I have the good fortune to belong to a church that takes community seriously. Most Wednesday nights we have dinner in the social hall. Last night, over a delicious and thoughtfully prepared meal, I’d guess at least 50 people socialized, laughed and connected with one another. I ate my dinner with a group of teenagers, then when they left the table, a group of elementary age kids and a toddler. I met the newest member of our church family last night – a two week old girl. There were people in their 80s present at last night’s meal. There were people knitting. Getting ready for book group. Parents waiting for kids. Kids going to practice the Christmas pageant. Adolescents going to youth group. Some people like me, just there to be there.  It was an extended family of single, divorced, married, young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, fit and not so fit.  Each person – simply by being present - created social capital to enrich our church community in the days and weeks to come.

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam traces the rise and fall of American community over the last 100 years or so. He offers a number of valuable insights into the creation and sustenance of social capital – the organized ways in which people relate to one another. Putnam traces the ways in which clubs, churches, social organizations that provide the spaces in which people to connect with one another have suffered drastic declines in the last two generations – after their post World War II high water mark. Putnam’s fundamental argument could be summed up as civic participation – people being playing active roles in their communities has declined greatly and to our detriment as individuals and as a society. (As a side note, Bowling Alone isn’t a particularly fun read – it’s dense and packed with factoids and facts and charts but it is worth the investment.)

The creation of community is not accidental, coincidental, or simply fortunate. Community results from the hard work of many people – people who plan meals, activities, classes and other events. Community requires actual face time with one another. Social capital results from shared time, activities, conversation and values (in both the broadest and narrowest sense). Community is both the physical location and the experience that takes place; community can exist in a bowling alley, camp ground, church, community center. Community requires a place, but the place need not be fixed. More than space, community requires behavioral norms and standards, physical and emotional safety, opportunities to fail and still be accepted, space to be authentically one’s self, to grow, to change and to still be accepted.

As a society, our current emphasis on “family” and “marriage” suggests to me a desire for the experience of connection. The emphasis on the nuclear family is a yearning for the mythical 1950s – the sitcom 50s not the real 50s.  Sure, Donna Reed on TV wore pearls and vacuumed but in real life she had a more than 40 hour a week job.  Ozzie and Harriet were a two career family.  Lucille Ball was a hard driving career woman, no matter what Lucy Ricardo did or said.  The sticoms were never real life, no matter how fervent our desires for them to be real life.

Over at Council on Contemporary Families, Susan Coontz offers this insightful comment on America and families:

It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love. Because of this change, many of us have found joys in marriage our great-great-grandparents never did. But we have also neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.

Coontz (in both The Way Were Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and Marriage: A History) argues that today’s conception of the “traditional family” is anything but traditional; it is in fact a recent phenomenon. Traditionally, family was extended, messy, blended, confused. Truly traditional marriage and family are complex, wide ranging, and surprisingly casual. The formalism of the nuclear family – bonded by legal and religious marriage – is an artificial construct resulting in unrealistic expectations. Human relationships cannot be easily defined and bound by such formal structures.

Emotional connection outside of spouses and immediate family is essential to our personal and society well being.  Stephanie Coontz:

The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of “togetherness” among middle-class suburban Americans in the 1950s. Women were told that marriage and motherhood offered them complete fulfillment. Men were encouraged to let their wives take care of their social lives.

But many men and women found these prescriptions stifling. Women who entered the work force in the 1960s joyfully rediscovered social contacts and friendships outside the home.

Community requires intentional work and planning. There are times a person will contribute to community, times they will draw from the well of community well being. The account more than balances out – usually in the creation of surplus social capital. Until the 1960s, most Americans lived in community much more actively than we do today. Institutional memory was passed along unconsciously as people of multiple generations lived, worked and worshipped side by side. That time is gone (and with it a great deal of sexist, heterosexist and patriarchal baggage).

Today, we need to learn and acquire the skills of community building. We need to teach them to all our members – young and old. It can be done and it can result in immense riches. Last night, despite a 16 hour day, I arrived home refreshed and renewed by my immersion into a truly caring and sustaining community.

Coontz concludes her article by writing

[W]e should raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage. Paradoxically, we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge from the pressures of the modern work force. Instead we need to restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced. That indeed would be a return to marital tradition — not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedigree.

At the end of the evening, one of our younger members realized it was time to go and she’d been so busy playing, being around people, generally being adored and valued, that she’d forgotten to eat ice cream and it was now gone.   With tears streaming down her face, she said, “I forgot to eat ice cream.”  In the future, she won’t remember weeping about ice cream, she will remember having a place where she was so engaged and upheld that she forgot to eat ice cream. That’s community at its most effective and vibrant.  It is an experience that too few Americans – ensconced in our houses and the bossoms of our disconnected nuclear families – have today.  It is an experience more of us can have if we are willing to do the work.  We will be restored by our experience of community.  With Coontz, I agree that the best way to enrich and strengthen our marriages and commited romantic relationships is to strengthen and enrich our connections outside of them. 

The temptation to nest is powerful.  Rhetorically, our society paints a picture of couplehood that is idyllic, fulfilling, romantic and completely unrealistic.  Hiding in our dwellings, fitted with every convenience and luxury, with companies willing and able to deliver our food, clothing, furniture, and entertainment is tempting.  But it is not the only, nor necessarily, the appropriate avenue for meeting our needs.  Human beings are social animals.  There are times that being present in community is healthier and though we may forget to eat the ice cream, our souls and selves will be better served.