Answering the identity crisis

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Been workin' on my recipe for religious fruitcake. The problem is the identity crisis: attention and identity are in 1973 demand, and most of us sell ours to a dozen or more buyers:
Do you not feel a problem here, instinctively and acutely?

Now, the Amish can fix this problem for you, but they require 100% of your identity to do so. I only want 51%. I think you can resolve the identity crisis if you can grant a controlling interest in your identity to a mini-scale parish of a catholic church.

It has to be mini-scale so everyone can know each other. You have to fight with each other and take care of each other (family, duh!). It has to be connected to the Church catholic because the Kingdom of God—the pattern of life that flows from God's own life—starts with true worship. Burning Man is not my Gospel.

Ready for the secret ingredient? Proximity. History teaches that communes don't work long-term for families. But even with separate butter dishes, it has to be as easy as possible to borrow a stick of butter—literally. This could mean apartments in the same building, houses on the same block, or farms in the same valley. You're not trying to hide from the world. You can work for money. You can have other friends. But if you can't pass the butter test with everyone else in your mini-parish, you haven't given me 51%.

(It's a matter for experiment whether or not it's better to have a common chapel and/or kitchen. The problem with a small building is the temptation to build a larger one. Even our current parish of 70 or 80 people feels too big, like it has several centers of life within it, and the whole point here is to have only one "center of life" above the nuclear family, identified exactly with a single parish of the Church catholic.)

I ain't tried it yet, but it sure sounds swell, don't it?
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Feed back to Chad Whitacre.