Community unites around presence—a shared purpose or goal.
Communion, as Peter Rollins suggests, unites around absence—a shared void, grief, or loss. It is not built by consensus, but by mutual vulnerability, often acknowledged through ritual.
Byung-Chul Han notes our ritual erosion: we’ve streamlined away liturgies that once made communion possible. In chasing efficiency, we lost the slow architectures of mourning and meaning. Without ritual, absence isolates rather than bonds.
What remains is a restless longing—not for connection through achievement, but through shared helplessness.
We lack not only meaning, but the means to lack meaning together: a void we attempt to fill with shallow pursuits.