While growing up, and on several counts, I found my parents’ way of doing things impossibly annoying. Perhaps especially, I, along with my three siblings, objected to the Sunday afternoon Bible sessions.
Every week, that is, we’d have our big meal at noon, right after church. It was always spaghetti with homemade meat sauce from the local deli. It’s the best sauce I’ve ever had. So we always looked forward to it.
It’s what happened afterward that generated our collective ire. While we were still at table, now staring at our empty plates and longing to be anywhere else, my father would begin the non-optional Bible reading. Each of us would be forced to read aloud various passages.
Being young and immature, we’d occasionally find ourselves giggling over what we read. My father, however, was not amused. At all. Which only made it that much more difficult to keep a straight face, particularly when my two older brothers were egging us on. It was that horrible moment when you know you can’t laugh, but knowing you can’t only makes everything that much funnier. It was, in short, a high-risk venture.
The injustice of these Bible readings was compounded in the summer as we’d hear our friends running around outside having fun in the sun while we were stuck at the dining room table stumbling over the Book of Genesis.
There were other indignities as well. Like not being able to watch certain TV shows because they came on too late. I would end up having to go to school the next morning only to hear my friends regale me with the latest happenings from the previous night’s episode of 77 Sunset Strip.
About these and other mortifications, my parents remained curiously unmoved. All spirited protests regarding the unfairness of, say, not being able to watch Kookie’s latest antics were always met with the same hackneyed parental response: “Well that may be fine for your friends, but in this house we don’t {fill in the blank}!” As I say, it was annoying.
At minimum this suggests that my family constituted a culture unique unto itself. The two examples given above are but two minor reasons why. The family dynamic reflected not just outside influences such as time, place, history, and other considerations, but an infinite number of internal ones, most of which, even today, I’m only but dimly aware.
Contained within were all the unique histories conjoined from both sides of the family, each with its own limitless intangibles. Therein were all the loves and struggles, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, all the moments of triumph and tragedy. In short, my family unit reflected the interplay of countless lives and countless circumstances going back millennia. All of which subtly or not so subtly shaped the reality of what we call our family – and not someone else’s.
It only stands to reason, then, that every member of my family, each with his or her own inherent differences and similarities, constitutes a mysterious reality that defies easy definition.
This, however, is not how modernism understands self or community. It argues instead that we are all a collection of interchangeable parts. We invariably share the exact same values, norms, and truths. We possess collective hearts and minds that feel and think the same.
I’m reminded of the time I had to endure the dreaded “CPE” training (Clinical Pastoral Education) while in divinity school. I was seeking a second master’s degree in pastoral counseling which required a course in hospital chaplaincy.
Unfortunately, the CPE program also included what is called “IPG” (Interpersonal Process Group). Within this particular form of torture, all the chaplains (roughly 5 or 6 of us) would participate in bi-weekly sessions where we would psychoanalyze each other. It could get pretty rough.
As a case in point, one day a bunch of us were having a casual cup of coffee in the adjacent kitchen. It was there that two or three of us committed the unpardonable sin of speaking a little bit of German for fun. Later, when we got into the group session, one of the members complained bitterly to the professor that she didn’t speak German and thus felt left out. Remarkably, this was treated as a major issue!
All told, we started out with a fairly diverse group. There was a divinity school student from Sweden, a middle-aged housewife, a nun probably in her 60s, another divinity student from the Midwest, and I. Each of us came with widely disparate backgrounds and life experiences.
But none of that mattered. Rather than attempting first to learn about each other and over time develop a genuine sense of communal identity, one born of the natural sorting and melding of individual lives and stories, we were required instead to submit to a predetermined ethos or community ideal.
If we failed to fall in line, as in our unconscionable attempt at German repartee, we were cited for not living up to this predetermined, artificial standard of unity. What was required was allegiance to an abstract idea, a theory of community, rather than one born organically out of the specific, natural concreteness of everyday human life and circumstance.
Genuine community, in other words, is not absent difference. We all bring the uniqueness of who we are everywhere we go. It is through honoring and nurturing these differences that ultimately produces genuine community. Humans, both individuals and groups, are not interchangeable parts to be shuffled around indiscriminately. Each soul needs to be both known and valued.
In Christian tradition, two essential views of community have long been established: cosmopolitanism and subsidiarity.
The former is the more common attitude today. It suggests globalization, internationalism (both political and economic), and political correctness. It defines all human beings as one community, despite outward appearance and circumstance, sharing the same common values, norms, and sensibilities.
At best, the tradition of cosmopolitanism represents for the Church a recognition of our common humanity before our Creator, along with every person’s inherent dignity.
But taken to an extreme, as is so often the case today, such a view denies the uniqueness of each human life. Moreover, it also denies the very context by which we human beings learn how to be human.
Subsidiarity thus recommends family, church, and the local community, each of which shapes and molds us into who we are and what we can become. In short, subsidiarity recommends a place we call…home.
Cosmopolitanism, despite its obvious merits, if taken to its extreme, leaves us all but homeless, abandoned to the soulless, collective, theoretical idea of unity, absent its essential reality. What gets lost is nothing less than our sense of belonging, the unique and life-sustaining aspect of life that defines what it means to be a human being.