You remember that old story called “Stone Soup”? The stranger comes and the community is inclined to reject him, but he promises to make them soup from a stone. All he needs is a pot and water. They watch him stir, waiting for a miracle. He promises it’s well underway, but you know what would make this soup truly great? A little salt—which someone gives him. And a little potato—which comes from someone else. And some carrots. And a little rosemary.
And before you know it, the whole community is eating a stew they made themselves.
When I read this story as a student, I thought it was about the cleverness of a desperate man trying to survive, and the gullibility of those he took advantage of. (Come to think of it, that kind of encapsulates the world view I had at that time.)
But in adulthood, I see this totally differently. He was teaching them a lesson about the importance of community and interdependence. We’re stronger—better fed—when we work together.
And isn’t that the very heart of the Gospel?
If you haven’t picked up on it by now (ha!), I spend a lot of mental space wrestling the cultural norms under which I grew up and the way they do—or don’t—reflect the call of discipleship.
I grew up thinking you do things yourself and it’s shameful if you need help. To this day, I struggle with asking for help. I’m fine to ask for help, AS LONG AS I can reciprocate. I don’t like owing people.
This is very traditional American, but it’s not very… Jesus. I mean, there’s the whole thing about inviting the people who can’t pay you back.
Although come to think of it, that puts us on the strong side of the power dynamic—I’m not the only one who sees the power dynamic at play here, am I?—rather than the vulnerable side.
But Jesus also wanted us to embrace the vulnerable side of being in community. You know, like when someone is mad at you and sues you for your tunic, and Jesus said give him your cloak as well.
I think we stop when we get to these passages and squirm and then just sort of quit thinking about them. There are easier things we can pin our Christian identity to. Things that demand less of us. (But, but, but… I need my four jackets and three coats!)
There’s a disconnect between our cultural norm of expecting self-reliance from ourselves and everyone else, and the community that Jesus meant the Church (which is to say, the Kingdom) to be.
I got to thinking about this because of a column I was writing on Mary and Joseph losing Jesus on the way home from Jerusalem. My husband suggested the topic. “We’re meant to raise our families in community, not in isolation,” he said. “That’s what that story illustrates.”
Oh boy, did that ever resonate.
Special needs parenting has taught us the importance of community. My chromosomally-gifted daughter used to “elope,” that is, run off without warning. Once, we got caught chatting after church and realized she was gone, only to have someone come back in to tell us she was waiting at the van and wouldn’t come back in.
The more dramatic example was the day some middle school moms met at Barnes and Noble at the mall to discuss a school problem. I put her on the floor reading books in the children’s section, and when we finished, I sent a brother to tell her to pack up, because it was time to go. She told him “No;” he came to find me; I went to get her and found that she’d decided to “go” after all—but where, no one knew.
Mall security found her, eventually, wandering around Target. (Because she knew that was where we were “go”-ing next.)
The mall security people couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a wreck. It was because this wasn’t our first rodeo, and I knew my daughter well enough to know she would not willingly leave a place with lots of people and cool things to look at. She’s the only extrovert in the family. I knew she was there somewhere.
But another reason unfolded over the next 48 hours. By the time we were leading the choir on Sunday morning, nearly a dozen separate entities in our networks had told us they’d seen our girl wandering Target and were mobilizing networks, looking for phone numbers. Down syndrome families, school families, work colleagues, choir families.
Everyone had our backs. A city of 125,000, and everyone had our backs.
We are meant to raise our children in a village.
There are limits to that, of course, but how often have we bemoaned the loss of kids’ ability to leave the house at dawn in the summer and come back at twilight?
We talk about those days as if they were taken away from us, but they weren’t. We shut down our community building instinct... out of fear of being turned in to child protective services; out of fear of our kids being left behind in The Great Money Chase Of Life because they’re not doing enough structured activities to get into The Right College… out of fear of a boogeyman that doesn’t really exist.
This question of community versus self-reliance goes much farther than child-rearing, though. We spend so much time living as if human flourishing is a zero sum game. If I make space for someone else, my own interests will suffer. I have to protect my tax breaks, because my financial security (and comfort, but man, the line between those two is slipperier than the slipperiest slippery slope, isn’t it?) is more important than any global good that might come because we have, for instance, a sufficient tax rate to actually fully fund the education formula.
Immigration rhetoric is another place where this conflict is really clear.
On the one hand, a large portion of the religious community bemoans the falling birth rate. The First World is losing population; the U.S. has bucked that trend only because we’re still bringing in new citizens from elsewhere.
Since Covid, we’re also grousing all.the.time about the lack of employees to run service industries: construction guys who are so overbooked, they don’t even bother calling back; fast food restaurants closing at 6 p.m. because they don’t have sufficient staffing.
But who takes such jobs? A lot of immigrants.
And yet in spite of all these realities, the rhetoric about immigration is: DANGER! THEY’LL TAKE YOUR JOBS! THE DRUGS! It’s totally irrational, even before we consider “what would Jesus do?”
I guess what I’m getting at is that community is messy, it requires a give and take that we, in our self-focused, protect-my-own-no-matter-what-it-costs-others culture, are unwilling to accommodate.
These are complex questions. I don’t want to oversimplify. But I think we need to grapple with what we’ve lost in pursuit of rugged individualism. We’re stronger together, because God made us to be that way.