A question of community

The other night I had a dream that one of my friends at Belhaven turned a paper in for a class a week early. The rest of the class was banking on the prof forgetting that it was due, and there went all our hopes. I don't have vivid dreams very frequently, mostly I don't remember anything I dreamt. This one stuck around long enough that I began to wonder if it might have actually happened. I've now confirmed that it didn't. I feel like that's probably best.

I like living in a neighborhood. I don't interact much with my neighbors for the most part--which is fine--but there're still traces of an element of something we have in common for living on the same block. In a dorm everyone was basically the same age and we were all at the same place in life (by this I mean we were all college students at Belhaven). A neighborhood has a different sort of community because neither of these things are likely to be the same, which makes our common location seem more significant in some ways. In a parish church system, the kind that I don't think exists anymore, we would mostly all go to the same church if we went to church. We'd have the opportunity to be either gratingly annoying or immediately loving to each other, and chances are we would manage to pull of both almost concurrently. We would see both the more human side of each other in passing during day to day life, and we would need to be reminded often that these very ordinary people--ourself included--are just the kind of people that Jesus came to die for, and for some reason I think it would almost be strange, in a real context, to realize that. I'm sure I would like that model. I wonder how the good elements of something like that could be incorporated into the way things actually are more. For now I leave all my thoughts on the matter there, however, at the occasional relapse into wondering.