SCHOLAR ISLAND
COMMUNITY
"True religion and undefiled is let every one quietly have earth to manure."
Winstandley
(Founder of the digger's 1652 England)
"Each man went into the woods in the place where it was darkest and there was no path, for they thought it would be a shame to go in a group."
(Joseph Campbell was fond of quoting the passage from the legend of the Holy Grail where the Knights of the Round Table set forth on their quest)
"Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."
-Jeremiah 29:7
"we expect a theophany of which we know nothing but the place, and the place is called community."
-Martin Buber between Man and Man
"The sin of egotism always takes the form of withdrawal. When personal advantage becomes paramount, the individual passes out of the community."
-Richard Weaver (1910-1963)
"Amongst us God….has restored community, as it was in the beginning….We hope too that amongst us community is as vigorous and glorious, and is by God’s grace observed with as pure a heart….For not only have we put all our belongings into a common pool under the care of deacons, and live from it according to our needs: we praise God through Christ with one heart and mind and are eager to help one another….Everything which has served the purposes of self-seeking and private property….eating and drinking the sweat of the poor….and indeed everything which offends against love, all such things are abolished amongst us by the power of love and community…..And indeed no Christian or saint can satisfy God if he does not live in such a community."
(a pamphlet from Munster Germany 1534)
"Communal living is one of America's Great Alternative traditions. In a country largely devoted to a laissez-faire individualism, there has for centuries been a small but stalwart counterflow-a principled minority who have argued that cooperation is healthier than competition, that helpfulness is better than hostility, and that living in community with others is a concrete way in which one can contribute to a better and brighter human future."
Gone to Croatan
"Attachment to the soil is an inescapable aspect of the healthy psyche. Uprootedness is a kind of psychosis-sadly, rampant in our community-less society."
-Martin Lembec (1909-1990)
"Community should not be made into a principle; it, too, should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all time; always it must be the moments answer to the moments question , and nothing more."
Martin Buber
"Theosophists in other parts of the world thought to establish their own communities, too, and most of these shared in the general rejection of mainstream society that has since become the signature of the counter-culture. This had its most widespread popularity in the 1960s and 70s, but the idea of an alternative society didn't start them. We can trace some sense of alternative societies back to the Rosicrucian experiment, but the idea of a counter0culture as we know it emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This was something more than the "bohemia" of artists and poets that we associate with Paris and La Boheme. Rather than living unconventionally but still within society, alternative societies were just that-alternatives"
Gary Lachman
Politics and the Occult
"Like a necromancer, I can diagnose the modern condition of rootlessness and longing for community by examining the entrails of my own soul. I'm a good twentieth-century man. I have carved my individuality out of the rough marble that was given me, tasted freedom within the confines of my genetic and historical destiny. I have a rich inner life, and I pay attention tot he winds of the spirit. i live in complex harmony with my wife and take pleasure in grown and growing children. I have intimate friends, a circle of acquaintances, satisfying work, a modicum of fame, financial plenty, land, and horses. I have a privileged, lucky, or graced life. nevertheless, something is missing. i can't make out the shape of the void or trace an outline of the obscure object of my desire but I can name it-community."
Sam Keen
Hymns To An Unknown God
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop into a complete human being
A Cast Iron Programme for Communal Activity
(A proposed rule of life written by the New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter for the Jerusalem Community, a Maori settlement on the Wangunui River in New Zealand. )
Feed the hungry
Give drink to the thirsty
Give clothes to those who lack them
Give hospitality to strangers
Look after the sick
Bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when they come out of jail;
Go to neighbors funerals;
Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know
Help the doubtful to clarify their minds and make their own decisions.
Console the sad
Reprove sinners, but gently, brother and sister, gently
Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself
Put up with difficult people
Pray for whatever has life, including the spirits of the dead.
Where these things are done, Te Wairua Tapu (The Holy Spirit) comes to live in our hearts, and doctrinal differences and difficulties begin to vanish like the summer snow.....
Michael L. Budde & Robert W. Brinlow
The Church as Counterculture
"Over-population and over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human life of multiple personal relationships has become almost impossible. therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternatively humanize the metropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and co-operate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions.
All this is obvious today* and , indeed, was obvious fifty years ago. from Hilaire Belloc to Mr. Mortimer Adler, from the early apostles of co-operative credit unions to the land reformers of modern Italy and Japan, men of good will have for generations been advocating the decentralization of economic power and the widespread distribution of property. And how many ingenious schemes have been propounded for the dispersal of production, for a return to small scale "village industry." And then there were Dubreuil's elaborate plans for giving a measure of autonomy and initiative to the various departments of a single large industrial organization. there were the Syndicalists, with their blueprints for a stateless society organized as a federation of productive groups under the auspices of the trade unions. In America, Arthur Morgan and Baker Brownell have set forth the theory and described the practice of a new kind of community living on the village and small town level."
-Aldous Huxley (1958) Brave New World Revisited
"Earth shall be fair, and all her people one:
Nor till that hour shall God's whole will be done.
Now, even now, once more from earth to sky,
peals forth in joy man's old, undaunted cry-
Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!"
The Hymnbook, no 490
"Professor Skinner of Harvard has set forth a psychologist's view of the problem in his Walden Two, a Utopian novel about a self-sustaining and autonomous community, so scientifically organized that nobody is ever led into anti-social temptation and, without resort to coercion or undesirable propaganda, everyone does what he or she ought to do, and everyone is happy and creative. In France, during and after the Second World War, Marcel Barbu and his followers set up a number of self-governing, non-hierarchical communities of production, which were also communities for mutual aid and fully human living. and meanwhile, in London, the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by coordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to create a true community even in a metropolis."
-Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited
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