Psalm 133 is a short psalm of praise for the blessings of close-knit family and community. This is a blessing increasingly rare these days. As I describe in The Shape of Joy America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. So much so in 2023 the Surgeon General released a health advisory warning about the lethality of social isolation. Loneliness is just as likely to kill you as being a pack a day smoker. We've reached the social end game that Robert Putnam predicted when he wrote Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community in 2000.
What's especially sad about all this his how we're actively choosing this unhappiness. Also in 2023 the Wall Street Journal polled Americans about what they believed was "very important" in life. Here's some of the findings:
To be sure, the economy is rough right now. We're all concerned about affordability. Money is important. But relative to past generations, globally, and world-historically, we doing okay. And yet, we're increasingly valuing money over community, connection, and relationship. No wonder our collective mental health is fraying.
I'm put in mind of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote that I've shared many times before concerning how community mediates grace:
Help must come from the outside...God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians, in the mouths of human beings. Therefore, Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them. They need them again and again when they become uncertain and disheartened because, living by their own resources, they cannot help themselves without cheating themselves out of the truth...The Christ in their own hearts is weaker than the Christ in the word of other Christians. Their own hearts are uncertain; those of their brothers and sisters are sure.
