Communal Living: Story-telling and Work

July 3, 2011 at 5:29 am (Uncategorized)

Being the new intern in a church means you get asked the same sort of questions: “Where are you from? What are you studying? Do you have any siblings? Why are you interested in church ministry?” etc. It requires you to have a cohesive narrative to relate. We are story-telling creatures, but I think it’s helpful to have studied what makes a story a story. Perhaps it seems self-evident, but I’ll include this helpful picture anyway:

This is a pretty simplistic picture, since often times it isn’t as cut and dried; there are usually mini-crises and plateaus that contribute to the climax, but to tell the story of your life to a stranger, you only try and hit the most important elements anyway.

Knowing your overarching life story well enough to package it in a succinct way is a skill one learns. Another skill is knowing the story of your life on a daily basis. One thing I’ve noticed about people here is that in the various small groups people are a part of (whether they live in a household, are on a leadership staff, or in their small group), is that they get asked the question, “What are your highs and lows for today?” (Those of you who lived in KHvR last year, might know this practice better as “happy/crappy”). Sometimes this is asked in terms of what one needs for prayer. Since I did happy crappys last year on a weekly basis, I thought it would be easy to be able to share things in my contexts. But since it happens almost on a daily basis, or every few days at least, I realized I had a harder time relating the story of my individual day. Sometimes, we just do the tasks that we know we have to do, and have fun when we can, bad things might happen, but if it’s just a “normal” day it is harder to figure out what a significant “high” or “low” point of our story is for that day. If you have a week of incidents to choose from, it’s a little easier, but even so often times people would not know what to say immediately during floor meetings last year. Hearing other people answer the highs and lows for the day, even when their day was just as “ordinary” as mine, made me realize, this discipline, which takes practice to know how to do, teaches people to see God’s grace in their lives (high) and the brokenness of the world (low) even in the midst of the ordinaryness of life.

When I first started reading about community I had this utopian Wizard-of-Oz-like entity in my head. The truth of the matter is, community living is about seeing God’s work in the ordinaryness of everyday life– things like eating, working, praying, walking, smelling, etc. That gets to my other topic. I just read a book review for Norman Wirzba’s new book, Food and Faith, and it talked about how the Acts 2 church (which many intentional communities try to aspire themselves toward, selling their possessions and living with common funds, etc.), more important than sharing a common purse, was sharing a common table. It’s true, the most memorable thing about my experience so far is the fact that I have been a stranger at the table in so many households, and through their hospitality, it becomes clear to me that the table is an extension of the Eucharistic altar, a place to worship and invite Jesus to be in this place.

Tonight, over one of these eucharistic tables, I had a really great conversation with a couple who had been in the community just over 20 years (their daughter is a little older than me, going into her senior year at North Park). I asked them a few questions, particularly with how the community understands work (as in, what you do for economic income, not necessarily “vocation”), and how the community interacts in the individual decision-making process.

First, I should say that the community suggests trying to find work in which you only spend 32 hours a week at your job, in order that you have time and energy for the community life– meetings, small groups, dinners together, etc. There is some common work the community tries to provide: most notably, a construction company (I think) in which many of the men in the community work (in my post about the funeral, I mentioned that members of the community made it– that’s because it was through this company). Because the owner of the company is a member of the community, he understands if someone requests time off because of a community matter. So, some people don’t feel “called” to construction work… so they spend their time on other things– raising their family in a very present way, volunteering at a bicycle recyclery, or a food pantry, etc.

It seems to me there are sort of two aspects of communal living vocation. There’s the internal work, of orchestrating a flourishing life together with conflicts properly mediated. But then there’s also the outward work, with people doing work in racial justice, and urban renewal, and food distribution, etc.– being Jesus to people. When I first got here I was really nervous about needing to fit the stereotype of the person I thought lived in these communities– a vegetarian who gardens and never watches TV and goes dumpster diving and wants to live in an apartment building with drug-dealing and primarily oppressed people of color and sell all my clothes.

But the good news is, because I’m part of  these professing believers, I am part of the body of Christ, and when others do the things they are called to do, like live in an oppressed neighborhood, then I get to be a part of that. I don’t need to do everything, because then undoubtedly I’ll burn out. This was the theme of the most recent “Conspire” issue (you can see the electronic version on their homepage). In the article about “Learning to Fly” he gives advice to new communities to start small. Don’t expect that you can do everything at once, otherwise you’ll burn out. The problems that we’re trying to solve (environmental and racial injustices especially) didn’t come about in a day; we don’t need to solve them that quickly either. God is at work in the slow growing of seeds, that require patience and tending, not the magic of instantaneous results.