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Utopian Dreams: A Search for a Better Life by Tobias Jones, Pub faber and faber, pp220, ISBN 9780571223800, £12.99.
Best-selling author, Tobias Jones, spent a year living in communes and among unusual dreamers to produce Utopian Dreams, daring to ask - do communities simply work better when religion, rather than secularism, is the choreographer? The dreamers included New Agers, Spiritualists, and welcome guests living and working at Pilsdon, a Christian detox community. Wanting to cross-examine the values by which people live, he selected communities he hoped would offer time ‘to stop and belong’.
Reflecting on the generation that reached maturity in the aftermath of 1989, and has had minimal idealism, the author admits being fascinated by what it feels like to believe in something - ‘actually to believe that the world could get better rather than worse.’ He then points to children of the Thatcher years denied a sense of community.
In a society described as ‘so atomised, privatised and individualised,’ he now reckons most people under thirty have no idea of what a real community is truly like. He therefore questions: ‘to what extent does our contemporary obsession with individual rightspreclude communal aspirations; and is the true cost of community an acceptance of a limitation of freedom?’ Attempting to make a just response, he enters debates about the permeability of the communities, about different forms of leadership, and about alternative ways of structuring families and finances. Reflection on the part religion has to play in it all even becomes a priority for him - a theme in this illuminating travel diary that he refers to as ‘the greatest or else the daftest idealism of them all: religion.’
Only through acknowledging that religion, rather than politics, was the choreographer of these communities did Tobias Jones sense that their difference and distinction emerged and set them apart - offering stark contrast between the sacred and the profane.
Having wanted to experience what religion feels like, he also points to the fact that religion is something with which only a minority of his generation has had any contact. In three of the chapters, the author stayed with Christian communities - ‘one stridently so, the other two very subtly so,’ he says.
To all but the first location, the author’s wife and baby daughter accompanied him. On return home, from the utopian journey, they discovered a nearby Community. Volunteering to drive their Emmaus van, happily led them to make good friends who, otherwise, they would never have met. They are regularly encouraged to hear about new gatherings of human beings trying to work out the best way to live together.
This challenging book is a timely reminder of the renewed sense of Christian community yet to be extended through the ecumenical community movements, and local churches around the UK. An important book; so read and reflect.
Wendy Whitehead |
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