Working in Communion #2: community and economy
Donate for flood relief in Kentucky. Or, it might spark you to give to help in another place.
Also, read here about the Anglican Communion Forest, good news coming out of the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops.
What needs room in the various ‘workshops’ of Christian community and association? What patterns emerge and endure through the decades and centuries of days?
What room must be made for different types, needs and gifts of people, and how they live with God in prayer, work and re-creation differently and in common?
What investments and encouragement for mutual aid, cooperative economic enterprise and production and consumption in common exist now and in the past?
consumption
These are lively and practical questions for us today. I’ll carve out some lines of thought about these using the old tool from the Rule of Benedict, which distinguishes ‘four types of monks.’ I’ll paraphrase these appreciatively and practically as: larger cooperative associations, households for discipleship, purposeful wanderers for Christ, and solitaries. Benedict might not agree with using these distinctions to say so, but let’s say that Christian life needs to make room for all of these types and practices. An effort to circle around and raise up less noticed yet ecumenically emerging patterns for living.
In this post I’ll jot some assorted thoughts about the larger monasteries of sisters and brothers living under a regulated life, what Benedict calls ‘coenobites,’ and about the long history of christian community patterned to include economic activity and manual labor. These hope to bring people nearer the peace and life of God.
In communal christian spiritualities, such as Benedict’s Rule, the actual people among whom one lives, prays, and works constitute the workshop in which interior conversion and the following of Christ is lived daily. One listens, one owes a certain obedience to the others and to the authority of the community, its members, its leaders, its values and ways of going about things.
But wait, what is community anyway? It sure gets used a lot of ways these days, to describe rather large masses of people possessing some common trait, identity, inclination, need, or consumer preference. It seems at times to abstract from the concrete, local and non-elective dimension of community.
‘Coenobite’ as used by Benedict to describe monks livibg in community, comes from greek. It’s related to the word ‘koinonia’, the word used of the early christian communalism. In Acts 4 we read that they ‘were one in heart and soul, and held all things in common.’ That scripture hearkens to psalm 133, ‘how good and pleasing it is when brothers dwell in unity’, where the hebrew for ‘unity’ is related to the word ‘one’, as used of God being one.
One etymology of the latinate ‘community’ shows this sense of unity among people being something divine. Com-unio meaning with or in unity. Community is a reality of communion, sharing union between people that is founded upon union with God. It has contemplative and trinitarian dimensions.
production
But, community could also be derived from com-munio/ire. ‘Munio/ire’, to build or fortify with a wall. The verb ‘munire’ in this possible etymology is related to the English ‘munitions’. A community is a group who associates for purposes of common defense, protection, managing boundaries, and the building and maintaining resources held in common. It may not mean military or police, but it requires concrete, sequential procedures, aggression well in hand, and a readiness to shoulder this responsibility. Military organization was one source of models for how to shape a community in the early christian centuries. Pachomius, an early christian monk in Egypt, wrote a rule to organize monks into villages or communities, drawing on his former life as a soldier. (His rule also talks about boats!)
The communal formation and organization of christian persons in north america is generally approached through local congregations, some of them organized into denominational associations, federations and other institutional arrangements. But other communal expressions have included Christians organized as monasteries, communes, intentional communities, looser associations or kinship networks. Their christian spirituality includes an organized economic dimension. A non-exhaustive list includes Hutterites, Mormons, many 18th and 19th-century communalists, the Moravian Brethren, efforts for mutual-aid, Black co-operativism, the Antigonish Movement and more. In the 1930s and 40s, the US federal government and christian churches sponsored experimental subsistence homesteads, in attempts to provide relief and work toward greater social and economic equality and welfare. The included such places as Norvelt, Arthurdale, and Delta farm.
I see a thread connecting the Rule of Benedict, modern and contemporary movements, the early christians, the Egyptian desert christians. This id less about discursive expositions on doctrine, ecclesiology, sacraments, and more about ways of working. Benedict’s rule provides for a measure of daily manual labor. Benedict knows this is good for the soul and body. Such work connects us to our body in integral ways, grounds us in the earth and activities of daily living. It also provides daily bread, pays the bills. The early monastics farmed and fabricated for their living, they were not begging monks as in some traditions. The desert monks practiced economy. It was a discipline for the personal soul and body, it was a structure for the work of the community and its well being, and it paid the way. They shared this work out of their love for one another, made room for one another in their tasks.
It was not overly grandiose work: weaving mats, making ropes. Quiet, repetitive, skilled and ‘semi-skilled’ work, making things immediately useful, saleable in the local and imperial economy. I wouldn’t compare it to coding, I might compare it more to service and care work, to repair and some construction trades, and farming. Manual occupations for the hands suitable for prayer and drawing near to the interior quiet given in ever closer union with God. And these people, living this life together, were praying for the world, and were available for people to come to them, seeking light and counsel.
So…the congregation is not the only pattern available to draw upon in organizing christian communities. A firm sense of mission, vision, and structure that aids in prayer, listening, resolving conflicts, making room for generative forms of life, managing boundaries, defining authority and responsibility, and more, can be resourced in this larger history. Community can be shaped concretely by purposes of work, of economy. It is the concrete means that gives definition to the community effort, provides the workshop of its interior transformation and its mission among the world.
Zinzendorf Teaching the Nations, Johann Valentin Haidt ca. 1747
So,… when will the episcopal…lutheran…presbyterian…etc… church devote funds for a mission community that runs a home health agency, or an HVAC service, or an agroforestry business? That could be another approach to planting new communities!
It could model, teach, train and provide a useful service needed right now. It could have a chapel and worship gathering evening. It could offer an internship in living and working in community, rather than in organizing an abstract community. It would be good for soul and body.
There are examples out there, I’d love to hear about more, and pass the word on!
And…we churchy folks might just pay better attention to the ways people work, what is their work, what work they detest, or delight in. Pastors might visit congregants at work. You might pay attention to the play of manual labor in a congregation. Instead of planning formal instruction and lecture-style delivery of christian education, you might weave prayer practice and reflective conversation into hands-on projects led by church members. Start by paying attention and wondering what God has already been doing in people’s working, and in the ways they put their hands to good, to daily soul and body tending tasks.
Okay, that’s enough of that. time to go fit the legs to the table top. Peace and Good Things.
