This is from Touchstone journal, a Journal of Mere Christianity, September issue 2005.
This is what it said about community.

As I read Anthony Esolen's mostly excellent "Where Went the Neighborhood?" (May 2005), I recalled a story by John Cheever, "The Enormoous Radio," in which a well-to-do woman's new radio maysteriously begins to broadcast conversations from her neighbors' apartments. She is saddened and angered by the daily recital of woe that she hears, yet she takes no action on her neighbors' behalf. Like that woman, we Americans, adrift and isolated, have a love-hate relationship with community.

We long to "know" our neighbors, but we do not want to pay too high of a price for the privilege. We mourn the disappearance of the community of extended family, but many of us, inclding my husband and myself have been willing to tear ourselves from the place of our roots for the sake of economic gain. It is hard to miss the irony as Mr. Esolen bemoans his poor Canadian neighbors' desire to leave their village in search of higher wages, even as he is blessed with the happy circumstance of being financially able to manage a second home where he spends idyllic summers in an old-fashioned neighborhood.

I am fortunate to live year-round in an "interntional community," among neighbors who live around our Orthodox Christian church. Like West Arichat, we are in a lovely, semi-rural area, and visitors are frequent. They love our hospitality, the sigh of children playing and neighbors picnicking together on the community lawn, the bells calling us from our homes to services. All of it is delightful and we are blessed.

But real community is conderably messier than these pictures suggest. In a real community, people do not necessarily "like" everyone else. At various times, some neighbors are strong and giving, others are weak and needy. The demands of caring for the needy ones can grow tiresome, even leading to resentment and avoidance. My neighbors and I live relatively modestly and we live in the shadow of our church (two criteria mentioned by Mr. Esolen as necessary for friendliness and stability, yet we still get divorced, struggled with depression, disappoint each other regularly, and have our hearts broken by children who reject our faith in favor or more alluring delights such as drugs and nihilistic philosophies.

But in a real communiyt, it is harder to hide these things from each other, and the constant asking and granting of forgiveness is required. It is in a real community that one can learn (often painfully) to drop the mask and to reveal oneself honestly. My community is far from perfect, but, like West Arichat, it is different. It is a place where my neighbors and I can begin to learn what it means to "bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Mary Alice Cook
Eagle River, Alaska

I agree with this woman. So often, I dreams of living in a community where people care for one another and have perfect relationships. I dream of finding a perfect church to attend, when in fact, the perfect church cease to exist. I feel that the article stated very accurately when it said that people have love/hate relationships with their community. On one hand, they long to belong to a community, on the other hand they don't want anything more than superficiality.