Hothouse or Greenhouse? Building an intentional community

As it says in the name, it's all about the intention.

From time to time, the question of how to form an intentional community comes up among individuals feeling isolated and lost in today’s culture. It’s not impossible to build such a community, but it’s pretty darn near close to impossible—that is, without Christ.

If I have any sort of “expertise,” it’s probably this: I have spent nearly my entire life living amongst highly devout Christians in some kind of intentional community in different areas of the country. While not all my friends have been devout Catholics — my best friend throughout high school was Protestant and I have friends from other religious traditions and non-religious friends as well—by far most of my personal interactions on a day-to-day basis have been among Catholics who are devout, attempting-to-be-devout or at any rate attempting-to-be-thought-devout (I can include myself in that last category easily).

Since Catholics are called to be evangelists and to engage in the apostolate of friendship with everyone, Catholic or not, I used to feel uneasy about this. Shouldn’t I be going out to the margins? Shouldn’t I be reaching out beyond the limits of my church group? It did not help that every time I (or my husband) applied for a job, we seemed to get hired by—other devout Catholics. Even my novels seemed to be largely enjoyed mostly—but not exclusively—by faithful Catholics.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I grew up and chose to remain in a series of “Catholic fishbowls,” mostly because my parents were always searching for Catholic community and finally joined one of the lay covenant communities. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was an unusual flowering of this kind of community worldwide, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Most people are familiar with the hippie communes, some of which became cults, or the Jesus movement which spurred the growth of home churches, later new Protestant denominations.

But few people know about the Catholic covenant communities, who grew mostly beneath the radar of everyone, unless one of them turned cult or heretical or got in trouble with the local bishop. The healthiest of these communities were like healthy families: they grew up, expanded naturally, decreased naturally, and either turned over the generations or quietly expired, having done their job. These communities were worldwide, ranging from France to Africa to Ireland to all across America. My teenage and young adult years were largely spent in these communities, and I had an overall very positive experience, which I recognized was unusual. And if anything looked like a “hothouse” on the outside, it was these intentional lay communities, which spent a lot of internal effort building up the members, even as they birthed successful ministries.

Folks who do not live in an intentional community commonly misunderstand what it is or what it is like. Misinterpreting Vatican II’s call to go out into the world, people often criticized such communities. I was often told when I was a teen that I was “hiding” or that my parents were trying to insulate me and my siblings from the outside world (I grew up in a world where free-range parenting was the norm and helicopter parents had not yet emerged, so this was a bad thing). The most common complaint was that my parents were raising us in “a hothouse of Catholicism” which was too insular and self-referential to prepare us to engage with the outside world.

My responses as I grew up ranged from bemused silence to “No, we’re not,” to “Maybe we are, and I like that.” But I have pondered this criticism and I believe that there was a bit of confusion here which I would like to clarify.

A Difference of Intention

There is a difference between a hothouse and a greenhouse, although they look like the same sort of building. They both are buildings constructed of glass panes and they both contain growing plants. The crucial difference is in intention. A hothouse shelters plants that cannot survive in the outside world. A greenhouse is a preparation for plants to survive in the outside world.

But they both share much in common. In the same way, a healthy intentional community functions as a greenhouse, even though it may look like a hothouse. In fact, intentional community is crucial for children, and indeed each individual family is meant to be a greenhouse of a sort.

However, this sort of multi-family community is even more necessary for teens, because individual families can’t do it alone. The teen years are meant to be outward-facing with a natural tension as teens seek to establish their own identity and to some degree this means beginning the process of separating themselves from their birth family. Given our broken human nature, there will likely be some teens too anxious to want this freedom before they are ready and others unwilling to break free even when they are ready—as well as parents too eager to keep their teens close and others too ready to boot them from the nest.

This is where community can be a help. In a community, teens ideally can find other adults both young and older who share their parents’ beliefs and culture who can help them differentiate themselves from their parents without separating from the beliefs and culture their parents gave them. This precisely addresses the difficulty in transmitting culture between the generations.

And this is one reason, I think, why forming a community can happen organically when many like-minded families find themselves raising children in the same geographical area. This is one reason why they often arise around educational institutions such as a schools—the current “Catholic community” I participate in is really an outgrowth of the relationships that fanned out around young adult graduates of Christendom College who choose to settle nearby their alma mater nearly thirty years ago.

Some of its growth was intentional indeed, but some of its growth was random and not intended. For example, we moved to the area for a job and only then discovered there were quite a few like-minded Catholics already living there. Today our “intentional community,” such as it is, centers on our parish, and I hope you see the irony. The Catholic Church intended parishes to be the locus of intentional community, but for complex reasons, that often doesn’t happen as it should in America and elsewhere. This is one reason why the Church has never opposed the building of community per se. Ideally, we build an intentional Catholic community by building up our parish.

“In the Greenhouse” by Stephen Remick. Buy it here.

But, you might quibble, if I’m saying that a greenhouse is primarily for cultivating the young, what about people who are not children or students? What about capable adults who should be able to function on their own, apart from any sort of Catholic bubble? Isn’t fleeing to or remaining in a Catholic community an attempt to find a nice safe hothouse to dwell in, instead of engaging in the outside world?

Well, first of all, few people would confuse the average Catholic parish these days with a hothouse. Secondly, we adults are not as strong as we think we are. And three, Jesus said, “Where ever two or three of you are gathered in my Name, there I am with you.” So He emphasized the necessity of community to live out the Christian faith because Jesus also said that apart from Him we could do nothing.

It’s not only the young plants who need a greenhouse; so do the wounded and damaged plants, or ones that failed to thrive, and that’s also what communities provide, for we weak and damaged folks. We all need to keep on growing in virtue, and sometimes we can’t figure out how to do this, given the confusion in our culture, or we’ve damaged ourselves by refusing to grow and now regret it.

As I wrote in my previous article:

Looking at the people I know who were most eager to commit to a lay community, they were all individuals who had experienced isolation: single college kids, handicapped adults, young families who were estranged from their families of origin, combined with older generous adults who were willing to take the plunge for various reasons: some had adopted many children and knew they couldn’t raise them alone. Others had reached a crisis in their family life and knew they had to do something differently. How did these people find each other and agree to bond? In the communities where I was raised, we said it was the Holy Spirit who led us to each other. That seems to be as plausible explanation as any other.

The Catholic Church means for parishes to be geographical, consisting of people who are proximate to each other as opposed to those who have chosen it merely because they prefer it: often community means locality, and for most of us, God chooses your locality just as He chose your parents and your birthplace. But in these days of shifting sand, often families have found it prudent to move to a locality where they actually can find community in their parish, and I personally find that understandable.

Recognizing the purpose of a greenhouse can help you recognize in some respects what a parish is meant to be: a place where you and your family are known and can know others in the course of growing and coming to know Christ and His Church more deeply. Its relationships are meant to image a spiritual version of family relationships—brothers and sisters in Christ, as members of intentional communities often refer to each other. And of course, this means trouble.

Are Hothouses Possible?

Whenever I can, I have tried to hear and absorb the tales of those who built intentional communities in the 70s and 80s, and there are some crazy and sobering stories. I have concluded that early days in building up a community are always pretty rough, because most of the pioneers willing to take the plunge are either innocent and naïve idealists, or wounded and needy individuals desperate for help—or folks who are an interesting combination of both—so you can imagine the damage that each can do to the other.

And I kind of suspect that building a community that would function as a true hothouse, along the lines of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, is kind of impossible.

This side of Heaven, there is no such thing as a perfect community you can join: as soon as you join, you bring your problems with you, so it’s not perfect any more (joke!). In fact, your own personal weaknesses usually surface before the eyes of all into a frightening clarity, similar to what happens in marriage.

When you think about it, it is honestly amazing that anyone manages to build a healthy marriage and family, let alone a healthy community—but the risk is so worth it! Maybe it’s not possible without the risk. And God.

Since God is involved, He usually makes it clear that no community can build utopia on earth. So even if you were looking for a hothouse to hide in, hiding in community is like hiding “in the wounded side of Christ.” You are close to the very Sacred Heart of God, but it’s not exactly pleasant all the time.

This closeness alone can keep a community from being a warm bath of affirmation and love. When a community offers you love, it’s often tough love. And often you are thrown back on to your own resources, and to your own relationship with God, back alone with God and your pathetic, useless self. But that is how it can begin.

As one community founder told me:

“People think community is about sharing their gifts and offering their strength to each other. It’s not. When you try to share your strengths with others, you only oppress each other. When you share your weakness with others, then, and only then do you have community. When you share your weakness, you give others the choice to reject you and your pathetic weakness— or to accept you and reveal their own weakness. Without that terrifying choice, you never really have real community. Just a bunch of people pretending to be stronger than they actually are.”

The Cross will find you, wherever you are. But consider the Cross to be the loving hands of God Which never leave you alone.

So how can you build community? With a foolish and ridiculous trust in God, more than trust in yourselves or your community-minded friends. Building a community is building a greenhouse to strengthen and support the Church, and it takes effort and love and a willingness to see the fruits beyond your labors. It takes the willingness to acknowledge that you too are a weak plant in need of strengthening, and just maybe we can do this together.