Fr. Richard OMOLADE

Last week I wrote about the ‘good life’. Yes, a lot of things contribute to the flourishing of the good life, good communities or conducive environment being one of them. If the environment of growth is not conducive, human beings cannot thrive or be productive.  The same is true of the spiritual life. There is so much toxicity in the society that we have become estranged from one another.

The society is also filled with many maladjusted individuals that make community living for the people around them pretty difficult. In fact, family life in many families is so disordered that happy homes are becoming elusive. When societies are deprived of good schools, good hospitals and basic necessities of life, then we cannot expect them to contribute to the good life or make life better for others. It behooves on everyone then, to contribute to the making of a good society.

There are many societies that will benefit individuals, such as the community of the family, the educational community or work community, that is, community of businesspeople. Some groups fashioned along tribal leanings could be of help also. These communities do not just appear and become successive or impactful, they are created and nurtured to become enablers of virtues and core values that societies need to thrive.

We have heard many things about the ‘Japa syndrome’, that attitude or belief that makes many of our kith and kin to believe that they must travel abroad to make it. What is not said is that assumption that our society does not enable us enough to achieve as much as we would have loved to, and that foreign lands do and by implication are better. But those places were built by the people and their leaders. The development of those countries didn’t happen overnight. Hard work followed purposeful government policies and citizens’ compliance to regulations.

Many times, these steps are still lacking among us and when policies are in place, compliance is absent. Thus, we have not been able to engineer that enabling environment that will incubate strong societal values and better life for the masses. Society must be well ordered for peaceful coexistence and the flourishing of human life, and all citizens contribute to it by their compliance to societal norms and policies

For instance, noise pollution adversely affect many people, yet some do not bother.  Those who litter the roads and neighbourhood would appear to have lost the ability to think about their actions and their consequences because if they do, they would have realized the effects of those actions. Those who steal or embezzle may possess some rationality and think about their actions, but their thinking would have become warped as to appear to them right when in fact those actions are selfish, bestial and gross display of irrationality.

In our communities of faith, selfish is also the bane of many groups. Faith communities are called communities because they do not exist for only individuals but are made up of people helping people to be better Christians and citizens. When this support system fails, the community will naturally collapse, or degenerate and even individual life becomes an herculean task. Every member of a society must commit to the good of society and not defer it to someone else because everyone will do the same.

The community will serve us if we invest in it, if we do not do so, we will also suffer the pain of indifference. Good communities contribute to individual and collective wellbeing, through shared support and resources and even resilience. This is what is often lacking in many groups today as too many people prefer to take from the community without making any contribution to the same community.

Truth be told,  communities help create meaning and lasting social, cultural, economic,  religious and even environmental transformation if all in the community buys into the ideals of community life. A community draws us out of ourselves into the spectrum of the large body and expand our perspectives. This is good for individuals as well as for communities. Just take a look, we love soloists when they sing, but we also love the orchestra with its array of various instruments and many singers blending together in the beauty of the song. This is what communities bring about.

In the final analysis, human beings are regarded as social animals, animals that thrive in the community of others. We are made for community not apart from it. “I am because we are” gives this perspective a poetic rendering by emphasizing the role of the community. If the community is this important to our wellbeing, our survival and the attainment of goals and meaning in life, then we must do more to safeguard our communities and community living.

Of course, Christians must see the Trinitarian life as the model for all community living. Here the persons are in a constant outpouring of each other such that the others lack nothing and in their sharing of life, they pour out their life on humanity and their life remained undiminished. Let’s build our communities on love, then other good values will bless our life.