This weekend I visited Oxford to attend a short course at Plater College. The course was looking at ‘Changing Communities’. What a beautiful place Oxford is.What great people have frequented its streets.I thought to myself,‘If only I lived down here instead of Blackburn I would be more happy’.Life seemed perfect.Students sipped beer and read Dante on the enclosed lawn of University College, even bouncers smiled as they gently ejected a drunk from a city centre pub. This 'community' seemed to have everything that my own didn’t.Then the words of one of the great men to come out of Oxford University brought me away from this sense of perfection,Gerard Manley Hopkins :-

'Birds build - but not I build....
....But strain....and not breed one that wakes.'

This made me realise that it’s how you feel inside and not actually where you are, no matter how pleasant,that makes you happy. If you feel the melancholy that Hopkins shows here, no aesthetic delights will lift your mood for long.Then I started to wonder about what communities actually are, where do we as individuals fit in and,indeed,if they exist.

What is ‘community’? Whilst on the short course the most plausible definition I heard went like this,‘A union of beings working for a common cause’.A common unity. I quite like this definition as it includes all living creatures,from ants to humans. Human community is by far the most interesting and complex,and urban community is the most fascinating of them all.


Some people believe that our neighbourhoods are communities, we have community centres,communal shops and laundries etc. These facilities show people uniting for a common cause . I’ve begun to hear the words ‘global community’ more and more often.We have the technological media such as the World Wide Web that ‘unites’ peoples across the Earth. Then we have the sceptics,who believe that communities no longer exist,they are left behind in a rural golden age where everyone cared about each other and looked out for each other. They could leave their doors open and sleep soundly in their beds at night.They worked simply to sustain their selves and their fellow villagers.

So working from the definition of community, given above, all these examples can be classed as communities. But something just doesn’t sit right for me. The definition feels flawed. Looking at urban communities,how can we be in communion with each other, which is where the word community derives, yet we hear constantly about neighbourhood gang fights,burglaries, muggings and murders.Think about the TV programmes such as ‘Neighbours at War’.And how about global communities? Countries have nuclear weapons trained on each other and several nations are deep in civil war. The problem I am outlining briefly with the definition given earlier does not just belong to the present but is often rooted in the distant past, including the so-called Golden Age communities. Thinking about the rural villages of the 1700’s it is more likely the townsfolk were too much in fear of the landlord to step out of line and resigned themselves to a robotic way of life.

The day I returned from Oxford I read an article that’s in this edition of Edges,about a young woman and her battle with anorexia and bullying.Why do children bully other children? Going back to my primary school years I remember one girl who was excluded from school community by her peers.Why? Because everyone said ‘she smelled’. You know the strange thing about it is that she didn’t smell one bit. Looking back at the way she was treated I feel guilt, and I wonder if several years of nonsensical exclusion had any long term effect on her. I felt that in my actions I also had to exclude her to feel included,to belong to a ‘community’ that was fundamental to my life at that point.Youngsters can be the worst perpetrators of this kind of abuse. What messages about community are children receiving to behave in this way? I was united with classmates in a common cause to exclude this girl and,therefore, make her school life hell,so were we a community? Or is exclusion part of the natural dynamic of community?

In the article the young woman goes on to talk about her treatment by the medical profession.It is appalling that in this age , illnesses that maybe of the nature of the mind are still treated with disdain. Medicine is a great and rapidly progressive science but as we stand on the eve of the outbreak of what will be one of the major killers in this century, psychiatry is still regarded as a waste product of medicine, and funded as such.That major killer is Depression.This leaves a hard question to be asked. How can the self-same profession who treat you,and your families,with no ‘sympathy’ and talk to you as if you are ‘stupid’,be involved in or indeed be the innovators, of projects such as Community Care. No wonder the news reports breakdowns in this initiative on a regular basis.I don’t see any form of communion when fellow human beings are treated like this.I do not intend just to single out the NHS which is over worked and seemingly on the verge of breakdown itself,but to look at ourselves as a people, and our individual attitudes to others.Have we got any community to speak of? Or is it just relegated to a word on a page?

This evening I watched a rather disturbing film called ‘American Psycho’ at the cinema.The main character was called Patrick Bateman. A person you may call an ‘upstanding member of the community’.He was a stockbroker on Wall Street,he paid his taxes, rode in a Limousine and wore Versace suits.The high society he moved within was vulgar and soulless.The order of esteem was based on where you dined,what designer label you wore and the architecture of your thousand dollar business card.However, Patrick Bateman was different from the rest ,he was shown to be a serial killer. So was the morbid unreality of these peoples lifestyles that no-one noticed,or no-one cared to notice, his increasing abstract behaviour and twisted comments. We were shown him killing a homeless man,terming him a ‘loser’ because he had lost his job to alcoholism,a prostitute in a narcissistic sexual escapade and a fellow stockbroker, amongst others. It would be easy to say, ‘Oh! He’s just a nutter and it’s only a film anyway’,and file anything else that could be said away, but I think there are a couple of important points here. His so-called friends were oblivious to Bateman’s ludicrous descent into narcissistic insanity, they were too self interested.How well do we actually know the people around us? I think of those words,“They seemed such a nice person”.How many of us walk past homeless people and prostitutes,and do not acknowledge them as fellow human beings, even when they try to speak to us? Don’t homeless people and prostitutes, for instance, deserve the common courtesy I’m sure would be shown to Patrick Bateman on the street? If indeed community does exist as a fundamental state of how we act out our daily lives,then a natural dynamic of it seems to be to exclude. I cannot accept this to be true.

I do believe that community exists today, as it did yesterday and will tomorrow, but not in the way that the word is commonly used.I feel true community is born and lives in the heart of the individual.The outer structures that mankind create and sustain are useful,but only in as much as a person has community within their heart.This was what was flawed about my thinking about Oxford in the opening paragraph, you can be and live anywhere and be in community, as long as you are in communion within yourself.

The mystics often talk about a feeling of communion with all of existence, including God. When I first read this I thought ‘what rubbish’,but even though I don’t feel this myself I can see where they are coming from.

The commandment:-‘ Love thy neighbour as yourself’, is the realisation of community. It is difficult as it places the onus on you and I,no structure or program,no authority or group can realise this true community without individuals living out of this commandment.When you are sympathetic to a person and don’t treat them as stupid,but treat them with love, you are in communion with that person. We need more and more people to live in this way, that is the only way to make true community really exist.It’s hard to change the way we behave towards others,the only reason I try is because of the actions of other inspiring individuals. As many great figures of history have proved,one person can start a revolution,so it’s we as individuals who have the power to re-create and sustain true community. I find it very difficult to live out and the signs show that most of mankind does also. But in the words of Nelson Mandela:-‘ Your playing small does not serve the world’.