to feel a 'togetherness' which will
match our romantic aspirations. This is a point
that Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes rather forcefully
in his 1937 bookLifeTogether, which describes
the basis of a tiny, unprecedented Lutheran
experiment in communal-spiritualliving as an act
of resistance in a world increasingly encroached
upon and defined by Nazis the illegal
Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde.
Similarly, if we remain in expectation of a
one-size-fits-all theory of community adequate
\---
li
l