Down the Rabbit Hole in Search of Community

by Tyler Hambley

This essay was reprinted from the April issue of the Catholic Citizen, a newsletter of the Church of the Assumption in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is reprinted here with permission from the author.

Long before I became Catholic, I stumbled onto a dinner hosted by a Catholic Worker community. That night I felt a little like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. The shift from what I’d thought I knew to the new world being revealed in front of me was as exhilarating as it was bewildering. People from drastically different walks of life—rich, poor, black, white, young, old, clergy, and lay—deliberately sitting down together for a festive evening of agenda-less joy just didn’t register with the social experiences I’d had prior. For as little as these folks shared in background, they seemed to come alive—to bloom fully—when praying, eating, and celebrating life together. And that togetherness, it was easy to see, was coextensive with the liturgical gestures of the Lord’s Table that had initiated it.

Naturally, I came back later that same week and before long, I was hooked by that little community. I remain hooked to this day, some twelve years later, though I’ve never quite managed to stop stumbling and tumbling. Perhaps that’s because thick Catholic community life remains a definitive challenge to the culture of individualism that sticks so stubbornly within my veins.

Looking back, I was drawn to Catholic community for ulterior motives, though I didn’t know it. For example, I wanted to be around other people who cared about the “least of these” because I thought such concerns led to “activism”—an “activism” no different from the many secular efforts for “social justice” or “advocacy” I’d participated in elsewhere. Likewise, I was probably attracted to community life for the opportunity to save a little money through the sharing of resources or the chance to fill out my resume with collaborative writing endeavors. Perhaps too, I wanted to be around other Christians who were serious about tradition and orthodoxy, though I was less trusting of the traditional pursuit of simplicity and poverty for love of God and neighbor that the Saints exemplified. Mostly, I found myself just trying to fill a gap in my otherwise full but disparate social calendar. And hey, the food was good!

Yet, the more I stuck around, the more my attempts to shore up my identity as a unique and “caring”—yet still self-sufficient—individual got frustrated. This community and the daily practices I shared with them wouldn’t let me turn the situation into a project of my own self-making. Furthermore, my attempts to “help” my poorer housemates—to do for them—seemed less and less substantial than our merely being present with one another as friends, at a personal sacrifice. Favors were still asked, of course, but I was the one asking for favors as much as my homeless friends were. One such friend helped me build a wood fence and a railing on the front porch of our hospitality house. I couldn’t have done it without him. And so, a mini-economy of mutual gift-giving began to form through our fellowship. Communal presence itself was making each one of us whole in ways we could not imagine on our own. Yet, despite all of this, bewilderment continued for me because I did not yet have—and almost certainly still do not have—a truly Catholic understanding of what a human being is.

Consider what we’re all up against. Our social order assumes that human beings are first and foremost individuals, and human society is a collection of individuals who, when associating together, must find ways to preserve a negotiated freedom from the conditions and burdens that the presence of others places on us. Notice that the isolated individual is taken for granted as the starting point for social and political reflection. So when we individuals must interact, we do this largely through the categories of—but also all of the practices involved with—“rights,” contracts, and management. These categories only further enhance our individualism, even when we use them as the basis for “community.” Yet, we have a hard time imagining what other basis for togetherness there could be. No amount of opt-in, voluntary social outings can cover over these more fundamental arrangements that keep us held at arm’s length from one another.

But is this social order constructed as it is on the foundation of the human-being-as-individual actually congruent with a Catholic view of the person? After all, we are made in the image and likeness of a triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yes, there are three persons, but only together do they share one essence. Community—not individualism—is written into the very image of God. If we are made in that image, our personhood is unintelligible—even incomplete—apart from a deeply shared life with others. In other words, how we understand our very being cannot begin with me or you as an isolated monad. There is no such being! Rather, to be a unique person—to be truly seen and beheld by others—is to be a community-being or a being-as-communion.

So whenever I notice drastically different people finding new life together—when, for example, I recently experienced a group of Catholics who have committed to being present at a homeless encampment in St. Paul—I’ve come to believe it’s because God has made us for one another at our very core! We are not complete on our own, not apart from deep interdependence. We are freed for, not from, one another. Counterintuitively, then, our individuality—our personhood—only truly comes alive within the confines of that social performance called Church, a performance so extensive that no area of our lives gets left untouched.

We are not complete on our own, not apart from deep interdependence. We are freed for, not from, one another.

Tyler Hambley

Most of us, of course, aspire to more substantive Catholic community. But like Alice chasing her rabbit, we can hardly imagine how deep the rabbit hole really goes. What new wonders might we find there? An outside observer could describe the community I am a part of as “advocating” for “social justice” or as having “diversity-focused social events for Millennials.” But this would really be to misunderstand what we are up to from a Catholic perspective. For what we all need is not rehabilitation back into the production and consumption cycles of a society built upon cordoned-off self-sufficiency, but rather new mini-societies which discover what is truly good, beautiful, and just for each, only along the way of discovering shared sets of practices that extend out from our Lord’s table into our daily lives: preparing meals together, sharing our possessions, performing the works of mercy, giving and receiving forgiveness, pursuing friendship with the poor, gardening, praying together, practicing hospitality, and celebrating life. In all of this, there will be much stumbling. We may even appear “mad as a hatter.” But that’s what thick Catholic community is all about: opening up a new world of wonder, one little tumble at a time, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Tyler Hambley helps edit the Catholic Citizen at the Church of the Assumption.