What does it mean to live in community?

One of the purposes of the Iona Community is to practice living in community. The residents, volunteers and guests are all expected to play a significant role in the life of the community. Guests will have an assigned task that they will need to complete. Those tasks range from cleaning their bathrooms, chopping vegetables, serving meals, and picking up after meals. The volunteers and residents all have their assigned jobs, working in the shop; maintenance, kitchen or housekeeping, but you also have assigned tasks in your house. Those may be cleaning the commons area, cleaning the bathroom, straightening the kitchen, or putting away laundry. Even beyond that we are expected to pick up after ourselves and clean up any messes we create. But it is not all work, as a community we often spend time in our common rooms or the entry way (which I refer to as the warming oven), discussing a variety of topics. Some time the gathering is the girls, or the boys, or the young, or the old, and often it is a mixture of all the above. In the formal meetings that the larger Iona community requires that we attend, one of the primary issues discussed is how are we living or not living as a community. And while it is really an artificial community, we will all return to someplace else to continue our lives, it is a true microcosm of the community of our world.
For example, one of the residents of Cul Shuna, my house, gets very distressed when people don’t clean up after themselves in the kitchen. For her, nothing should take precedence over washing your plate or cup and putting them away. Many of the young people in the house will leave dishes and debris on the counter, intending to get it later, and they typically do come back and get it, but it drives this other resident crazy. She made one of the other residents, who have a knack for simply picking up anything to avoid a conflict, promise not to clean up the mess of others. This “problem” disrupted most of her evening, and ultimately mine, because she continued on and on about it. The same is true when we drop the ball and don’t do our tasks. There may be quite uproar this morning when it is discovered those on supply duty did not restock the tea caddy.
However, in reality we are all living in community. I am living in an exaggerated community, on a tiny island in the West of Scotland. But the world is our larger community. We need to be aware that what we do, or don’t do, has an impact on others. Sometimes in the short term, sometimes in the long term. As an individual, the decision of whether we use the bags provided by the market or whether we go the complicated step of bringing our own bags for our purchases, seems rather small. We would have to remember the bags. We would have to be willing to cause the disruption at our market to use our bags. But in not using the plastic bags, we decrease the number of those bags polluting our environment. Community is about loving our neighbor, in all that we do. Work on ways you can be a better member of community today.