Out of my forty years of working in community organizations, including fifteen living in an intentional community, has come the insight that there are nine elements essential to a healthy organizational or community life. These elements begin with six attitudes:
1. Gratitude. There is an enormous amount for which we can be grateful in living in the community in which we find ourselves. The setting of our community—whether it is urban or rural, whether our neighbors are close or farther away—has advantages we can easily take for granted. We have neighbors who want the best for our community—even though we may have difficulty in seeing that from time to time. We have roofs over our head and doors to close behind us—or to open to the people in our lives. We can take stock of how fortunate we are in these regards; and they are merely the beginning of the long list each of us can make of what we have to be grateful for.
2. Enthusiasm. There are days, many days for some of us, when we feel burdened by the challenges that life presents—be that our own life or the life of our community. Very likely each of us has to work hard at some point to muster the enthusiasm to tackle those challenges: from small ones like a home repair that is needed suddenly; to medium-sized ones like navigating the bureaucratic requirements of our community life; to large ones, like enduring the way in which we have dealt with each other on issues that we disagree about. All this bad weather needs enthusiasm to sail through, and we can be enthusiastic about the challenges in our lives, because it is there that we find our growing point.
3. Objectivity. What our neighbors say and do almost always elicits an emotional reaction in us. Some of it is joy; what we are challenged by are reactions such as anger, envy, and fear. These make it very difficult to be objective; and we need objectivity to see what is really happening in our shared life. Often we have emotional responses to what we hear each other saying and see each other doing. How much is there to be gained by putting aside our emotional responses and seeing what people really intend with their words and actions? Seeing what is really there rather than making up a story about what has happened—even when we do not want to see it for whatever personal reason we have—is essential to a healthy community life.
4. Interest. We cannot know what is going on with each other if we do not take an interest in each others’ lives. Our natural framework of reference is our own life; but this limits our perspective. Taking interest in each other can give us the breadth of perspective we need to approach our shared life in a way that bears fruit for all of us.
5. Understanding. If we do take an interest in each other, then we can begin to understand what others intend with their words and actions. Our interest can also help us understand how the things we say and do affect and are viewed by the other people in our community. Our individual understanding, however much we may broaden our perspective, is necessarily limited, but that limitation can be overcome through talking with other people and arriving at a shared understanding that arises out of our combined perspectives.
6. Seeing the best in each other. This is easy when we are dealing with someone we like; it can be very difficult when someone has slandered or abused us and disrespected the innermost core of our being. And there is hardly a one among us, and I speak from my experience of myself, who has not done things that have darkened him- or herself in the eyes of others. Yet there is, at the very least, a kernel of goodness in each one of us; and we can find it even in our so-called opponents, hidden within the darkness we see surrounding them. It is there that we can find the human being who is struggling just as much as we are.
These things are not easy to do even one time; and they are harder to keep doing. As Aristotle said, it is easier to become a good person than to be one. Life is not asking us to take part in our community as people who have perfected their goodness; it is asking us, though, to come prepared to acknowledge the efforts of others when we are challenged in these respects.
However imperfectly we achieve the elements of this outlook, if we do succeed at least in some measure in laying the foundation for fruitful conversation, a foundation that is built on the successive elements of gratitude, enthusiasm, objectivity, interest, understanding, and acknowledgement, then we can create the possibility of working together in an harmonious and fruitful way as a single whole.
Our speaking. In addition, the way in which we speak, the way in which we use our unique, individual voices, is the most powerful way in which we embody these six attitudes.
Many of us are familiar with the “four rules” of speaking. These are four questions to ask ourselves before we speak:
Is what I have to say truthful?
Is what I have to say respectful?
Is what I have to say necessary?
Is it the right time to say what I have in mind?
If we can answer yes to all these questions, then it is the right time to speak.
With our speaking, we can do three things, which are the final elements of building community:
7. Speak to enlighten or inform, rather than deceive or obscure.
8. Speak to comfort or heal, rather than wound.
9. Speak to create or inspire, rather than destroy or deflate.
We can also do the opposite of these: we can misinform or deceive; discomfort or wound; or we can destroy. When we follow the four rules, our speaking will have at least one of the three positive effects.
Taken together, these nine elements, the six attitudes and the three uses of speaking, provide the basis on which a vibrant, joyful community life can be built.
