Ordinary love

I love being at school - there is a thrill here that is so fulfilling - I could read books and write papers and talk about books and papers for the rest of my life. I don't want to leave. Every time I think about leaving Simmons I get so sad, cannot even imagine it. I do not know where my life will be next year and that is both exciting and uncertain.

I am reading Mrs. Dalloway again, for my Virginia Woolf & Jane Austen class (envy me: writing an essay on Pride and Prejudice this week). There are few things as lovely as sitting on the bus (this morning, last night) while it rains (water and words), while I am lost in something so beautiful, so much like a poem - it just goes and goes, layers image upon image -

But everyone remembered [thought Mrs. Dalloway]; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.

She so worships and fears words - loves them for their beauty, despises them for their flimsy inadequacy. I love her ebb and flow, her syntax, the way her sentences form not only a story, but a song (I am also reading The Iliad right now, they remind me of each other). She desires the present: the everyday; Clarissa walking in London for her flowers, seeing the fat lady in the cab (what a glorious moment). If you have not read Michael Cunningham's The Hours I would - it is so - I will not attempt to describe it. But it is about Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, and one of my favorite books. I wish I could spend my life reading and writing in coffee shops. I wish I was less in love with words. Today I will share a poem with you that I wrote (it has just been written, so it might not be entirely finished):

The sun this morning

Stay with me in the error of dreams

lifting golden

in a window so lit

I want to reach inside

and grab God by the bones -

not the sallow faced savior

with eyes like hell passing

cement rooms.

I believe in a God of the ordinary, the everyday; I believe in a God of tea, a profound bit of sun in the window, on the sidewalk, the way dark chocolate tastes with coffee, some arms around me, wandering in a museum with a view of the Eiffel Tower on a Sunday afternoon, making balloon animals with my neighbors, sitting on the porch last night while the sky was gray mist, looked as though there was a fire beneath it, the green leaves drifting, flying - the world grabs me and I cannot give it up.

Create

you can look at my home's (that christian intentional community where I live) weekly blog here (we take turns writing)

:)

http://createboston.webs.com/apps/blog/

Community

The word has become a popular ideal in our culture, pasted in between grocery store aisles, cutely drawn up in the elementary school parking lots, scrawled in the real estate office, the bank, where you buy your smoothie, the WalMart down the street and on tv. It is overwhelming – at once so desired and intangible, certainly not always prevalent in our conversations with the bank teller, even less so when he or she is replaced with a machine.

“Community,” in so easily alienating a world can seem frivolous, pretentious, merely a pile of letters. It seems especially so to live in “intentional community” in one of Boston’s poorest suburbs (five white twenty somethings living where we’ve never been and certainly don’t look as though we belong), and to become a non- profit entitled C.R.E.A.T.E. (Christian Relationships Enabling A Transformational Environment) – a breathless string of syllables that can sound crazy, pretentious, colonial, and just really stupid.

Community, communion, commune, communism, communicate – this vocabulary bears the common and the profound; it varies between community (what we share), and what it means to commune (“to experience a deep emotional or spiritual relationship with something”) and communicate – something that I believe occurs when we take communion and give our common selves to a profound savior, share with him our inner fears, sins, hopes, beauty – when we have a genuine and sincere relationship.

Our house resides perpendicular to Blue Hill Avenue, green trees wavering throughout the city, people sitting on their porches, the sidewalk, the sound of sirens, children laughing, yelling, even an overwhelming quiet sometimes– it is a place I loved almost instantly. There are three girls that live above us, all no taller than our shoulders, with eyes like moons and energy like (very joyous) chaos, who have begun to knock on our door almost daily.

It is not easy to try to live like Jesus, hard to even attempt to become so vivid and illuminating – difficult, in theory, to let three young girls spend hours in your house daily. It is hard to commute to school, to have a job, volunteer at the high school, homework, classes, a covenant with the four people I live with.

But when the girls lead me from this room to the next, paint every fingernail a different color, bake and eat chocolate chip cookies around the table with us, laugh so openly; when I pray in the evening with my roommates, the sound of rain through the window, God so close I am breathing him – I feel blessed, at peace, beauty surrounding me – it is something I cannot easily fold it into words. It is hard and profound as God has always been, but I feel safer here than anywhere, in community with God and what he creates, and gives us to create. I have been reading Franz Wright’s book of poetry Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, something I cried through upon first reading, and something I feel now (though not nearly as well) at the end of one of his poems “One Heart”:

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of

the sane; thank You for letting me know what this is

like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening

blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without

terror, and your psychotic and hopelessly

lost

with this love

yours, hannah

(this post will also be posted on the C.R.E.A.T.E. website: createboston.webs.com)