Community spirit

Looking at one of the free papers lying around the house, the front of the Sentinel caught my eye. A nice friendly picture of lots of people outside a few houses with the caption 'Good neighbours'. A close in Worthing where people had got together, closed the road and staged a street party to 'celebrate the area's community spirit'.

Turning to the story on the inside, it was good to read about 'Big Lunch', a nationwide project to get neighbours across the country sitting down together. The pictures are great and demonstrate something that I think deep down a lot of people long for. It just so often seems so hard to get to! Something that looks so hard for us to achieve that it seems the effort isn't worth it. But from the smiles on the people's faces (well, except for the older guy at the front of the photo below!) it looks as though it is worth it.

It also reminded me of conversations I've had with my elderly next door neighbour. Being an atheist, he attached more significance to the solstices than to Christmas and Easter, and I remember that he said he'd like to see people walking through the streets on winter solstice together, and also wanted to see more street parties and people being community together. He went into hospital a few weeks ago, and at that time I was reminded of this desire he had expressed. I wondered whether, if he got better, as a few of us neighbours had been going to see him for a while before he even entered hospital, it might be good to have a BBQ or picnic, just to for him to experience what he longed for. Alas, last week he moved to St. Barnabas House, a hospice in Worthing, told he's not going to walk again. Seeing him tonight, unfortunately it seems he probably doesn't have long left at all. Having got to know him this last 18 months, it's reemphasised in my mind, that there are people nearby who are lonely, as he has been since his best friend, who he cared for at home for about a decade, died about two years ago. We don't know how long people will be around, and with him there was a sense that I got too know him too late to really make that strong a friendship.

As I said, he is an atheist, which means something at my very core is starkly different from how it is with him. And yet we seem to have such similar desires in many respects. I really want to explore what community is, to see neighbourhoods transformed and for people to grow together and to discover more of how life is supposed to be. I don't think this is just some massive coincidence, I believe it's because deep down we have an inbuilt desire to live in community, to have relationship. Whilst there is a part of us that is selfish and greedy, at our core we long to be relational. I believe that is because we are made in the likeness of God. God, although one, has been in community since before time began. The father, the son, the spirit, entwined in relationship, in a communion with each another. And so, for mankind, formed by Him in His image, that longing is there, waiting to be fulfilled. I want to experience it, to be a part of it, and I hope that I will continue to find it, in whatever shape and size, throughout this lifetime and into the next!