Why Community Anyway?
Vine and Fig Tree member Dee Dee Risher shares some reflections on community life.
People sometimes ask what I am learning in community life, or, more skeptically, why I would choose it. It reminds me of when people talk about marriage as “hard work.” To that second thought, my internal answer is: “Marriage does require stretches. In that sense, I get that it is work. But my experience of covenant is not primarily that it takes work. It is that it is mostly gift that sometimes takes more work.”
Wendell Berry has a similar remark when asked about the hard work and discipline of writing. His retort basically said: If I felt writing was hard, tortuous work, I probably would not do it. So community life. I am drawn to it because I like life lived in relationship. I believe we can do things together that we cannot accomplish alone. I feel we are, in many ways, wired for community. I feel that human relationships teach us more about each other and ourselves and test our faith and growth. I feel that community also helps us live more simply economically. Vine and Fig Tree is structured to wear community fairly lightly. By that, I mean, we removed many of the stresses of a community that shares living spaces. We do not share kitchens, living areas, or bathrooms, so we do not have endless arguments about cooking habits, how to squeeze the toothpaste tube, or whether the living rooms should always be ready for guest or covered with backpacks and coats.
Most of our rhythms consist of a weekly community meal, biweekly meetings, communal prayer. We have discussion nights and movie nights. We have workdays together. Sometimes we have parlor nights, coffee time, or happy hour. We try to help one another out as most good neighbors would—watching kids on short notice (the community, after all, is half kids, and half of those are under ten); sharing cooking ingredients, cars, and growing vegetables, trying to be attuned to and support each other.
We bring to this a mix of expectations and a range of personalities. For this moment in time, we actually have two family systems (my niece and I both live here, and there are two sisters). This adds some dynamics because family systems have a lot of similar instincts and synapses and already honed communication patterns.
A few years in, and I feel that we are beginning to understand what new muscles are exercised by community. Predictably, people have very different attitudes about time. And, reared by our individualistic culture, we have to notice and work through individualistic tendencies. Many people who have experienced other cultures already sense that our culture is often more locked in on schedules and more time-bound in reference to others. Time is a very valued commodity in North America; some would call it a North American idol. We often operate with different balances between our own family time and the time the community or group might want to claim, and work time. Yet despite different time boundaries, and we have also chosen to be in an environment where we also know that support does demand the concrete gift of our time. We choose to be in a place where we work with that.
There are also the perceptions of the balance of give and take. One of the ways the community has challenged me is to ask more clearly when I need help, which I know is difficult for me. By living life together, we often ask things of each other. Our joining in community is opening ourselves up to the vulnerability of being asked to do things for each other, and having to reflect on our responses to that cultural intrusion. How much time can we make for each other? What is healthy and how do boundaries shift over time?
There are no right and wrong answers to these questions. The answer lies in working them through. As my spiritual director, who has lived her life in community, observes: “Building true community often means that we are asking each other to build or strengthen muscles little used by our cultural context, but necessary to life in the faith. Often when you are good at one thing (like responding to the needs of others), you need to develop the oppositional muscle (like discerning what you are called to respond to.) In the best and strongest communities, you use differences illuminated by small conflicts to identify what muscles you need to exercise. You need to grow the community, and that grows and challenges each person’s natural reaction. What is the learning of that moment? How do you grow beyond your personal default or nature? The goal is never to be right. The goal is to learn balance, discernment, and loving, honest communication.”
A gift of this community is that I believe people are truly affirming of one another. We celebrate birthdays by each one naming a gift they love in the other, and we are sometimes surprised by what each other says. And I believe we are all cognizant of the role grace—what we can muster and what God can channel through us when we are open—has in building our relationships. There will always be tensions, small frictions, and stuff. There will always be grace, beauty, and joy.
One does not have to choose a live-in community to be faced with these learnings, but there is no doubt that choosing to live in community asks us to confront them. They are, in many ways, a central question of the Christian life, and many faith communities. How do we create strong bonds of love and family among strangers? How do we grow into love and tend it? For me, community is another place that challenges me with these questions, and the goal is always to grow more authentically and fully.
