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)