Missing 'thick community,' still

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Bonnie Kristian is my editor at The Week. She's also a columnist for Christianity Today. Her latest starts:

This is a season for taking stock of who we are, how we live, and what we are building. It is the best season, perhaps, to ask ourselves the question of poet T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock: “Have you built well?”

In 1934, Eliot penned The Rock to fundraise for 45 church buildings near London. Appropriately, his frequent theme was building—not only churches but also the church as a thick community, an institution, a people seeking knowledge of God, a sanctuary from alienation and futility.

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without,” Eliot said. So, how are we building?

The phrase "thick community struck me, and reminded me of something I wrote about a year ago this time: "In 2021, I need to rebuild my personal community."

Even before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer who works from home and who attends church once or twice a year. It didn't feel great! I could go days without leaving the house, even, unless I made a real effort. Oh, I have a few friends I see now and again, and sitting outside the coffee shop with a socially distanced group of men has saved my sanity over the last few months, but the truth is it has been awhile since I was enmeshed in the networks he describes here. I feel their absence.

To be sure, I'm not sure how to reclaim those networks for myself. But I've come to realize I need to try, somehow.

I haven't made great progress. I go to the coffee shop regularly, but mostly I just sit there alone.

Truth be told, I miss the church community I had 20 years ago -- miss it ferociously. When I left the church, I did a fair approximation of re-creating it among a group of people roughly my age who were regulars at the downtown coffee shop. But those folks have largely moved on. And I find myself missing the richness of my life during those years. Outside of the family in my house, the people I talk to most are online -- on Twitter or colleagues that I message throughout the day. I know I'm missing something important, something I love. I know I'm missing "thick community," and I don't have the foggiest idea how to rebuild it.