Snapshot (excerpted permissably) from "Care of the Soul in Everyday Life",
" Love's Initiations", "Communal Love"

One of the strongest needs of the soul is for community, but community
from the soul point of view is a little different from its social forms.

Soul yearns for attachment, for variety in personality, for intimacy and particularity.
So it is these qualities that the soul seeks out, and not like-mindedness and uniformity.

There are many signs in our society the we lack a sufficiently deep experience of
community.People bemoan the breakdown of family and neighborhoods, longing
for a past golden age when intimacy could be found at home or on the city block.

Loneliness is a major complaint and is responsible for deep-seated
emotional pain that leads to despair and a consideration of suicide.

The Renaissance humanist Erasmus says in his book In Praise of Folly
that people are joined in friendship through their foolishness.

Community cannot be sustained at too high a level. It thrives in
the valleys of soul rather than in the heights of spirit.

Bill, a priest, told me many times about his religious order, where community was
discussed as an ideal in books on the religious life and by retreat masters.Yet when
Bill looked back on his life as a priest he could think of very few colleagues who
had been real friends, and he had always felt lonely in the midst of community life.

Loneliness can the result of an attitude that community is something into which one
is received. Many people wait for members of a community to invite them in, and
until that happens they are lonely.There may be something of the child here who
expects to be taken care of by the family.

But a community is not a family. It is a group held together by feeling of belonging,
and those feelings are not a birthright." Belonging" is an active verb, something we
do positively.

In one of his letters Ficino makes the remark, "The one guardian
of life is love, but to be loved you must love."

A person oppressed by loneliness can go out into the world and simply start
belonging to it, not by joining organizations, but by living through feeling of
relatedness - to other people, to nature, to society, to the world as a whole.

Relatedness is a signal of soul.By allowing sometimes vulnerable feelings of
relatedness, soul pours into life and doesn't have to insist on itself symptomatically.

Like all activities of the soul, community has its connection to death and the
underworld.From the point of view of the soul, the dead are as much a part of
community as the living.Outward community flourishes when we are in touch
with the inner persons who crowd our dreams and waking thoughts.

To overcome loneliness, we might consider releasing these inner figures into life,
like the one who wants to sing or cuss in anger or is more sensual or more critical
or even more needy than "I" would like to admit. To "admit" who I am is to "admit"
those people into life, so that the inner community serves as a start for a sense of
belonging in life.

I "remember" people I met for the first time because I am in touch with the archetypal
world of my imagination, and on the basis of that self-knowledge I can love anyone I
meet and be loved in return.

The roots of community are immeasurably deep, and the process of belonging,
dealing actively with loneliness, begins in the depth of the soul.

Love keeps the soul on the track of its fate and keeps consciousness at
the edge of the abyss of the infinity that is the range of the soul.

This doesn't mean that relationships between people are not important to the soul's
loves. Quite the opposite: recognizing the importance of love to the soul, our ordinary
human loves are ennobled beyond measure. This family, this friend, this lover, this mate
is the manifestation of the motivating force of life itself and is the fountain of love
that keeps the soul alive and full.

There is no way toward divine love except through the discovery of human
intimacy and community. One feeds the other.Care of the soul, then, requires
an openness to love's many forms.

It is no accident that so many our troubles have their roots or manifestations in love.
It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about
relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.

Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul
at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies.

The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part
that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.