Gabriella Wilke: Dorothy Day believed that the only answer to loneliness in this life is community. You have responded to the call, living as a member of the Bruderhof. What sparked your passion for community?

Charles E. Moore: I grew up in a suburban family of eight children. My father was the town doctor, and my mother took care of us at home. We were the envy of our neighbors. All of our friends wanted to play over at our house. Yet I felt a gnawing sense of loneliness inside. Gradually, I came to realize that simply being with others did not answer my deepest need and longing. Only Christ could do this, the One who alone heals what is most broken inside us.

Ironically, it was my eventual conversion to Christ that led me to explore what it meant to forge a common life with others. I saw that when Christ called his first disciples, he called them to follow him together. There were the Twelve, and then the seventy. This is because Jesus came to inaugurate God’s supra-political kingdom: a new social order in which we could truly be human and live justly and peaceably together. So when Christ poured out his Spirit on his disciples, a radically distinct, alternative community was born. It was a shared life in which no one was without, where all belonged, and where all could give in a spirit of joy. (See Acts 2 and 4.)

What sparked my passion for community, therefore, was not so much my sense of loneliness but my passion to follow Christ fully, unconditionally. Books like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and Community: The Social Dimensions of Christian Faith, and Eberhard Arnold’s God’s Revolution: Justice, Community, and the Coming Kingdom, among others, helped along the way. What I came to learn was that the eternal Word became flesh for a reason. God in person came to show us what happens when God dwells here on earth. By following Jesus, we can together be an ongoing extension of the Incarnation. We can demonstrate God’s kingdom of justice and peace right here and now.

GW: Help us understand how one can move toward a life that is shared with others.

CEM: From my experience, the move toward a shared life with others takes time and intentionality. If we can’t spend time together, how are we to grow in the virtues necessary to sustain the ins and outs of doing life together? But sharing space is just as important as time. To grow together as a community, we must live more proximately to each other. If the notion of a “commuter marriage” is an oxymoron, so is a “commuter community.” It is daily life together God wants to sanctify.

God tabernacles in what is local. When daily life is truly “set apart” for God’s holy purposes, we will naturally begin to share our lives and gifts and goods with one another. What is “mine” fades to the background and what is God’s becomes paramount. We can become free of the dictates of the market, media, and mindsets that pit us against each other. In this context, we can grow to trust each other to share our lives with one another.

GW: You’ve written that building community requires more than just structures of belonging, but also a “Spirit-filled life.” How would you describe this spirit? Must it have what Eberhard Arnold called the “religious secret”?

CEM: In one sense, we are all part of some kind of community. But the work of community that brings “common unity” is more than just getting along with one another as we pursue our own self-interest. This kind of community has to begin and end in faith. It is formed when Christ is at the center of everything. That is the “religious secret” Eberhard Arnold refers to.

Human bonds alone can only go so far and can, in fact, undermine the work of community. Who of us hasn’t hurt others or been hurt by others? That hurt is the seedbed for anger and mistrust. Without forgiveness, that hurt can divide us, and life with others becomes a sort of hell. So how is true forgiveness possible? It must be founded in a spirit that seeks the well-being of the other. Without it, selfishness, greed, lust, power, status-seeking, and envy will destroy us and our life together. Seeking common unity means I dedicate myself to being my sister’s and brother’s keeper. And centering on Christ means I must see to it that whatever separates us from God and one another is overcome.

This Holy, or sanctifying, Spirit must be alive in us and in our midst, otherwise we cannot experience the transformation promised us in Christ. Without the Spirit, community becomes but a form of life, a living arrangement in which we measure everything by how things either affect or benefit us. There is no joy in that.

GW: Dorothy described the task of community life as “sowing the seed of love, and we are not living in the harvest time.” Can you say more about the vision and reality of life together?

CEM: I love Dorothy’s way of putting things. We are living in a time of extreme isolation. Consequently, there is a corresponding longing for connection and community. But herein lies a danger. Our expectations of one another can be too unrealistic. In our culture, immediate results are everything. The seeds of love—patience, loyalty, commitment—are in short supply. This is one reason why many people become so easily disillusioned in their efforts to build community. No one wants to stick around!



My wife and I experienced this firsthand before joining the Bruderhof. Along with several others, we moved to the inner city of Denver to live in community and to reach out to the homeless. After five years of countless comings and goings, we realized that community wasn’t happening. Community wasn’t a place or a project but a people who committed themselves to each other so that Christ could perform his transforming work in the world. What we experienced then, however, was seeds blowing in the wind, falling on shallow ground. How can fruit be born when nothing ever takes root? Waiting for the harvest time is hard, but we need to be confident that the seeds we are sowing are able to grow.

GW: Perhaps one of the gifts of Dorothy’s example is how honest she is about the hard things—the difficulties and trials of community life. It’s not only our egoism that gets in the way, but also the demands of our “community in need.”

CEM: Indeed! Hard things, however, are somewhat relative. Things are often hard because we have unrealistic expectations, or as Bonhoeffer puts it, “wish dreams.” The ego is and will always be a problem. So are the wounds of the past. But community isn’t for idealists. For it is in community that we undergo the painful but liberating process of being changed. That process always involves bearing with others (and them bearing with us!). Community is God’s workshop. Some pieces are more finished than others, but all can be used and all are called to build something beautiful for God.

It’s important, however, that community never becomes an end in itself nor just a means of responding to the needs of others. Otherwise, it risks either becoming self-absorbed or burning completely out. We take for granted our weakness and brokenness, but we also commit ourselves to finding ways together, as a reconciled and reconciling community, to share God’s love. Love, however, is more than doing good deeds. Love is born from gratitude and amazement: God is in our midst and we don’t deserve it!

GW: Eberhard Arnold suggests that marriage can be a true spiritual community. Dorothy invokes the experience of mothers in learning how to love. And Pope Francis has invited us to see “brothers and sisters, all.” What do familial relationships teach us about community and being church for one another?

CEM: Throughout the New Testament, believers are referred to as brothers and sisters. This familial metaphor is important and deep. But the natural family, as important as it is, must be seen in a greater light. For Jesus himself said, referring to his own natural family, that it is those who do the will of God who are his true brothers and sisters. In other words, the family bond should, if it is based in Christ, point to a greater bond. It is the family of God constituted by the birth of the Spirit.

There is a paradox here. Family is God’s first community, but it must be part of a greater family to find fulfillment. With the breakdown of the family today, I believe that it is God’s greater family that has to become uppermost. It alone can teach and model what family in Christ is all about. To do this will take a huge commitment. But it was this kind of “being family” with one another that enabled the early Christians to turn the Roman Empire upside down.

GW: In a collection of essays you edited, Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People, you begin with an excerpt by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who happens to be one of Dorothy’s favorite writers) and end with one by Dorothy. Can you speak to the significance of this, for both the book and for your readers?

CEM: The piece by Dostoyevsky addresses the crying need of our age: isolation. But it is a piece that is ultimately based on hope and on God’s great idea of community. The antidote to isolation is belonging in community. For Dorothy, community is not just a doctrine nor an idea. It is not a moral imperative. It is not a “lifestyle” nor a rule of life. Community, as Dorothy understands it, is born of mercy: God’s mercy toward us and the mercy we grant to one another. When we receive and give mercy, we can’t help but want to be bound together in one shared life.

GW: Anything else you’d like to add?

CEM: If we are ever to rediscover the gift of community, it will be on account of God’s Spirit moving us with Christ’s compassion. We are not created to be self-contained, self-sufficient individuals. But community in Christ doesn’t just happen either. It takes work, patience, and self-sacrifice. So in seeking community with others, we must be realistic and honest. We must allow God to prune us of the habits and values that undermine community and exploit our propensity to go it alone. When Christ’s mercy prevails, love is unleashed in the world. As the Apostle John writes, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16). Love takes risks and seeks liberation from all that separates us from one another. That is the call to community. As witnesses to Christ and his coming kingdom, this is our task in the world.

Gabriella Wilke is the marketing & audience development director at Commonweal. Our thanks to Bro. Martin Erspamer, OSB, for the use of his illustration as the icon for Good Talk.