Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.
Interpretation
Community reflects the possibility of love and happiness beyond material wealth.
In this quote, Jean Vanier emphasizes that the existence of community demonstrates the potential for love and connection in a world often driven by materialism and conflict. He suggests that true happiness stems from relationships and communal ties rather than financial wealth, signifying that love and fulfillment can flourish even in challenging circumstances.
In practice
During a speech on community service, one might quote Jean Vanier to emphasize the importance of love and relationships over wealth.
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.
True peace can rarely be imposed from the outside; it must be born within and between communities through meetings and dialogue and then carried outward.
In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.
We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
When we begin to believe that there is greater joy in working with and for others, rather than just for ourselves, then our society will truly become a place of celebration.
As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing.
We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.
We have essentially gone from being communities that were policed by people from the communities to being communities that are policed by strangers, and that's no longer a community: that's an area that's under siege.
I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.
It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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