Community! We all live in one but do we have other communities that we are a part of?  I know I belong to many different communities.  I frequently wonder what makes community and how hard it is to keep a community together.

I am a member of the “running” community.  A lot of the runners I “know” are not people that I have met before but people that I communicate with online. We support each other. Even when we are running a race together, and therefore technically against one another, runners will help each other and encourage each other.  The race, as we all know, is actually against ourselves and our own personal bests.

I am also a member of  religious community.  I have written about my beliefs and my sense of community within my church many times.  I became a Catholic because of the sense of community I felt in the Church.  I truly feel that church is not a building but a group of people, a sense of community.

I worry sometimes that the strands that hold communities together are fragile.  Can a community where the beliefs are different – like the running community where there are fast and slow runners and each has his or her own beliefs – stay together for long?  Can the love of the run hold the community together when other parts are so different?

Thoughts about what might tear a community apart or hold a community together, not the running community as that is just an example, got me to thinking what is community and how do we come to be a part of a particular community.  Dictionary.com has several definitions for the noun community but the one I am talking about is:

a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists

So exactly what would cause the common characteristics or interests to change enough to end a particular community?  Would individual interests be strong enough to alienate one from community?  If so, how is it that community forms to start?  All of these questions are rhetorical but have been circling in my mind for over a month now.  I do not have answers but I do frequently wonder if one part of a community’s particular interests being held to be more important can tear apart the threads of the community.