A Communal Life

on wanting more than community (and something new for the new year)

I cringe a little when I hear the word community.

Well, let me rephrase that: I cringe a little when I hear community promised from stages or online spaces. Maybe the word has been overused in the places I occupy, and like many words that get tossed around within a culture’s lexicon, the more we use a word the more we lose its meaning. Good words get watered down. But all I know is that something within me grows leery when belonging is offered by strangers, before I am really, truly known.

And it’s strange because my actual job for many years was to foster community on college campuses and in creative spaces. I believe community is a worthy goal. Everyone needs human connection, and making people feel welcomed into our homes, our churches, our schools, our offices, our neighborhoods places our feet in Jesus’ footprints. Offering community pulls out the chair, and we all have to start somewhere. But so often in these manufactured settings, the promised community does not live up to the hype. We dip our toes into the waters but never venture into the deep end. The small group or book club or Bible study or Sunday morning service scratches an itch but does not reach down to soothe the deeper ache.

Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

I will own that some of that is on me. Some of that comes from wanting to be wanted without being willing to reach out first, or from thinking I have to hide certain aspects of my personhood in order to fit in. I am more concerned with being liked or looked up to than letting myself come just as I am. I want to be seen without the vulnerability required to be known. I often put far too much pressure on places and people to be the answer to my ache.

But I also wonder if by setting our eyes on community we have lost sight of a deeper communion. Have we allowed ourselves to stop short of what our souls truly crave?

In his final words to his disciples, Jesus prayed for a people so interconnected that they would be “completely one” (John 17:23). He asked God that we would be so intertwined that the world would see one entity, one holy communion, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21). And when I read that description of Love that flows so freely between God and us, us and each other, I know my soul longs for more than the community I have so often been promised. I want communion.

Because in all the ways community can be plastic and parceled, a communal life is far from polished. Here we come to the table with our most basic needs in full view of one another: our hunger, our thirst, our fleshiness on full display. Here we sip from the cup not as leaders and followers, the people who have life pulled together and the mess-ups who can’t quite seem to find their way, but as fellow sojourners looking for a place our weary and sometimes wandering hearts can call Home. Here we drink and we eat because we are human, and when we lean a little further into what seems both full and fragile, we find that being human together peels back the curtain of our longings and ushers in a little heaven into the here and now.

If I’m deeply honest with myself, I crave more than community, and I think that’s why I cringe. I want more than showing up with only bits and pieces of myself or expecting the next person or place to be the answer to my loneliness and desire for connection. I want a life that is bathed in the communal, where every little crack and crevice and conversation is a sacred opening in which God himself wants to dwell.

I want a communion that is not watered down.

Sometimes the little voice in my head tells me I am asking for too much. I am too much. This kind of depth and abundance is more than what we can expect from our friends, our neighbors, our small and ordinary lives. But is it? Or is God simply waiting down in the sacred details of our right-here lives, inviting us to sip and let the taste of abundance linger like a full-bodied wine upon our tongues?

I think he is. I think that despite all that seems hollow in this life and in our relationships and in what we have learned to call community, we were made for more. We were woven with specks of his image folded into our skin, so that every fiber of our being wants the fullness of his love—and not someday, but here and now.

But how? How do we love God and each other and this world and our lives in such a way that the communion of “I am in them and you are in me” is a prayer we know deeper than our bones? That’s the question. That’s the question that is bigger than me. Bigger than you. Bigger than one solitary life tucked into one tiny corner of the world. And it’s the question I want to follow—and I invite you to come along.

Beginning in January 2024…

Human Together will also become a podcast, featuring conversations on the communal life for people who agree it is not good to be alone (but who secretly wonder whether it might be easier).

It is for we who waver daily between longing and belonging, intimacy and isolation, making plans and then breaking them. It is a place for actual human people who crave a connected life and believe we can find more of God through each other but who still ask the question, “But how?”

Season one begins in January (more details to come!), but for now, I invite you to:

• Follow or subscribe to the Human Together podcast. I will post new episodes and show notes here on Substack as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Season one will include guest conversations, but you can listen to a five-minute, just-me introduction that gives you a peek into the formation of the podcast and what to expect.

• Consider becoming a paid subscriber. My goal is to keep the podcast ad-free, so becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack is one way to help me keep the podcast running. Plus, you will get access to extended/bonus episodes, essay series, and book club discussion guides and gatherings. I won’t promise community (wink-wink), but I do want to provide ways to connect and keep the conversation going.

(quick note: if you cannot currently swing an annual subscription but want the extras, email me at sarah@sarahewestfall.com and we will make sure you have full access, no questions asked.)

I hope that in some small way, the stories and conversations that emerge from the Human Together podcast will help us reimagine what it means to live in communion. I hope it will remove the weird taste from our mouths when we hear the word community and invite us to see more clearly the overlaps in our humanity and soften toward one another. So that even in the midst of great differences, the fullness of God’s love is felt as close as our own fingertips and becomes a sturdier, steadfast belonging we can embrace and extend.

Recording in our bedroom closet, hovering above my literal dirty laundry.