The discussion below is interesting – thanks for all of your responses. Again, I didn’t mean to cause offense. I can’t think of a place I’ve lived which, if it were criticized, I’d be “offended.” People live places, like certain things about them, are driven crazy by others, settle, flee and try to figure out why places are the way they are.
So?
Anyway, the point I find myself working through is the issue I raised at the end of the post. It is that of paradox – the element in life that gives it tension and dynamism, the element that won’t let us settle, that nudges out of complacency.

And here, the paradox is of the community (small or large) that sees itself as “close-knit” and stable, which is truly an anchor and important – how can that close-knitness become counter-productive or even destructive?
I can think of a few ways.
A school, let’s say, is deeply rooted in a community. Three generations have attended this school and many still live in the neighborhood, some of the teachers are graduates and have or have had children attend the school.
It sounds ideal – to me it does, having taught only in schools that were constantly in transition, in which staff came and went like the seasons, in which no one seems to have any connection to anyone else or a strong sense of mission.
But wait. What if, in this close-knit community, one of these teachers, so closely bound by blood and classroom presence, proves him or herself incompetent or even worse? What if there is more than one teacher who is just getting by? What if the ties among the families and the school staff make staff hesitant to tell the truth about a student’s behavior or performance?
And what of a close-knit parish, one with long, traditional ties to a neighborhood, with families who have attended for years, with pillars who have sustained the faith community?
What happens when a priest comes into that community and suggests…change? Even after a suitable settling-in period, even if the changes are directed at helping the parish experience, say, a liturgy more expressive of the Church’s ideals?
Talk to a priest who has attempted to come into a close-knit parish, bound together by years of attendance and intermarriage and tradition and sense of place and do anything that meets with disapproval. Ask them how it went.
And what of the parish community, perhaps with a school, settled and closely bound to that spot of land that has been here forever?
Is there a chance that this parish runs a risk of letting a sociological understanding of faith creep in, loses a sense of the importance and necessity and command of evangelization and seeking the lost and welcoming the stranger?
How many close-knit parishes and schools have been transformed, in a matter of two or three decades, into closed parishes and schools?
The other end clearly shares in this dynamic – of not so much a dark side as a risk, a flip side. It can happen in any situation, any structure, large – or small.