Community: Extending the Table

I was musing on what it would be like to meet every person on earth.

Imagine that you could meet one person per second until you had met all of the (roughly) 6.7 billion people on the planet. From the very first hello to the final goodbye, you would spend somewhere around 212 (and a half) years, which is, as it happens, a good deal longer than you will likely live. And yet as our economies and technologies globalize, we keep hearing buzz words like “global community” and “shrinking planet”. Global community? How can we identify with a community of billions of people, the majority of which we clearly will never meet?

These questions began swarming in my brain earlier today when I came across some of the several hundred photographs I took of last year’s lunar eclipse on February 20. This eclipse stands out for a couple reasons: first, I was so captivated by its beauty that I stood outside in zero degree weather for at least an hour and a half taking pictures, and when I finally went inside I realized that my camera lens had literally frozen over. And if you know me, you know that I had to be really interested to voluntarily remain in the cold for that long. Second, and more to the point, I specifically recall mentioning the event during that week’s shared prayer. Lunar eclipses so fascinate me because of those moments before and after totality when the edge of the earth is projected onto the moon’s surface. For a few minutes we glimpse a shadow of God’s vantage point. In the perfect stillness of our holler I could see the outline of our planet (albeit cloaked in penumbral darkness) and I could envision all the beauty that our world contains. For a few minutes I could look at our shadow on the moon and see our global community.

All these romanticized notions might merely remain a collection of warm fuzzies were it not for our firm grounding in the understanding of community. While community certainly speaks about all the people in our lives whom we know and with whom we interact—family, friends, teachers, co-workers—the true challenge of community is to think beyond our immediate surroundings. Some community-derived jargon we throw around at the Farm comes from the principles of Catholic Social Teaching. One of my favorite principles, but one that is difficult to grasp, is solidarity. I like to describe solidarity as prayerfully seeking to understand another’s trials through a commitment to a certain sacrifice or through an intentional action that spiritually connects us to that person. One of our most concrete examples of solidarity at the Farm is bucket showers, which scale back the amount of water we use to place us in solidarity with those who have limited access to clean, safe water. By living in solidarity, we begin to authentically investigate our global community. Who must live with limited access to safe water? What historical, geographical, economic, political, and environmental factors create this limited access? How is the community responding to this form of poverty, and what more needs to be accomplished? As a member of the global community, in what way can I respond, either through direct action or through actions of solidarity?

Of course, we cannot meet every person on earth. But we can begin to meet our global community through our intentional efforts to seek justice.

-by Adam Austin

(Our apologies for our tardiness this week... check back on Sunday for another update).