You know in this season I have been able to reflect on “community” as a foundational pillar to society.
There is an inherent longing within the human experience to come together in community, to be at liberty to congregate together is a fundamental human desire.
Perhaps in this season, we have understood the importance of living in community.
What a privilege it is to just be able to visit friends and family, to be in fellowship with others, and even to be in the same vicinity of total strangers.
We have discovered that a truly individual life cannot produce a truly flourishing life. To live well is to live well with others.
The challenge, however, is that to live a life that seeks to embrace community requires us to let go of total individuality and autonomy.
One must concede that in order to live a flourishing life in a community, we must simultaneously, learn to lay our own absolute individual desires down. We must come to the point of self-sacrifice and self-denial to embrace community.
Why? Because a community with a diverse set of experiences and thoughts will always produce points of difference, and maintaining community (common unity) requires an acceptance of a diversity of thought.
The traditional response to these points of difference has been to create communities within like-minded individuals. However, if you only associate with people who completely agree with you, you would remain in isolation forever.
As evident in society, we are all different, but what fundamentally brings us together is our humanity, and the longing we have to live in community is proof that unity can be achieved even in diversity.
As we open up these restrictions let us consider what brings us together as a society? Let me dare say, that it is our humanity. Thus, from this point, we must ask ourselves, what is the collective human story?
What are the beginning, conclusion, meaning and moral of this human story? I invite you to consider, can there be multiple versions of this story, or can there only be one? If there is only one, which one is it?
