Community

The challenge and complexity of gathering with intention

Since the presidential election, I have seen many exhortations to lean into community. I agree, I have tried to do that myself. But what the often anodyne exhortations fail to explain is that community is challenging.

It’s hard to be with a disparate group of people trying to do a thing together while hewing to norms and standards that can be very different from what we encounter at work or in our algorithm driven online interactions.

Community can be found anywhere; from a group of parents whose children play team sports together to an open water swimming club. They are all good. I am primarily thinking about what I call intentional communities.

The phrase “intentional community” is often used to describe a residential arrangement where people volunteer to live in communities organized around specific principles and/or shared tasks or spaces.

My definition is broader. I mean any group of people who work together to do something positive in the world. They gather with shared values and goals.

The neighborhood group that clears invasive plants from a nearby forest. Volunteers who run a food pantry. A community theater group. A church or synagogue is often host to a number of intentional communities gathered around shared interests like a men’s scripture study or a jail ministry. Animal rescue groups, environmental justice coalitions, support groups, recovery groups. You get the picture.

I have been a member of groups like these for most of my adult life. And getting that kind of group to make decisions and work together effectively requires almost the opposite skills that we learn in the corporate world. Some of my communities are pretty countercultural, so there’s the added interest of working against capitalism, patriarchy and exploitation of the earth.

It's interesting to watch people move from a corporate world driven by a capitalist mindset into an intentional community. I’ve done it, and I’ve watched other people do it, and we often struggle with some of the same things. It can be like watching a bull plow through the proverbial china shop, snorting and tossing his big head and wondering why everything is so complicated.

I’m a governance geek. I’m fascinated by how groups and communities gather and decide. If you can hire and fire people, and they need to follow norms to keep their jobs, paychecks and often health insurance, then you can get most of us to stay even if the governance is terrible, our voices are ignored and how we gather is difficult, dissatisfying or both.

But if you are relying on volunteers, if your community is made up of people who have day jobs and families to take care of and they are choosing to spend their limited free time in community, you all had better be good at invitation, orientation, governance and dealing with conflict.

Many people like me who have some experience in leadership in the corporate world, can fall into capitalist traps when we first are in community, focusing on output, deliverables, accomplishments, rather than some of the longer term or less material successes of intentional community.

We corporate folks can bitterly complain about a decision-making process where different viewpoints are invited because consideration can stretch out and seem aimless. We’re used to a top-down decision-making process which prioritizes utility, productivity and efficiency. In community, we’re often prioritizing shared values, more thoughtful deliberation, and trying to consider a complex intersection of ethical, practical, moral and logistical objectives.

We can also show up to community with expectations. I participate in community to do good in the world. I want it to be a respite from the frustrations of the corporate grind. I want it to be a gathering of like-minded friends that feels good and runs smoothly, a halcyon oasis apart from political and societal upheaval. And often it is.

Until it isn’t.

The project or initiative I think is stupid. The group decision that takes exponentially longer than I think it should and then doesn’t go the way I want. Often there is that one person I can’t stand. Every time they talk I tense up, their voice is nails on my psychic chalkboard. The one who talks too much, who has to play devil’s advocate, who commits to do things and never follows through, the arguer, the blocker, the gossiper, the passive aggressive underminer, the Queen or King Bee who has to run everything,…we can all add to this list of challenging personalities in community because if we’ve been in community we’ve interacted with some of them.

People can react badly when an old trauma or an unskillful coping mechanism bursts out in a spasm of anger or paranoia or accusation. The conflict avoidant ones look away, the combative ones rise up to defend and it can get messy fast.

I have learned to be more patient as a decision which I could whip out of a corporate team in fifteen minutes with a whiteboard and a dry-erase marker stretches into a second hour in a community setting. Because I know now, after decades of doing this, that we aren’t just deciding the thing we are deciding, doing the tasks we set out to accomplish. We are connecting with each other. Building trust, honing our often-neglected skills of listening, compromising and negotiating. We are working on our self-regulation, because in community there are greater repercussions for the outrage, the condemnation, the swift judgement we’ve become so used to in social and political discourse.

In the rest of my life, especially when I am consuming information online, I can get seduced by the simplicity of the binary. This person is evil, this one is good. In community, the sharp edges of my judgement are softened. No one is all good or all bad. The people I put on a pedestal make a mistake; the ones I dislike surprise me in a positive way. We are connected. We wouldn’t all be in one place together if we didn’t share something. A wound, a belief, a hope. And if you are in community you see one another more fully, it’s less curated. You yourself are seen, which can be alternately terrifying and joyful.

I remember complaining once about an old guy who never seemed to shut up, and another member pointed out to me that his wife had recently died. He wasn’t close to his grown children, and we were the only people he ever talked to, he had no one else who listened to him in his entire life except for us. I thought about him differently after that, and became quite fond of him. That happens. You see an irritating person long enough and you get used to them. Sometimes you learn something that explains their irritating quality. In other cases, they might show a competence, insight or bravery that you didn’t expect.

I’ve sat with some elderly people who talked casually about the clothes you’re given to wear in jail, and realized they had been arrested multiple times protesting social justice issues. I thought of them differently after that, realizing I had seen their white hair, frail bodies and the canes the leaned on and missed the history of direct action in the face of significant consequences.

I’ve had serious conflict with people in community, carried real hurt and anger in a disagreement, and been able to sit with them over time and stay connected. Sometimes we talked it out, sometimes we just agreed to disagree and treated each other politely until enough time passed that we experienced that ineffably joyful realization that we were past it, it was behind us, and we were still in community. In some cases, years later, we even joked about it, that fiery disagreement.

I do think community will save us, not in comfort but in the correction of real connection. In a short period of time many of us have moved online, our interactions thinned to talking through screens, slinging outrage, condemnation and approval in a stream of likes, reshares and comments. If you spend all day leaning over a screen, it impacts not just your body but your spirit. I remember my grandmother poking me in the back as we walked down the aisle at Mass to get communion. “Stand up straight” she would whisper after nudging her hands, still folded in prayer, gently into my back. She was correcting my posture, as a teen, because she wanted me to own all my height.

We need that correction as a culture. Be together in real life, in all the messy, difficult joyful aspects of community. We need to own our deep ancestral knowledge of how to work together through difficulty, dissention and frustration to get something done. Not because we are paid for it, or need to comply to be safe, but because we care about the world in which we live enough to join together to make it better.

My book, The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is available online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. If you get the book, it would be a big help if you could post about it on social media. If you want me to do a reading or workshop in your town, get in touch. More at speirolo.com