Tag Archives: friendship

Called to be awkward together

Posted on by under Together in Place

If clichés are any indication of reality, Americans have exactly two options on Sunday mornings:

1. Stay in bed as long as you want, then put on yoga pants and a hoodie and relax for hours with your cat or dog in a sunny spot, sipping coffee while indulging in The New York Times from cover to cover.

OR

2. Get up early and rush to church (with your coffee in a travel mug), to be surrounded by dozens of people who may or may not have anything in common with you beyond your choice of how to spend Sunday mornings.

For almost my entire adult life, I have willingly gone for that second option. If the first option can be characterized as Blissful Solitude, the one I choose is Awkward Togetherness—at least at the churches I seem to gravitate toward.

There’s no telling what might happen on any given Sunday morning at my church. Drinks are spilled (well, coffee or communion juice), squealing toddlers are chased, and people are generally loud at the wrong moments. It’s like a family reunion with all your crazy relatives. Every Sunday.

I am clearly a glutton for punishment, as I head back to church week after week. But I make that choice because I am also a glutton for unexpected friendships, undeserved grace, and unconventional beauty. These are things I can’t seem to find anywhere else in the world, so each Sunday I return to church for more.

In no other realm of my life could I spend a couple of hours with such a diverse collection of people: a leading advocate for disability rights and a leading scholar of Islam; ex-convicts and an ex-prison guard; an Obstetrics nurse and newborns; homeless people and psychologists; a once-big-time blues drummer with a grey beard down to his belt, his teenage drum student, and a toddler who idolizes them both.

Church is the place I go to be in community—not with the mainstream, middleclass, upstanding Christian crowd, but with the ones Jesus gravitated toward: the misfits, the broken, and all those who don’t always “fit.”

Many Sunday mornings, as any illusion of well-rehearsed order dissolves, I sit in church half-cringing, seeing all the chaos and mishaps through the eyes of some poor visitor who wandered in to see what we’re all about. Being in this place can be so uncomfortable and awkward, especially for those of us adept at feigning full command of ourselves and our surroundings.

But those feelings have a way of projecting back onto me, highlighting my own brokenness and discomfort in this world. Before long—during the very same worship service, even in the next breath!—my cringe transforms into a heart swell of openness and love-beyond-reason. I look around our coffee-stained sanctuary and see the stories we live together.

There is our friend who one day surprised us by returning from a visit home to India with a new bride at his side. Now they have a baby we ooh and ahh over at every opportunity.

Down the row from them is the former blues drummer. For years he spent Sunday mornings sitting behind the drum set with the worship band; now he’s recovering from cancer surgery and too weak to play a whole set. But that doesn’t stop him from pulling a tambourine out of his bag when the spirit moves him, and making music from his seat.

I watch a preschooler run up to her grandparents with smiles and hugs. As an infant, she was raised by her grandparents. Now she and her sister are the adopted children of a young couple in the church (and vessels of joy for everyone who knows them).

On the other side of the sanctuary is the woman who is always busy sewing or crocheting away on a blanket for someone’s baby, and there is the woman who regularly testifies to how Jesus has delivered her from debilitating anxiety. Behind me a hearing aid whines briefly as our “senior member,” at 90, makes an adjustment.

Then a song from the church’s “hippie days” begins, having made its way into a worship set. It is unfamiliar to me, but clearly not to everyone. A man gets off his chair and kneels right there on the carpet, while a few of the “old-timers” begin doing hand motions that seem part-sign language, part-jazz hands. A baby screeches, and we know exactly who it is, without turning our heads. A boy with autism rocks and rocks and rocks in a rocking chair in the back of the sanctuary. That is how he does church.

And I bow my head, overwhelmed by the terrifying-yet-glorious goodness of being awkward together in the presence of God.

 

 

The Royal Hotel

Posted on by under Home & Place

If your home is your castle, my husband and I have been living with the drawbridge down for about ten years. In that time, fifteen housemates have come and gone, and eight of these have lived with us for two years or more. In our four-bedroom Victorian house, community is our way of life.

Sometimes, when I describe all this to someone I’ve just met, they look at me with wonder and admiration. “Oh that’s so beautiful to share your home with other people,” they sometimes say, “but I just couldn’t do it.” And at these times I wish that I kept a cheat sheet of former and current housemates’ phone numbers in my pocket.

Talking with them would certainly temper any idealistic notions.

****

For both my husband and I, the desire to live in community was born in college. When he showed up as a freshman at the University of Southern California, two seniors helped him move in. He soon discovered that these seniors lived next door in a cramped dorm room, choosing to forgo apartment life as a part of their Christian commitment to hospitality. That year my husband watched them model kindness, patience, truth-telling and forgiveness in the nitty-gritty of daily life, and his vision was forever altered.

For my part, I liked undergraduate life so much that I extended it for six years, working as a campus minister at a small women’s college. During that time I lived in a household of 35 for a summer, led spring break trips in tight quarters, and attended overnight training events, as well as an annual two-week “camp” for campus ministers. Though all of this intentional togetherness was uncomfortable, and at times painful, for an insecure introvert like me, it was also strangely life-giving.

And so, by the time we met and married in July of 2005, my husband and I were both committed to some form of intentional, extended community in our home. We, of course, had no idea what a roller coaster this would be.

****

To begin with the obvious: life after college is not like life in college. There are property taxes, for one, and many other bills that you never imagined. Remember the four-bedroom Victorian house I mentioned in the introduction? Victorian=more than a hundred years old. More than a hundred years old=constantly falling apart. Now add full-time jobs, graduate school, and two babies to the mix of bills and renovation, and  you have two very distracted people who barely have time for each other, much less a parade of housemates.

We have not always done well.

With one housemate it took us over a year to discover he didn’t feel comfortable on the first-floor of the house because of its perpetual untidiness. Another housemate hid in her room the whole time she lived with us because that summer we filled every bedroom and the living room with beds and people. When we began living with another family with two young children, I used to hide on the porch and cry during dinner because I couldn’t stand so much chaos so late in the day.

Sometimes it amazes me that we kept this up so long. But then again, there is something about life together.

Just a few nights ago, the five grown-ups were sitting together in the kitchen, having “adult dinner” while the kids bounced off the walls in the living room. Someone had brought a bottle of red wine up from the basement, and we were talking about this and that, telling stories and laughing about the ridiculous things that had happened to us that day. This scene is not unusual. It’s just a natural, spontaneous outgrowth of living in close quarters.  Like college for grown-ups.

And as I looked around the table I knew. I knew that I was blessed. Sitting there I was surrounded by a rich network of people-these current housemates and all the others who have stayed for a while-and these were people I knew and loved.

Over the years we had annoyed one another, confronted one another, and watched one another (with front row seats!) make all the mistakes of marriage, parenting and singleness. But all of this grit and dirt makes the forgiveness, encouragement, and laughter over a bottle of red wine that much more sweet.

Isn’t this the essence of any community, large or small, tied by blood, or marriage, or an old Victorian house?: We are known and (somehow, miraculously) we are loved.

I am beginning to suspect that it is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference.

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Photo by Nell Howard on Creative Commons