Community: Slamming Doors and Kitchen Messes

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I was 19 and had nowhere to go. I had been couch surfing for nearly a year and was running out of options. A friend and I had talked about going out to Chicago to check out a Christian community known for its ministry to lost hippies and punks and the homeless, as well as its contribution to art and music in the Christian subculture.

I took a train from Pennsylvania to Chicago. I was going to visit for 2 months and ended up staying eleven years. I found hope and a future in actual, real-life, exasperating, infuriating, soul-filling, heart-healing, intentional community.

I live with over 200 people in a ten-story building on the North Side of Chicago. We have been doing this for over 42 years. (I’ve only been doing it for half of that). We call it a miracle on the edge of disaster. It’s funny because it’s true.  

We have had our share of betrayal, loss, grief, and pain. We have also had incredible times of joy and celebration, huge parties we have invited thousands of people to called Cornerstone Festival. We have created amazing works of art together. We have witnessed intense bouts of spiritual warfare, long seasons of financial hardship, and conflict with neighbors we call friends who call us enemies. 

It hurts. But it’s worth it.  

Even though it may take years to acknowledge. It’s worth it because in the midst of all the difficulty, we are daily saying, “I choose you.” 

Even though you cut in front of me in the dinner line, or took my laundry slot, or didn’t return the car keys on time, or slam your door a hundred times a night, or never return my movies, or ruined dinner for the second time that week, or chastised my kid in the side yard, or left the kitchen a colossal mess, or gave my son a concussion playing dodgeball, or stole my ice cream from the freezer, I still choose you. Every day 

For each of those annoying habits and irritating personality traits, there are ten times as many opportunities for kindness, sharing, support, comfort, undeserving love, and patience. Because they choose you, too

Community has been a buzzword for years in faith circles, social justice movements, and local politics. It works because it’s a shared felt-need by most people, regardless of race, socio-economic standing, and religion. It’s a longing and a remedy as old as Adam. Man wasn’t meant to be alone, God thought he needed a wife, and even one other person is the seed of community. 

Authentic, faithful community is so necessary to developing and maintaining mental health that the lack of connection causes severe deficits, and even death, in children. The revoking of community is considered a harsh punishment in the prison system. It is that important. 

The insatiable need for connection not only draws us together but at times is a desperation that drives people to addiction, infidelity, domestic violence, promiscuity, and even suicide. 

David Clark wrote in Yes to Life that “without a strong sense of community human beings will wilt and begin to die. Community is the foundation of human society, the zenith of interdependence, the epitome of wholeness; in fact, the end of our journeying.”

Marriages are grounded in community, friendship grows out of it, families are supported through it, and every one of us has been fed by it or wounded by it at one time or another. 

 Jean Vanier, the man who founded the L’Arche communities for disabled people, wrote a book called Community and Growth. Although it mostly addresses groups of people who have intentionally chosen to live together, the larger implications are that it applies to any and all of us who want to broaden and deepen our concept of community as well as our experience of it:

Community is the place where our limitations, our fears, and our egoism are revealed to us. We discover our poverty and our weaknesses, our inability to get along with some people, our mental and emotional blocks, our affective or sexual disturbances, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies.

So community life brings a painful revelation of our limitations, weaknesses and darkness; the unexpected discovery of the monsters within us.  

As all the inner pains surface, we can discover too that community is a safe place. At last some people really listen to us; we can; little by little, reveal to them all of those terrible monsters within us, all those guilt feelings hidden in the tomb of our being. They stand at the door of our wounded heart. Community life with all its pain is the revelation of that deep wound. And we can only begin to look at it and accept it as we discover that we are loved by God in an incredible way. We are broken, but we are loved. We can grow to greater openness and compassion; we have a mission. Community becomes the place of liberation and growth.  

The wound in all of us can become the place of meeting with God and with brothers and sisters; it can become the place of ecstasy and of the eternal wedding feast. The loneliness and feelings of inferiority which we are running away from become the place of liberation and salvation.

Growth. Liberation. Salvation. All of these can be found in relationship with God and each other, in the closeness and craziness of community.  

This month we will be exploring “Connection, Community and Couplehood” in The Mudroom. You will read accounts of the finding and losing of community, the longing for connection and the challenge of maintaining it, and the building of marriage and the threat to its survival. All of these ways of relating have one thing in common: a choice is made, choosing to pursue and choosing to remain.

Who do you need to choose today?

 

Further Reading: 

Community and Growth by JeanVanier

Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Compassion by Henri Nouwen

Tammy Perlmutter
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13 thoughts on “Community: Slamming Doors and Kitchen Messes

  1. Tammy, I am one of those people who remembers when Jesus People started….42 years ago. Glenn and Wendi Kaiser came to our little hippie Christian community in California and we visited theirs in Chicago. We were fellow evangelists in New Orleans at a park filled with the most motley assortment of Jesus freaks I’ve ever seen.
    Not only is community a ‘felt need’ human-wise, it is the source of enduring relationships to this day. My dearest and closest friends have all come out of that time.
    You are making hard and wise choices to choose the other in this time. Sounds like Jesus to me.

  2. found however brief ly between 29 Feb 1972 and summer 1975 with two other adults (total four) and total three children NYC

  3. yes! community is so life giving! look forward to the posts this month.

  4. Parts of me think I’m nuts for living with a group of crusty Christians who have never heard the adage that cleanliness is next to godliness. The other part of me thinks it’s the best think I’ve ever done. One thing is for sure, I can always get find a free ice cream bar in the freezer on three:))

  5. Ohhhh Tammy, looking forward to the stories this month.

    And I love hearing about the intentional community you live in. We are in dorms (my husband works for the college) right now which is it’s own form of intentional community, but I am so attracted to other forms and incarnations. Love the way you point out the connection between community and mental health, so so true.

    • We considered doing that for awhile. I’m glad you’re getting a taste of it too. If you ever want to talk about it, I’m always open!

  6. Don’t know how I missed that you are Jesus People, Tammy. Which means we’re shirt-tail relatives, right? I’m ordained in the ECC. Love this piece, and this ministry. Thank you.

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