Community

"It is in this wrestling that Jacob 'prevails with God', and realises that he has seen God face to face. He has overcome not God but his own rivalry. After this mysterious struggle he was able to recognise his wrongdoing and look his brother Esau in the face. Thus he was able to learn to live in peace with his brother—and become Israel, a community of brethren."

"A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves."

"Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world."

"Theological condemnation of others, which breaks off fellowship in either judgment or contempt, is impermissible."

"When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city ? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" What will you answer? "We all dwell together To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?"

"I think that individual voices are not as strong as a community of voices. If we can make a community of voices, then we can speak more truth. Also in a community, we learn to listen"

"A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm."

"Without community there is no liberation."

"Who is our neighbor? We know we don't have to look far: our neighbor is the brother who passes by us. [...] To be Christian, we must love our neighbor now. So not a platonic love, not an ideal love: active love. [...] To love, Christians must do as God does: not expect to be loved, but love “first.”"

"Chiara Lubich, L'arte di amare , Città Nuova, 2005"

"Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood."

"The brotherhood of the community is indeed the ground in which the individual is ethically realized. But the community is the frustration as well as the realization of individual life. Its collective egotism is an offense to his conscience; its institutional injustices negate the ideal of justice; and such brotherhood as it achieves is limited by ethnic and geographic boundaries."

"Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community."

"Nations had risen against nations, employing the subtlest devices of mechanism and mind to waste, and excruciate, and overthrow. The great community of mankind had been subdivided into ten thousand communities, each organized for the ruin of the other."

"Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, an educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education, was inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction."

"As a community goes so goes the nation."