If someone comes to you asking for help, do not say in refusal, "Trust in God. God will help you." Rather, act as if there is no God, and no one to help except you.&emdash;Hasidic teaching.
A few years ago, I moved to Western Wisconsin with my wife Sharon. I had taken an early retirement from Michigan State University's medical school where I had taught for twenty-three years. Sharon was exploring a teaching career of her own and Menomonie, Wisconsin was where the job was. It was, in Sharon's terms, a "no-brainer" decision, the right place for both of us to be at that time.
I had never lived so long in one place as I had in the East Lansing area. Even during that time, I twice moved to Denmark, once with the notion it would be permanent. Earlier, I had lived many places, from early childhood on, although my school years were all spent near Corning, New York. So I was used to moving. Sharon grew up in a military family, her first husband was also military. If anyone knows moving, it's people with military backgrounds.
Menomonie was a place where we knew no one. Our children were already grown and off to all corners of the globe, so we had no ready-made contact with other parents. Recently married, both for the second time, we'd not arrived at a mutually agreed upon church group we both found comfortable and spiritual. I was intent on learning to write, leading something of a hermit's life for the next couple of years.
I was acutely aware that the local community could not meet many of my needs. I was grieving the loss of a secure work environment, a predictable paycheck, a life centered on children, friends of many years standing, frequent trips to my favorite sanctuary, Lake Michigan. Coming from a university town of considerable size near large metropolitan areas to a rural, diary farm community with a technical college and no bookstore, in a place that many have eagerly left to avoid harsh winters, deadening and demanding routine and near poverty existence, I was a puzzle and a mild source of threat, an outsider with no shared cultural roots. We lived near Colfax, a town of 1100 people that had seven Lutheran churches and little else since the twin tornadoes of 1957 had robbed it of its trees and spirit.
In one sense, it was not "community" to me&emdash;at least not in terms of what I needed.
In time, of course, there were people who became important to me. Dave and I religiously played tennis. He would also come over to help me move furniture, borrow a mower, sit and chat. Matt taught me how to fly a Cessna 152. John and I would have breakfast and stimulating conversations. I became a regular at the only coffee shop in town, a known figure at the athletic club. I shared an office with other therapists. I taught for a semester and enjoyed once again engaging with students and faculty. Then, with retirement becoming official and a predictable financial base again available, we moved to where we wanted to physically live the remainder of our lives&emdash; in Northwestern Lower Michigan, on lovely Old Mission Peninsula jutting into Grand Traverse Bay, a part of Lake Michigan.
Such mobility, stimulation and choices about places to live confront many of us with what is the essence of the community we need. Clearly, in my Western Wisconsin years, I felt less of a need for an interactive community than I have at other times. I wanted to write, to be more reclusive, to commune with nature and spend time with Sharon. We spent mornings and evenings, sometimes alone and often together, sitting by the lake, listening to the silence, watching fish leap into new vistas while internally entertaining new dimensions of self.
The natural world is very much a part of my community. It is hard for me to feel connected when I live in large metropolitan areas. I feel much more at home in a woods or by a lake&emdash;especially Lake Michigan. In Western Wisconsin, I had a special relationship with eagles as witnesses and sources of empowerment and humility. In New York State where I spent most of my childhood, it was the creek, deep woods, the hills to climb and conquer that fed my soul.
My community also contains a sense of purpose for me. I need to be of service in ways that take advantage of what I have to offer. That has often meant in recent years traveling to places that are receptive to my notions of grief as transforming&emdash;where, for a short time, I become a part of that community's efforts to deal with grief and loss.
My community can also involve wounded people who have something to teach me, who in the integrity of honoring their suffering validate my importance to them at that moment&emdash;and for whom I do the same. Two or more people form community, even if it is a chance encounter on the street in a strange city, or the result of many hours of intensive psychotherapy. How often I have heard of hospice nurses, for example, gaining enormously from the few hours they spent with someone just prior to their death&emdash;not to mention what a courageous gift they have given to that person as they negotiated that final pathway.
We also need people in the physical, interactive community. Family can provide many of the essentials others must find in the larger community. We also need people to help us with survival tasks that come from, for example, living in a Great Lake snow belt, such as watching out for each other during harsh weather. We can also feel invigorated by the kind of people who have made conscious choices to be in our community.
Mobility has its price. We miss funerals, opportunities to say good-bye in person to many friends. We miss birthday parties, retirement ceremonies, conventional ways to witness and validate significant life transitions. Email and cyberspace can't replace the hugs, shared tears and laughs of being there.
It is what we miss that also helps us appreciate what we have even at a distance&emdash;and what we must somehow find new ways to express and receive. Not being physically present challenges us to find spiritual ways to acknowledge our connections, our appreciation of the significance of these events. We run the risk of rejection and misunderstanding of our caring.
We often have people who have witnessed our life-long process of growth and change. We may have people and places of comfort and challenge; people who validate our process and our feelings. We have to make effort and intention to get together. There are few elements of community that we can take now for granted.
Despite our mobility, we are not without a healing community, one that can help us grieve, empower our creative urges and give us a sense of worth and place. All it requires is accepting we must create it.
The most important aspect of community is the one that lies within us that reaches beyond the physical and emotional limits of geography, family and friendship. We have within us all the gifts that have been given to us in this lifetime. Sometimes those gifts are accessible in terms of memories&emdash;and remind us that even in the darkest times, we have within us the essence of hope, love and the capacity to endure that others have modelled for us. At other times, these gifts come from the love and empowerment and the challenges they have posed for us.
How is that possible? Clearly many of us almost ritualistically give up much of what we traditionally assume community to contain&emdash;places where we belong, people who know us and our history, a defined role, predictable rituals for comings and goings, remembrance and play. At some point in life, we may hope that moving to another physical community is over&emdash;that here we can create a place we want to live the rest of our lives, along with the spiritual and psychological support and challenge we need.
For many of us, we are not the first generation of our families to be wanderers, in need of broader definitions of community. Many of our ancestors migrated, fled or were taken from Europe, Africa and Asia. There is a common ancestry of migrations even among many Native Americans. It is the American legacy, one that often differentiates us from those who share our ethnic backgrounds yet stayed behind, who still live in traditional communities, holding the values of sameness steeped in history, the holders of our transgenerational legacies.
My parents continued the migratory legacy of their parents, immigrants from Germany and Ireland, often in search of a place and the people that felt like home. In fact, the place I have finally settled&emdash;after six times moving away&emdash;is the one they yearned for. Not moving here literally broke my father's heart&emdash;he died suddenly two weeks after he realized it would not be possible to do so because of his responsibilities to the men who worked for him. Mere coincidence, or are there places of special significance that reach beyond our lifetimes?
Having violated so many of the basic tenets of traditional community, my definition naturally involves portability. Having lost the material base of "home" being a single place, or a role being defined over a lifetime, I look beyond appearances and images for a spiritual home and dynamic relationships that are sources of healing, growth and challenge. Like many others in the late twentieth century, I seek the essence of what connects us to others, what makes us a part of a global village, interdependent, able to witness and celebrate, challenge and support, carry a history and begin anew. We carry an internal torch passed on from previous generations, ready to inspire and empower succeeding generations to keep alive that flame of connection, legacy and spirit.
The way we find the essence of a community, whether or not it has healing capacities, however, is how it responds to us and we to it in times of change and crisis. Does our community have what it takes to validate our losses and support us during the process of grieving? Do we have a place in the healing, a sanctuary that gives us the safety for inward journeys and spiritual solace in our community?
I challenge each of you to redefine your notion of community by beginning to address the following questions. In so doing, you may become aware of parts of your community, however long and stable it may be, that are lacking. It may affirm that your community will not end simply because you move, retire, divorce or your children grow up and leave home.
What do you consider to be your community for healing? Who is a part of it?Are there parts of it that you carry within you, in the form of memories, empowerment, validations, your transgenerational histories, legacies?
Does your community have places you need to be? Is nature a part of it? Does it contain places of sanctuary, safety to explore your inner and outer worlds?
Does your community reach beyond the living, the tangible, the influences of any mortal creature?
Does it involve prayer, meditation, rituals of continuity and remembrance? Is God, a higher power, a sense of spiritual connectedness involved?
Is hope a part of your community? Who embodies that sense of hopefulness?
Is belief in a higher power a part of your community?
Is love a part of your community?
When do you need community?
When does community need you?
When is it healing for you?
What ingredients does it contain that aid in transforming loss into growth potential?
Is your community more than a geographical location, a church and/or an extended family?
Does your community have a recorded history, a way to note continuity of past, present and future?
Does it contain the created (i.e. by humans) part of the world?
Does it involve nature, seasons, places for you to belong and feel protected?
How does your community respond to you in times of crises?
Is it more than local-i.e. a global village, a personal definition of "those in communion with you"?
Can it be temporary, a product of a single encounter or a week together facing common life issues?
Are you ever the center of your own healing community?
Is your community a combination or a balance of your internal aspects and the world outside?
Does your community acknowledge its potential for darkness, control and manipulation and the importance of covenants for self responsibility?
When you consider these questions, who is it that you consider a part of your community?
Are these people living or dead?
Do they live near you or far away?
How difficult would it be to get in touch with them or they to get in touch with you?