Our Struggle For Community

This column by Fr. Ron Rolheiser appeared in the October 20, 2005 Catholic Herald. He asks

Why, when we so desperately want community, do we find it so hard to achieve and sustain?

His answer,

Perfection is the enemy of the good and what we over-idealize will invariably disappoint and frustrate us. And that's exactly our difficulty with community - with marriage, with family, with church, with friendship, with civic community. Simply put, we're often unable to sustain community because we have false notions and false expectations as to what constitutes it. An overly romantic notion so much clouds our vision that we rarely even recognize real community when we see it.

To idealize, or over-idealize as he puts it, is to romanticize. He gives an example of what he calls an idealistic young member of a religious order who complained of the superficiality within his community. The community finally sent him to a psychologist who concluded "What you're looking for you won't find inside a religious community because what you're looking for is a lover - not a religious community!"

It seems to me that the young man was not looking for a lover, as such. To regard one's lover as perfect is romanticizing, certainly. But this young man was no more likely to find a perfect lover than a perfect religious community, or a perfect anything else on this earth. Perhaps this longing came from this young man thinking he met his own standard of perfection. Perhaps he was acutely aware he fell far short of it, and longed to find it met in his religious community. But a lover would have been as sure to eventually disappoint a longing for perfection as his religious community was.

Another difficulty is that Fr. Rolheiser talks about both community more generally and about Christian community specifically. On the latter, he concludes,

Simply put, it is a gathering around the person of Christ in a way that displaces our selfishness so that we begin to live in a charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, constancy, mildness, and chastity that make it possible to precisely live with each other beyond differences, fears, and incompatibilities.

He himself seems to here confuse the hopeful realism of "begin" and "possible" with the romantic idealism of "precisely."