A community to be truly community, must have a quality of unselfconsciousness about it.
Interpretation
True community thrives on genuine connections without self-consciousness.
Madeleine L'Engle highlights that for a community to be authentic and fulfilling, its members must engage with one another without the burdens of self-awareness or self-doubt. This 'unselfconsciousness' fosters an environment of trust and openness, where interactions are driven by sincerity rather than social anxieties or facades.
In practice
During a community meeting where genuine collaboration is encouraged.
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
What makes community organizing especially attractive is the faith it places in the ability of the poor to make decisions for themselves.
Curation comes up when people realize that it isnβt just about information seeking, itβs also about synchronizing a community.
It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
Without the ability to plant roots and invest in your community or your school - because you're paying 60, 70, 80 percent of your income to rent - and eviction becomes something of an inevitability to you, it denies you certain freedoms.
In any democratic, civilized - even non-democratic nations, if you are a nation, it means to say that in our case, if there's a hurricane in Louisiana, the people of Vermont are there for them. If there's a tornado in the Midwest, we are there for them. If there's flooding in the East Coast, the people in California are there for us.
Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.
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