tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20704380.post787288592447823577..comments2024-03-22T17:35:52.045-04:00Comments on Extra Thoughts: What is so bad about unifying your worldview and your self-selected groups?Lydia McGrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20704380.post-17926333386285634822014-04-06T12:23:15.751-04:002014-04-06T12:23:15.751-04:00Spot on, Tony. And I note that the Vietnamese keep...Spot on, Tony. And I note that the Vietnamese keep coming back to your parish. This is presumably because in a larger sense they do feel welcome, even though in various cultural ways the parish isn't "theirs." We all have to learn to roll with this sort of thing. I've read of young people who have said they don't want to go to a church that has primarily older people. In one way I understand that but in another way I want to suggest that they get over it.Lydia McGrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00423567323116960820noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20704380.post-44354543229625636602014-04-04T10:38:44.871-04:002014-04-04T10:38:44.871-04:00Lydia, this is so true. There is indeed a certain...Lydia, this is so true. There is indeed a certain degree of tension between being "a community" and being welcoming to those not (yet) members of the community. <br /><br />One of the important things to keep in mind is the distinction between differences that are independent of the basic, core meaning of the community, and differences that relate specifically to the core meaning of the community. Here is just a simple example: There are very fine, excellent Catholics from Vietnam. They attend our church because they are Catholic. I rather strongly suspect that they don't get their "community" needs satisfied in doing so. And since there are only a few Vietnamese here, it is hard to see how they COULD. <br /><br />One of the aspects of forming a truly strong community is that the members share living (even very temporary living, such as 3 hours on Friday nights) <i>even about peripherals, accidentals, and purely ad hoc choices</i> that have nothing to do about the core meaning of why they are a community to begin with. We play poker on Friday nights: playing poker can be done with beer or wine, with potato or nachos, with wild cards or no wild cards, directly with money or with chips, and on and on into ever more accidental accretions. Yet OUR poker group has made choices that specify some of these and exclude others, and anyone walking into our Friday night sessions might feel rather not united with everyone else when he doesn't know all the "rules" (even if they aren't actually rules, they are just the most common ways we do them) and when we do things one way and he is used to doing them a different way. That's not <i>exclusionary</i> of us, that's just simply the sheer meaning of forming a concrete community - a community <i>isn't just everyone doing whatever they feel like with no reference to how others are deciding the same choices.</i> A community, in order to come together in activities, must share living and must mutually act in such ways that they are doing the same things the same way, more or less, even with respect to accidentals, and so the core nature of the community is distinct from the concrete expression of that community after many years of such activities and choices. <br /><br />I don't like Vietnamese food, and don't particularly like the smell of it cooking, and frankly since so much of the non-essentials of community living end up involving sharing of food, it is unlikely the above Vietnamese and I will ever really feel much unity in community with each other in the normal sense of the word. That's OK, a person doesn't need to <i>feel</i> all of the pleasing aspects of a tight community - feeling loved, cherished, invited, welcome, being part of - in order to actually BE a member of a formal community which is organized along other lines and for different purposes than those feelings. Indeed, other than family, most communities are in fact organized for explicitly more formal purposes than "feeling a part of a community", everything from chess clubs to national political parties exist for reasons that are independent of your feelings. Sure, whites will feel more comfortable at a gathering of Republicans in Orange County CA than blacks will, but that's not because "being Republican" is either formally or materially related to being white or excluding blacks - it is an accidental accretion to being Republican. The accidental accretions arise from place, time, individual personalities, and singularities of historical events or choices that could easily have been different. These don't reflect either an intention or preference to "exclude" those who are not comfortable with all of those accretions.Tonynoreply@blogger.com