Communities Directory
by Joseph Wakelee-Lynch

Just about 18 years ago, I joined an intentional Christian community in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and his secretary of state, Alexander Haig, was eager to confront the Soviet Union, perhaps by using nuclear weapons. I had recently spent five weeks in Japan, highlighted by a sojourn to Hiroshima, and I was determined to respond politically and personally. Fortunately, I had discovered a community in which my political commitment could be united with my faith.

I vividly recall a bright, warm, late Sunday afternoon in D.C. At the intersection of Columbia Road and 16th Street, the sun illuminated several churches, turning their walls golden. I peered down Columbia Road into the neighborhood where I'd make my new home, a neighborhood ravaged by riots in 1968. I uneasily pondered the step I would soon take. But the reassuring words of the Psalmist were in my mind:

"Lord, you have assigned me my
portion and my cup;
you have made my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful
inheritance"
(Psalm 16:5-6, NIV)

The choices that people make to live in community, it seems to me, are probably rooted in both a critique of culture -- a society's politics, lifestyles, ecological policies, power structures, gender relations -- and belief, or for religious people faith, in an alternative. For most of us, building community engages our head and our heart, and communities born in one without the other are probably destined to fail. The absence of flexibility and love and the absence of vision are usually fatal to community life. For religious people, faith may also be essential; it certainly is a kind of community grease that can keep the wheels turning even on uphill slopes.

The Communities Directory, published by the Fellowship for International Communities (FIC), is a massive compendium of community models, the work of many hearts and the fruit of social and political critique. The current volume is the third edition produced by FIC, a nonprofit, educational organization that acts as an information hub and a community-building resource. FIC also offers referrals and support resources to people who want to learn about community living, including weekend conferences on managing the nuts and bolts of life together.

The communities included defy categorization: rural, urban, Christian, New Age, environmental, vegetarian, lesbian, nonviolent, egalitarian, service-oriented, devoted to political resistance and civil disobedience.

Compiling this resource was a multi-year project for Jillian Downey and Elph Morgan, the project's managing editors. To gather information, they mailed several thousand surveys and traveled the country in an old RV to visit communities. They paid their way by offering 10 hours of work a week in return for room and board.

The "Communities Directory" consists of a list of communities with their self-descriptions, articles about many aspects of community life, an annotated reading list, maps, and a listing of organizations serving as resources for community or alternative lifestyles. Information is included about more than 700 communities, more than 100 of them located outside of North America. That the communities have provided their own descriptions is noteworthy. The editors offer a kind of caveat emptor to readers about evaluating information included in the book. "The FIC," explain the editors, "asked communities to participate only if they do not advocate violent practices or do not interfere with their members' freedom to leave their group at any time." But Downey and Morgan caution that the FIC has few resources with which to verify any group's claims. In effect, they've asked participating organizations to follow an honor code.

The communities included defy categorization: rural, urban, Christian, New Age, environmental, vegetarian, lesbian, nonviolent, egalitarian, service-oriented, devoted to political resistance and civil disobedience.

One, made up of eight people, was formed as recently as 1997; another, the Hutterian Brethren, was formed in 1528, and has 40,000 members spread throughout communities across the U.S. and Canada.

In fact, the diversity of views about this most excruciating and exhilarating of ventures is a great strength of the volume. The directory includes articles about cults, etiquette for community visitors and how to nurture longevity, along with useful advice about the finances of community: land trusts, common ownership, housing zoning laws, and even capitalization.

It's gratifying to read the comments of a Catholic Worker member, who also touches on the Atlantic Life Community, because those communities often work on political resistance as much as on their ways of living together. And the reflections of a lesbian community that is determined to counter patriarchy are enlightening for anyone interested in examining power and gender relations.

The book offers a great deal for communitarians to wonder about, though much of it is admittedly based on anecdotal evidence. For instance, eras that spawned communities were the 1990s, the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1930s and 1940s. Most communities fail before reaching their fifth year, perhaps because people change, because a community lacks the flexibility to adjust to the changes in its members, or because a community's central mission or purpose is too vague, making expectations muddy and conflict difficult to resolve.

The Communities Directory is very much a handbook on forming and living in communities. Maybe that's why the most gripping articles are about death: the death of a community and the suicide of a community member who lost a battle with depression.

Carolyn Shaffer, in "Committing to Community for the Long Term: Do We have What It Takes?" writes about the loss of her labor of love. She takes the reader through a forest of doubts and questions as she relates how she finally agreed to disband a community that two years earlier she had pledged herself to through a vow much like the marriage promise ("for richer and for poorer, in illness and in health, until death do us part"). She thought she'd live the rest of her life there. Shaffer draws crucial distinctions between duty's burden and commitment's engagement, and she makes clear the danger of subtly rooting a selfish investment of one's ego in a group's altruistic goals. Most of all, she helps to map out the complex and sometimes shifting ground of integrity on which we stand in community. One must be able to stand on integrity, Shaffer advises, to remain in community. But knowing what integrity demands we do, and discerning when integrity requires that we act, or not act, is the height of wisdom for those who see community life as a long-term endeavor.

In "Mental Illness in Community: What Can We Offer?" Rajal Cohen recounts the life-changing experience of her friendship with Delancey, a woman who came to community with a history of depression and suicide attempts. Cohen goes partway down roads of questions: Did the community fail Delancey? Did it fail its members? Were its decision-making structures part of the community's inability to solve Delancey's problems? Those torturous roads have no ends, as Cohen recognizes, and she brings the reader back to the harsh but unavoidable reality that life in community must be more than a political experiment, even if it is partly that. Community at its fullest is a way of life, with all its tragedies, joys, victories and unanswered questions.

The death of community, like the death of a loved one, takes years to accommodate to (probably, one never gets over it). It is the loss of a vibrant agent of love, at the least. We may hope that a sense of peace will someday follow today's agony and grief. But when one leaves a community in anger, perhaps we should hope to gain humility as much as peace. Those departures are akin to divorce, and in relationships, as perhaps all of life, true wisdom lies in understanding one's faults. The Communities Directory serves its purpose as an encyclopedic primer; it also sheds a bit of light on the mysteries of, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, "life together."

Joseph Wakelee-Lynch is a writer and editor in Berkeley, Calif. For the past six years, he hosted a radio interview program in Claremont, Calif.