The Thread #9, Strong, Supportive Communities

No single idea has more punctuated my life experiences than the benefits of a supportive community. You never have and you never will hear me extolling the notion that we are self made people. I do not believe it in any sense because in order for that to have any validity, we would have to strip away the thousand of years of built up support which gave us a very high platform from which to start making ourselves.

It is also very false to assume that we all start off from, if not the same height of platform, at least platforms that are equivalent in terms of their ability to launch us into our life endeavors. No, if this is a race, then some people start off very near the finish line, or beyond it, and some start far back and behind great obstacles. In fact, for some, there is no race because those obstacles are all booby trapped, and one of them will be their undoing.

I very well understand that I was positioned well by my childhood to run a good race. Many factors went into that positioning, but one beyond immediate family really stands out in my mind, and that was the community of Weddington. Around the elementary school and the church across the road were the events that, all put together, gave the children a real boost. We were a part of something bigger than our selves or our families. The community picked up our education where our families left off and taught us things that our families could not.

There is little wonder that I came to see church as the best of all civic organizations.
As a matter of fact, I rather resented when religion got in the way of its being a great civic center. In the late 40's and 50's, Weddington Methodist Church was a beehive of activity, and it was there that the families of Weddington held those events that made being a child then and there so wonderful.

I will go so far as to say that there is no substitute for a supportive community. No parent or set of parents can or will construct an environment, free of community, that supplants the very active and supportive community that gives the individual the sense of being a part of that thing that is so much larger than themselves.

We are built in such a fashion that we are unable to be complete within ourselves. It is only through interaction with other humans that we are fulfilled in any sense. Men have honored this truth for eons. The self made man or woman does not exist, and where there is someone who claims to be such, he or she is nothing more than a self deluding individual. The parents who claim to be able to oversee and determine, in total, the education of their children are cheating their children out of their chance to understand their rightful place in the community of man.

Stories of people who are isolated in nature with only the animals as friends are stories of how those humans became like the animals, not about how the animals became like the people. The community always ends up being an expanded community of the teachers, the animals in these cases. Contrary to what some would say, these stories actually prove that without community, man is nothing, and that he will find his supportive community wherever he can find it.

As my life went along, I learned more and more that the religious aspects of my life had been largely contrived. I am no atheist or any such being. I can not wrap my mind around or accept the idea that I am capable of saying that there is no God. But, I still see the church as being at its best as a community of people who give support to and direction to the lives of the people that make up the community. I accept the existence of a God that is somehow in charge of the whole of the world and humanity in particular. I am willing to wait until my death to get to know this God as well as some claim to know Him here on Earth.

But, so long as I am here on Earth, and my mental capacities are only capable of telling me about this existence, I will spend my time and my efforts telling people that they are best fulfilled by being a part of a community of people whose main purpose is to give support and direction to all its members. That could be a church or it could be a combination of many things. If you choose to give up that support, you have only chosen to cheat yourself out of what should have been your birthright.

As I am expanding my knowledge of what became of the students I once taught, I am finding that most of them have chosen to seek that community through a church. That is not surprising, this is the South. But, I am also finding that the religiosity of the younger group, that is younger than myself, is much more pronounced than what was even considered in good taste in earlier years. I do dearly hope that the overt religiosity does not translate into communities where people are not allowed to grow as they feel the need to grow. Community that has indoctrination as a part of its program can be very destructive.

Out of healthy communities, be they church based or otherwise, come the range of human interests, talents, world views, professions and the gamut of what it takes for communities to be self sustaining and self correcting. If and when a community ceases to have the power of self correction, then it is no longer community, it is a prison for most of the people who are caught in its grasp.