Communities of Abundance: Relationship as Resistance

I have always secretly wanted to live in a commune. If you read closely, you can see this desire woven into most of the novels I’ve written, in the tight-knit community settings, the kinship bonds between characters, the sharing of resources and daily experiences. It’s the security of commune life that appeals to me the most: the safety of children running free between shared dwellings, watched over by all the adults; the knowledge that there will always be someone there to talk or to snuggle, to cover the bills or cook the meals; the ability to fall asleep knowing that if someone breaks in, you have a small army who will rise to protect you. I’ve always longed for these things; single motherhood has made me long for them even more. In fact, if I thought I could get enough people to join, I’d start a commune tomorrow.

The political chaos that has engulfed our country since January has been intruding on my work as a therapist on a daily basis. People are stressed and scared; the barrage of wild news gives our nervous systems no rest, the uncertainty about the future is toxic, and the feeling of helplessness about our ability to keep bad things from happening is literally the definition of traumatizing. Much of my work lately has been trying to help people stay emotionally and physiologically regulated so that they can take meaningful action according to their values, because the alternative is paralysis, depression, and trauma symptoms.

A few weeks into this hot mess, knee-deep in compiling coping strategies and psychological resources, I began thinking about the concept of community-building. It started as just one item on a list, but it has grown in my mind. Now, community-building has become the trunk from which all the other branches of resilience sprout.

Community is not just an asset—rather, it is a necessity. In times of crisis, we return to the lower layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: food, shelter, water, safety. Maslow put “belonging” just above our physical needs for shelter and sustenance, but that has never made much sense to me. If you’ve just crawled out of a big pile of rubble, and you’re thirsty and caked in dust and blood, what’s the first thing you do? You go looking for people—because wherever you find people is where you’ll find food, shelter, water, and safety. We cannot separate belonging and community from our most basic needs.

I have begun to understand community as resistance: community as protest, community as defiance, and community as survival.

One of the reasons I still attend church, despite the past deconstruction and ongoing reconstruction of my faith into something that no longer resembles traditional evangelical Christianity, is that I have realized I require a community of abundance in order to thrive. What do I mean by a “community of abundance”? The opposite of abundance is scarcity: the belief that there isn’t enough to go around; that we have to fight over existing resources, because if someone has enough then someone else doesn’t; that we have to focus on ourselves first, and can give to others only if there are leftovers. Abundance is the belief that there is more than enough for everyone; that we can give freely and without fear, because our needs can all be met together; that if we create a community of generosity, there will always be others there to help us when our own resources run low.

I will be the first to admit that the church in America often struggles to turn outward and meet the needs of its surrounding community (and pragmatism about this is why I am a bleeding-heart liberal who supports government-based social welfare). But in my personal experience, the churches I have been a part of have always done a wonderful job meeting the needs of people within their community. I’ve experienced this consistently, from childhood through this week. From the gifts from benevolence funds that have replaced furnaces, ovens, and worn-out tires to the meals delivered after childbirth or illness to the couple who paid for my car repair when I was a broke graduate student to the friend who took me in for five days and sat with me in the ER three times when I was too sick to take care of myself to emotional nurturing beyond measure and last-minute childcare and places to go for the holidays, church has always been there for me. And since our society has so far struggled to come up with a viable secular alternative, I intend to continue being a churchgoer for the foreseeable future.

I understand that not everyone can stomach being a churchgoer. (Believe me, I really do. It takes a tough stomach these days.) But you can still create a community of abundance outside of church. It will take a little more work and intentionality, and it will not be as self-sustaining, but it can—and must—be done. More on that in a bit.

Communities of abundance are the defiant opposite of capitalism, a vibrant form of protest against the toxicity of our current economic system.

The capitalism of today is what you get when you combine rugged individualism, a scarcity mindset, and unchecked greed. In America, where the top 1% of the population holds 30% of the wealth while the bottom 50% holds only 2% of the wealth, unregulated capitalism keeps the oligarchs in power by keeping the rest of us too busy just trying to survive to create any real change. We are all too exhausted scrambling to meet our basic needs—to pay our rent, manage our medical debt and student loans, keep our children fed, and get enough sleep to work 40+ hours a week—to invest the time, money, effort, and organization it would take to build a more just system. There are more than enough of us to do it; they’re just keeping us too broke and desperate to believe we could pull it off.

This relentless treadmill of survival makes most of us think that we don’t have enough resources to offer others—so we never take the time to build a community of abundance, even though that is the one thing that can make late-stage capitalism more bearable. I still struggle with the belief that, as a working single mom, I don’t have anything left at the end of the day or the week to give anyone else; when this belief wins, I pull back from community, which only leaves me more depleted and more at risk. Committing to a community of abundance is a radical act of resistance that requires the courageous belief that there is enough to go around if we can learn to trust one another, to be vulnerable with our needs, to share without fear.

This, perhaps, is the meaning of the story of Jesus feeding the 5000: He didn’t wave his hands and create a mountain of bread and fish to feed the crowd; the abundance only happened as people passed the bread and fish to one another, hand to hand. Abundance required sharing. It required participation. It required each and every person deciding not to hoard what they had been given. Whether you believe this story actually happened or not really doesn’t matter. It still offers us a profound and life-altering truth: the miracle wasn’t that Jesus fed the 5000; the miracle was that the 5000 fed each other.

The goal of the oligarchs is always to increase our dependence on them, which makes us easier to oppress. If they have their way, soon, all we will be left with is each other. As social welfare systems are dismantled and stability vanishes, the temptation will be to give in to a scarcity mindset, to turn our backs on each other and try to fend for ourselves. But even with the loss of the social safety net, abundance will still be possible; there will still be enough to go around—if we can learn to share it.

We need to start asking ourselves—now, while we still have time—what could abundance look like?

What does abundance look like when it comes to housing? Owning a single-family home is already out of reach of the vast majority of American households. We need a new vision for creating homes. Increasingly, generations will have to share the same roof and friends will need to live together to make ends meet. Can we revise our expectations and stop seeing this as a necessary sacrifice, but rather an opportunity to create more resilient social networks? Instead of leasing your basement to a renter, can you reframe it as adopting a single person in need of family? Instead of begrudgingly giving up your privacy to share a house or apartment, can you view it as an opportunity to fight oppression by providing mutual care? A good question to ask yourself is, if you lost your housing today, who would you call? These are the people with whom to begin your community of abundance. Start dreaming of what housing abundance could look like for you and your family—both chosen and genetic—because we may need it in the next few years.

What does abundance look like when it comes to food security? One easy way to practice abundance is to share weekly meals with one or two families you’re close with, whether geographically or relationally. But we need to think bigger than that; the larger the community, the more resilient it is to oppression. Five families are stronger than two, and an entire neighborhood is stronger still. Food banks are about to become an even more crucial resource than they already are, and they will need donations and volunteers. Children who can’t access school meals—whether because of school breaks or because of funding cuts that put an end to school meals—need us to show up for them. Sharing food is a powerful act of community-building; it does far more than fill our stomachs. It’s hard to hate someone with whom you’ve broken bread—hard to fear a stranger with whom you’ve shared a home-cooked meal, hard to vote against the rights of the child to whom you’ve handed a sack lunch, hard to assume the worst of the person who split the last cookie with you. Food teaches us to love.

What does abundance look like when it comes to safety? These days, it seems like more people are marginalized than not: immigrants, people of color, women, queer and trans people, people with religions other than Christianity, differently abled people, neurodivergent people, people without financial privilege. If we can learn to protect each other, we will outnumber the oppressors. Due to our intersectional identities, we are each shaped by layers of privilege and vulnerability. As violence—both state-sanctioned legislation and individually motivated psychological or physical attacks—mounts against all marginalized populations, we increasingly need to think about how we are going to protect each other, and how much we are willing to risk to keep someone else safe. We need to prioritize creating safety for others with our political action. But we also need to spread safety when we walk down the street, intercede with authority, or inhabit shared spaces. We need to learn practical skills for leveraging our privilege on behalf of those who are targeted. As a white US citizen, I can leverage my privilege to protect someone else, but as a queer woman, I may someday need someone to leverage their privilege to protect me.

But how do we create these communities of abundance when there are so many obstacles?

I’ll be honest with you and admit that I’m still trying to figure this out. We all work so much. Many of us have children with activity-packed schedules. We say we’ll make plans, and then we don’t. We say we’ll call to check in, and then we forget. In a place like the Denver Metro area, we often live miles away from our friends and family; it gets harder to live in community when you have to drive forty minutes to see each other. I can’t tell you the number of clients who report that they’re trying to build community, but no one will text them back. I’ve stopped counting the number of times I’ve been crushed by last-minute cancellations for lame reasons. It’s discouraging. It’s easy to lose hope and give up.

So I don’t have all the answers, except to say that this is too important for us to just stop trying. Maybe it starts with casting a vision—sharing this post, talking about the kind of community you’re seeking, deconstructing scarcity, questioning the limiting beliefs and past hurts that hold you back from community. Maybe casting that vision starts over a shared meal. Maybe that meal starts with some persistent text messages to make it happen. Not everyone will want to participate; not everyone will understand. That’s okay. Your people are out there, and they need you as much as you need them. Don’t stop looking until you find them.

And if along the way, you find anyone who wants to join a queer, kid-friendly commune, let me know.