When I was growing up in rural Indiana, a trip to the grocery store or to my grandparents house nearly always included a rehearsal of the history of our area. Heading from our house in any direction inevitably meant passing numerous friends’ homes, sites of teenage antics by one parent or the other, graves of long-gone relatives, or some landmark we all identified with. And this wasn’t just true for my family. Our community, as spread out and rural as it was, shared both a geography and a history. We belonged to the place as much as it belonged to us.
According to Al Hsu in chapter 6, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” of The Suburban Christian, this sense of historical anchoring is one reason why a sense of community often is lacking in the modern suburb.
“While we may have a facade of community and neighborhood, we actually have clusters of autonomous individuals and atomized family units with no historic or natural connections to their neighbors.”
The transient nature of 21st century living may be a hindrance to building a common history and sense of place with our actual geographic neighbors, but it doesn’t make it impossible. The chief antidote? According to Hsu, it starts with hospitality.
Hospitality can be as traditional as inviting neighbors over for a meal, or as radical as creating new neighbors by inviting missionaries or a struggling family to temporarily share your home. Hsu also suggests things like sharing lawn equipment or transforming personal space, like garages, into community space for neighborhood gatherings. Mostly, I’ve heard that hospitality is creating space in my life to share with other people. When my home, my hands, and my heart are available, I can help build community.
And in making myself available and sharing my life with those around me, we create a history together. It may not involve gravestones or landmarks, but it can be the starting point for making my neighborhood a community.
Links to this post:
LL’s “A Little Community”
Al’s book, The Suburban Christian
You guys are great — I am always so thankful to know people care about me. I’m doing fine. The Lord is good, is blessing my life, and is giving me some good resolution to a few difficulties that have plagued me this summer. (Lot’s to think and write about, actually!) The past couple of weeks have actually just been busy because I’ve been out of town a lot. I’m back, and my plan is to have something posted by the end of the evening.
(crickets chirping)
Charity, Miss you. Wonder how you’re doing.
Missing you. Dearly.
I loved your quote about hospitality being that you make space in your heart for others – and that doesn’t have to cost you financially.
Craver — I would say it’s NEVER too late to plan a block party. I’ll bet you would be the perfect host. I love what Stacy said about your front yard, too. I agree.
Ted — Thanks for your clarification. Having more than one job, having to work long hours at the one job, or having everyone in the family work in order to keep up with expenses certainly does put constraints on community.
Craver, Yes, good. Block parties. We had one but should have continued it. But we could get another one going, an annual summer block party sounds like a great idea.
Charity, I was referring to people who struggle with finances and in the case I cited because of mishandling or because of the cost of their home. Or for whatever other reason people have to keep the pedal going pretty hard to the detriment too often of relationships.
Your thought is an interesting one. Whenver people live in community it is surely humbling becasue over time there has to be forgiveness and working through conflicts and issues, but that should be growing times, not times that would dissolve community, though that certainly happens alot, unfortunately.
I wonder if it’s too late to plan a block party? We had a fun time at the last one, and it brought a few neighbors closer.
Ted — Tell me more about what you mean . . . are you referring to the debt of trying to live in a community where you have history? Or the actual costs involved in engaging in hospitality? I say both are real constraints that limit our involvement in community.
Charity, Wonderful thoughts here. Part of the problem also lies in getting into the ditch of debt or having to keep the payments going on mortgage, etc. But we have to ask and think in terms of what we can do, not with reference to our limitations.
Stacy — “Community” means so many things to so many people now. Because we lack connections with those geographically and historically close to us, we instead choose hobbies or interests or careers to connect us. Makes for a different kind of community, though not necessarily bad, I suppose.
I love the opening of this post especially. Someday you really must consider doing a longer work on the issue of place.
I just like this book. It really makes me think of the world around me.
I do think that communities in the states have lost their sense of community. One year, when I was teaching in Florida, we had our start of the year teacher’s meeting (with all of the teachers in the county) at a local church. One of my fellow teachers was really upset that the county did that. I just looked at him and mentioned something about a sense of community. He told me later it made him think instead of react. That was a new community and was very transient, so there were no stories like you have mentioned here. It was frustrating to live there for that reason.
I like the idea of making a public space for meeting with your neighbors. I believe Craver’s is his front yard. At my house in Texas (growing up) it was our front porch.
We do need to be more hospitable. People need to know that dropping by is not an inconvenience!
Thanks for sharing…