"In a false community everyone protects himself against everyone else. Everyone tries not to be known, except in ways he or she chooses. Everyone tries to work out ways in which all relationships will be smooth. This is not community.
There is a vision in the writings of Saint Hermas, one of the seventy disciples of Christ, a vision: he sees the angels of God building the city of God, the new Jerusalem, and he sees that they choose square stones with sharp edges and place them next to one another, cementing them together. And then there are stones that seem so beautiful in their material, so smooth in their shape -- round, oval -- and they are rejected. Because it is only those stones that can be fitted together and cemented together that can be used for the building of these walls of the Heavenly Jerusalem. And when we try to create a society in which every one of us is safe from the other, are we not creating a society of people who are like smooth, rounded stones that can in no way be fitted together with others? What is needed then is a hammer that will break the smoothness and reshape them."
- Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, "Churchianity vs Christianity," pp. 114-115
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