“The key to community must be fashioned of a common understanding of life, a common faith, a common commitment. Every person is at long last concerned with community. There is a persistent strain in the human spirit that rejects the experience of isolation as being alien to its genius.
“It is true that there are moments when the feeling for aloneness, for solitariness, must be honored and respected. Every person has said many times over, ‘I must get away from it all. I want to be alone.’ This really means the urgency to catch up with one’s self, to clear the bearings, that one’s true place in community may be more accurately seen and realized.
“But community is the native climate of the human spirit. It is for this reason that we seem most our true selves when we are deeply involved in relations with other selves. We cannot be indifferent to one another. . . . It is of primary relation with individuals that the bridge connecting one to a group or groups is constructed.
“. . . This is the very stuff on which [our] souls feed; for it is the door through which [we] enter into the Holy of Holies where God dwells. For behold the dwelling place of God is in [our] hearts . . . my own heart and the hearts of my fellows.”
— Rev. Howard Thurman, a 20th century American theologian, teacher, and mystic
–From Meditations of the Heart, © 1953
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