What if community was the default?
thoughts inspired by Rhaina Cohen's new book, and hope as a form of love
In my twenties, I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I loved it. I am still frequently reminded via Facebook memories of how I would gush about how good it felt to be connected to a place, and to people, and to work that mattered, and to a vision of what our city could become. I was a part of creating pockets of community in several ways, and in the most transformative of them, these spaces were helping us to center friendship and the sacred in our lives. It was everything I had hoped for in a community, and we had created it together.
Then one day, over coffee with a friend at our Eastown donut shop, I decided to apply for divinity school in Boston. I felt called to explore a vocation that I knew required a place of study and focus, and later that year, I moved over 800 miles away from home and community, from family and friendships that had known me all my life. While I loved what I got to study, and who I got to meet, I did not find community. Not the kind of community of mutuality that I desired. Over those two years, living on the east coast and in the rush of the city and in the ego bubble of graduate school, I could feel myself losing the thread. I knew that if I moved again, it would not be for a job, or a degree, or a partner. I knew those things did not make me ultimately happy. If I moved again, I decided, it would be for community.
So, the day after graduation, a dear friend drove me eight and a half hours and dropped me off at a Benedictine monastery in Erie, PA.
This choice felt so good to make, yet difficult to communicate. In those first couple years at doctor’s appointments, they would ask “What brought you to Erie?” and I would chicken out of the real answer, “For community.” Instead, I would say, “For a job,” because that felt like the more palatable answer for our culture to understand.
I’m reminded of this as I read and listen to interviews with Rhaina Cohen, author of the new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. In the book, she gives us the stories of people who have chosen their primary commitments to friendship rather than a spouse, to co-parenting and care-giving outside of nuclear family contexts. In a culture that sets marriage at the center of a “successful” relational and familial life, these stories uplift another way that many are actually longing for: living in wider circles of belonging, that include multiple ways of loving.
In an interview with Ezra Klein, he asks about intentional co-living communities, and says of a friend who lives in one and supports them, “she’s decided to choose the default in her life being the problems of community as opposed to the problems of not having community… she wants the problems of connection rather than the problems of how to find that connection.”
In response, Cohen comments on the values that are implied by making decisions to live a certain way. For example, you might move to a new neighborhood to have a bigger house with your partner or family, but inherent in that choice is to move away from the community you might have had with neighbors. She states, “…people are creating conditions where they are disconnected. You know, privacy and control have a lot of benefits. But when the car breaks down and you need to get your kids to day care and you don’t know any of your neighbors in your cul-de-sac of five houses, you’ve given something up in the process.”
“It is so much easier,” Cohen observes, “to overweight the negatives of the unconventional decisions and to overlook the negatives of the conventional decision.”
In the midst of what is called a “loneliness epidemic,” and in a milieu where millennials are increasingly dreaming about starting communes together, there is—slowly gaining traction—an exodus from our individualistic ways of being and atomized forms of organizing relationship. It is happening, and there are plenty of examples of what it looks like. But it is still difficult to make these counter-cultural choices. It takes muscle to work against the stream of what is expected or “normal.”
In an interview with Anne Helen Peterson via her Substack, Culture Study, Cohen shares a story from Kristen Berman and Phil Levin, who started the intentional community Radish (Phil has their own incredible Substack documenting alternative ways of living called Supernuclear). In Cohen’s words: “[they] told me they’ve found it hard to get people to want something different from the one thing they’ve been told to want. To get people to want something different — specifically, living within steps of friends — they’ve had to push harder than feels comfortable to them.”
Cohen goes on, “To fight off the gravitational pull of the nuclear family default, it currently takes people … who are willing to pour tons of time and resources into creating another option — and making that option visible and attractive. Not everyone has a friend like them in their life, so they may never realize the possibility of a different path and its benefits.”
This is where we are: many of us are coming to know there is something off about how we are living. Many of us instinctually sense we need another way to live, a more connected and communal way of life. Many of us are looking for models of how to do so, someone who has walked the “different path” and given us the courage to do so too.
Making the choice to set community as our default is difficult, yet far from impossible. It feels to me like the tide may be turning here in our century. More people are waking up to their hunger for new forms of relationship, and more groups are experimenting toward ways of creating belonging for others.
And in the turning of the tide, we are also returning to traditions of community that far proceed us.
For myself, I found community in a monastery. As I wrote about here (back in 2019 already!), I found monasteries through my roundabout spiritual journey and learned quickly that they hold an ancient and time-tested piece of the puzzle for our contemporary longings. I have found here a history of people choosing community and a continuing reality today of people choosing community. Several of the friends I’ve made here have moved to Erie, PA—of all places—for the community, offered through and alongside the monastery.
Community is not societal default; it is a committed choice. It is nurtured, and needs the right conditions to grow. It requires our struggle, and our active participation. If we trust our longing for community, if we make uncomfortable decisions to center it, then we will move toward community.
Joan Chittister, a Benedictine sister, spiritual teacher, and my neighbor here in Erie, wrote: “The gift of Benedictine spirituality to the modern world may well be community itself.”
May community be a gift for you, wherever and however you find it.
What else I’m thinking about lately:
This past week, I attended a phenomenal lecture with Matthew Ichihashi Potts on “Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope,” as a part of the “Religion in Times of Earth Crisis” series at Harvard Divinity School. For the theology nerds out there, and for those heartbroken over our world’s ongoing climate losses, I highly recommend the talk (which will be published on Harvard Divinity School’s YouTube page in the days ahead). For now, I’ll leave you with this one quote, which has opened up how I think about hope:
“Hope is a form of love, not of knowledge. It is not about knowing the future, but about deciding what is worth acting for in the present.”
And on the theme of apocalyptic grief… here’s a poem, by Ayisha Siddiqa: ON ANOTHER PANEL ABOUT CLIMATE, THEY ASK ME TO SELL THE FUTURE AND ALL I’VE GOT IS A LOVE POEM. This last line is everything:
“I’d follow love into extinction.”
