a community in process

[Note: I wrote this post a month and a half ago. Looking back at even so recent a time, I can already see how if I wrote this today, it would have read differently. If anything, this shows even more clearly just how much I have to learn and how long it takes to do so.]


Community is incredibly slow going.

It’s easy to miss this fact in the midst of the buzz. After all, community is grand, right? God wants it. We want it. We even generally learn to account for the fact (though likely not to the degree we should) that community brings with it conflict.

What I’d forgotten, and what I am lately beginning to remember, is that it takes awhile to even get to the conflict stage of things. Sometimes you’ve just got a long way to walk.

Three months ago six of us – young women ranging in age from twenty-three to thirty – moved together to a poor neighborhood in Washington, DC. We wanted to be good neighbors, to learn the structures of poverty, and to meet what needs we could. This, we felt, was too big a task to tackle alone, and so we network’d ourselves up some cohorts, and one became two, became three, became five, became six.

Six individuals who believed that God called us not only to live with the poor, but to live with each other. To live not as single woman in a cosmopolitan city, but to live as an unconventional family unit – an in-home representation of the Church. We wished to change ourselves with the hope that, having begun to do so, we could then begin to change the world.

Despite the profusion of past tense in this article, this is not a failed venture. We are there, and we are learning. When we moved in, we each took an evening and shared our life stories, our spiritual struggles, our desires, our fears, and our annoying personality quirks. At an average of 2.7 hours each, it was a crash course in one-another-ness. We wake for prayer in the mornings, and we spend one long evening together every week. We try to maximize the hours we spend at home and make a point to invest in each other, to pray for each other, and to serve each other.

Our neighbors have welcomed and embraced us – the six strange white girls from the other side of town. They have looked out for us and shared with us, and we’re listening gratefully to them. We’re exploring the community, making ministry connections, joining civic associations, going to public meetings, and volunteering at the nearby elementary school. We’re learning the rhythms of the street – when to smile and nod, when to stop and talk, when to avert your eyes, and how to be home before dark.

But don’t let that handy litany fool you. Community is slow going.

On any given day, at least three of us are so overwhelmed that we just want to hide. Five of us have broken down in tears at least once. At least one person has been seriously debating whether she should stay. We share a bank account and bathrooms, but we’re still strangers.

So how do you learn to depend on a stranger? How do you keep walking when you realize the path is twice as steep and three times as long as you’d anticipated?

Quality Time v. Quantity Time
Don’t delude yourself: shallow conversations matter. I’m reminded of Bible study groups of which I’ve been a part – likely you know the type. Think of the groups where you gather to profoundly talk about God and then turn to lift up deep and personal concerns before God, and yet you manage to walk out of the room every week having no idea that Suzy desperately wants to skydive, Mike’s allergic to peas, and Paul watched two presidential debates and three movies last week. (You do, however, know that Emma’s aunt is scheduled for a triple-bypass next Tuesday.) Knowing someone’s marriage is falling apart may bond you together, but it does not necessarily make you friends. Friendship may be charted by the heights and depths, but it thrives on the mundane.

Transparency
Striving for greater intimacy, Christian circles talk a great deal about vulnerability. They’re right to do so; it’s important. But allow me to offer one distinction. Vulnerability is most frequently characterized in moments – the three minute segment when someone opens their heart and someone else nods sympathetically, pats their shoulder, or maybe hands them a Kleenex. Transparency, on the other hand, characterizes a lifestyle. Moreover, you will make yourself transparent to far fewer people than you’ll allow to see you vulnerable. (And this is a wise call.) Transparency means you express your frustrations and annoyances, exposing both actions and attitudes. It means you explain your rationale. It means you show someone your life and, here’s the tough bit, give them the right to comment. That means my roommates know my budget, know my spending, and can critique both. That means next week we’re scheduled to give ‘preliminary input’, good and bad, on one roommate’s month-old romantic relationship.

Service
Churches tend to have some easy buy-ins for service opportunities. There’s the clean-up crew, the nursery workers, the endless calls for volunteers. You don’t necessarily have to think; you just have to show up. You can make it fit your schedule. In a home, the rules change. There are times when we’re each so self-reliant that we have to search out areas in which we can serve the person across the dinner table and when we couldn’t, no matter how we rack our brain, figure out how to offer up a way they could serve us. There are other times when the person across the dinner table is pitching a whiney fit, and you feel more like slapping her than serving her. And nothing fits your schedule. Yet without practicing that sort of interdependence, we’re no community at all.

Joy
I’ve always been a rather strong proponent of this thing called laughter. Those of you who know me may have noticed this. Well, what I’m finding now is that my roommates and I so crave laughter that if we can’t get it at home, we’ll go – and stay – elsewhere to get it. It’s wonderful to have someone who will let me sit and vent the stress of my life. But there are equally days when all I want to do is forget that stress and be wildly, comfortably ridiculous with a good friend. It’s fabulous that I come home to people who are interested in politics, discuss racial reconciliation, pursue planet care, study scripture, and pray with me. But on other nights, I just need to come back to a roommate who wants to watch Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and make a large pan of brownies, preferably with pecans. Be it quality or quantity time, there is always a place for laughter and there is always need for joy.

This just in: I’ve suddenly realized I left a can of Coke in the freezer last night. There’s a community sustainability test for you. Egads. I hereby add a fifth point to my previous four:

Don’t be an idiot.