By Jim Gerwing

As a group of us looked ahead while planning future issues of the Beacon, we discussed opening a dialogue about what a community is. We talk so much about community this and community that. What do we mean when we use that word, community?

The first place I go is the dictionary. It gives the root meaning of the word as coming from two Latin words, cum, meaning “with” and munia, meaning “duties.” Putting them together the Latin word is communis, “duties together. So the word means uniting with others for the common good. .

I think of community also in terms of my life experience. I grew up in a little village in Saskatchewan, surrounded by a large extended family and a completely homogenous community of German Catholics. Everybody knew everybody else. Unpleasant incidents did spring up between members of families and between members of the community, but when it came to a crisis, everyone was expected to pitch in. The feeling of identifying with the village remains strong and warm. When I joined the monastery, I experienced the closeness of the Benedictine community with common ownership of everything. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was an oft-repeated mantra. Again, within this even more homogenous community of men, selfishness occurred, sometimes surprisingly virulent. Still, the ideal of brotherhood dominated our lives.

It seems to me that two essential components of a community are a sense of belonging to each other in some discernable way and a definable locality where the members live.

Villages and towns like to use the word community to reflect the basic ideals which hold the population together. It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to provide for the needs of each individual member. It falls to community leaders at various levels to assist people in smaller sections of large population centres to form a sense of community within a given area. James Bay already has taken major steps toward such a goal. We have the Community School, the Community Project, community gardens, and a busy Neighbourhood Association. As the character of James Bay changes with each new development, pressure builds to ignore the needs of the powerless, the weak, the poor, those who “do not fit.” Change is a necessary part of anything living. We have to keep changing or we die. The question that needs addressing is just how do we keep the feeling of community alive in James Bay while the building goes on? Not just the feeling, but the reality of honest concern for each other’s welfare. How successful James Bay is as a community can only be judged by how the weakest, the poorest, the least among us, fare at the hands of those with power.

Let us hear your views, via letters to the editor, full length articles, or in our blog, whenever that gets off the ground.