Community: What’s in it for Me? 

The Rev. Ron Sala

Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

January 5, 2003 

 

 

With the Super Bowl coming up, lots of people are talking football. At its best, sports can mean a lot more than numbers on a scoreboard. Take for instance the example of Paul “Bear” Bryant. One of the great coaches of all time, Bryant was at the helm of Alabama’s Crimson Tide from the 50’s to the 80’s. Under his leadership, the team won many championships and was often number one. This despite not having as much money to spend on the program as some other schools and not recruiting from 50 states. A lot of this success had to do with Bear Bryant’s approach. One player would remember many years later the very first thing Coach Bryant said to him and his fellow players on the first day of practice. He asked, “Have you called your folks yet to thank them?” The players’ jaws dropped. None of them had expected that question. None of them had called. Coach Bryant went on, “No one ever got to this level without the help of others. Call your folks! Thank them!”1

Bryant knew that a single player, no matter how talented, can do little without teamwork. From the very beginning, he called his players attention to the fact that they were part of something bigger than themselves, from the parents who raised them to the other young men on the field.

Our whole society could take some lessons from Bear Bryant. Robert Putnam is the author of a book called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Renewal of American Community. According to Putnam, over the last 25 years, Americans’ attendance of club meetings is down 58%, family dinners are down by 33%, and having friends over is down 45%.2

As we’ve become more isolated from each other, a catchphrase has become popular: “What’s in it for me?” What does that phrase really mean? “What’s in it for me?” On the one hand, it’s a declaration of independence. It asks, why should I settle for someone else’s version of how things should be? Let’s cut through the high-sounding phrases. What hidden agenda are other people getting me to follow? I’m smart enough and mature enough to make up my own mind. I don’t need anyone to make it up for me, thank you very much.

We Unitarian Universalists who come from other faith traditions—and that’s 85 or 90% of us—have asked ourselves some version of this question at some time in our lives. What’s in it for me if I continue in my present faith? Is it only for the opinion of my family and friends that I remain? What do I need for my intellectual and spiritual growth? And what’s it worth me to get it? UUs have a proud tradition of those who break away form the pack and go their own way. From Reformation heretic Michael Servetus to early feminist Margaret Sanger, from revolutionary biologist Charles Darwin to socially conscious novelist Charles Dickens, from Transcendentalist editor Margaret Fuller to trend-setting engineer Buckminster Fuller, we’ve laid down a history of independence and chutzpah.

What’s sometimes more difficult for us—and here I include American culture as a whole—is facing up to the dark side of our individualism, recognizing the gaps in the “What’s in it for me?” mentality.

Just such a gap is the notion of community. I think we hear more about community now than we used to. Once, a strong sense of community was taken more for granted, like rain without acid in it. Community spirit was often reinforced by practical, economic considerations. What better example than the farming village? At the turn of the last century, most Americans were directly involved with farming. The community faced common problems like flood or drought. Common work like corn-shucking, or sewing was the basis for community socializing. Automobiles had not yet come into common use, so your neighbors were likely to be at home. In fact, before television, radio, and air conditioning, they may well be on the front porch, enjoying the evening and taking visitors. Most of your neighbors may well have gone to the same house of worship and held a similar view of the world to your own. It was common for people to live in the same few square miles for their entire lives, in close contact with the same neighbors from cradle to grave, making strong, enduring relationships possible across generations.

We mustn’t look back to the past to call for a return to some golden age. The world of a hundred years ago had its own catalogue of problems: high infant mortality, low life expectancy, repression of women and minorities, to name a few. What I mean to do is to highlight how we have come into our present state of communities in crisis. The twentieth century was one that brought more changes into people’s lives than any other, and we’re behind the curve in learning how to cope. We live in a country where 1% of the population controls half the wealth, where poverty and hopelessness drive youth into gangs, where we know more about celebrities on TV than about our own neighbors, where many men over 30 have few if any friends outside the workplace, where our elderly are isolated and doped up in nursing, homes, where men, women, and children sleep on the streets of our cities, where many children of divorced parents haven’t seen their fathers, in the last year. I could go on.

Contributing to all these problems is a lack of community. The dictionary defines community as “a unified body of individuals.” A unified body of individuals. This phrase is unusually striking for Webster’s Dictionary. Unless we’re talking about tapeworms, to divide a body is to cause death. To define a community as a body is say that to sever its parts from one another is to cause death. It reminds one of St. Paul’s famous analogy of the church as body.

Indeed, our nation’s houses of worship, when they’re being what they’re supposed to be, are some of the best examples we have of strong communities today. Rev. Peter S. Raible of University Unitarian Church in Seattle writes:

Two-hundred twelve studies reveal by a 75% margin that religious commitment has a positive effect on health. Religion helps with drug abuse, alcoholism, cancer, high blood pressure and heart disease—that’s rather impressive! People who attend church are both physically healthier and less depressed.

Some may hold that they can tap into these benefits all by themselves, but it doesn’t work that way. Persons who sit home praying alone or watching TV evangelists were actually worse off than others. It seems to get the benefits we have to go to church and be a part of community.

This is the congregation’s first duty: to be a community, nurturing those within it. To borrow the title of a book, we really do need each other.

The poet Rupert Brooke was once about to board ship for a voyage out of Liverpool. He was lonely. He writes, “Everybody seemed to have people to see them off. So I went back on shore and found a dirty little boy, who was unoccupied and said his name was William.

“Will you wave me if I give you sixpence, William?” he asked. “Why, yes,” William replied. This was a way to raise some easy money. The poet gave the boy the coin and climbed aboard. As the ship pulled away from the dock, Brooke saw the boy leaning over the railing on shore and waving. He could hear him shout “Goodbye!” in a squeaky voice. The last thing Brooke saw of Liverpool was a small dot on the horizon—the boy still waiving a handkerchief as the ship sailed out of sight. Later, Brooke wrote, “So I got my sixpenn’orth and my farewell—dear William!”

There is a part of each of us that longs for what Rupert Brooke longed for in that port. Someone to notice when we come and go. Someone to care. Someone to wave us hello and goodbye.

But the second duty of the congregation is to reach beyond itself and aid its larger local and global community. We do this by promoting understanding among races and religions, aiding the needy, and bringing forth justice.

I was at the wedding a while ago of a couple friends of mine from high school. At the reception, I asked the groom where he and his bride were going for their honeymoon. He said, “We’re going to Disney World!” I thought I had just watched the Super Bowl. Someone else I knew from high school also was married not too long ago. She writes a column now in our hometown paper. She devoted one of her column now in our hometown paper. She devoted on of her columns to her honeymoon trip. Where? You guessed it: Disney World.

This surprises me. I recall that Niagara Falls is a popular honeymoon spot. My parents went there. Niagara Falls I can understand. The raw force of nature. Perpetual falling , like we wish our falling in love to be. But Disney World? I have nothing against Mickey, I assure you. I could see going there if dragged by a four-year-old, but as a couple of adults? What could explain this phenomenon? One thing I’ve come up with is Walter Disney’s view of the world. He envisioned a world of eternal happiness, solidarity, and goodwill. At Disney world, the nations do not rage, war does not kill good boys, and every culture is understood and accepted by all others. It’s a small world after all, and it attracts people by the multitude. In short, it’s a picture, albeit a naive one, of the community we strive for. Perhaps, in some unconscious way, these Disney-bound couples hope that some of the harmony, the optimism, and the pure magic of this mythic community will rub off on their new marriages.

One of the most powerful images we carry from our Christian roots is that of the Kingdom of God. Or, perhaps to escape that latent sexism and hierarchy of the term, we might say the kindom of God. The Peaceable Kingdom. The Millennium. Some Jews call it the coming of Moshiach. To Baha’is, it’s the coming of the Most Great Peace. Will such a time arrive? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a dream toward which we strive and will prove as unreal as the glittering facades of Disney World. But there is something right in the striving. Every child we bring up to be a loving adult, every lonely person we rescue from despair, every neighborhood we save from violence is worth it. Each holds its own reward, regardless of the overall shape of things.

The world is a lonely place if we can only ask, “What’s in it for me?” Though the question is important, let’s not forget, “What’s in it for us?”

Along with our Unitarian Universalist heritage of the daring individual there is a long history of building community around the world. Indeed, many of the most outrageous individuals have done the most for community. For example, for the anti-slavery movement, women’s rights, racial justice, and human rights. Exemplars from crusading abolitionist minister Theodore Parker to suffragist Susan B. Anthony to groundbreaking author Mark Morrison-Reed to Amnesty International director Bill Schultz have shown us the difference between individuality and individualism and have built the growing Beloved Community. May the spirit of “What’s in it for us?” be our work in progress. Amen.



1 The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley (New York: Recorded Books, 2001).



2 “Bowling Alone by Robert J. Putnam” (www.bowlingalone.com). [accessed 1/4/03]



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