Community

(if you go to FIUCC, what I speak about Sunday will be rather familiar to this post... just for a heads up!)

 One of the major themes of my personal study this year has been community.  As I've been going through my journals processing and making a memory book of the year, I have been continuously reminded about how thick the theme of community ran through my writing, reading, and thinking. 

And it makes sense why.  

I was sent a year ago last August to a country I had never been to that spoke a language I did not know.  I was sent with two people I had met for about a day in March and with two people I had never met in my life.

and then they became some of my best friends in the world.

Monday, the last of them, Andrew, left Antigua.  Now that leaves us with three in the States, one in Honduras, and Marcia and I here in Antigua until she leaves for vacation tomorrow.  It's so crazy.  Our family for the year is breaking up... or, I guess I would use past tense, it has broken up.  Not forever, primero dios, but at least for now.

Henri Nouwen, my favorite author ever, describes community as the result of solitude greeting solitude.  He defines solitude as broken, vulnerable, loved, and a part of a family. Solitude is not loneliness, and that's what makes true community unique.  We're together because of love, not desperate loneliness and need.

With that definition, community then becomes related, connected, interdependent, healing, accepting, and although not perfectly harmonious, a place to simply receive love and care.

That's definitely the community that I saw this year.  I came into this country and community with a lot of loneliness and not much solitude.  My walls were up pretty high.  Through health, family, and general life fatigue issues, the vulnerability and brokenness that defines solitude and therefore prepares us for community were able to enter into me.  And these people were ready to accept me for who I am and was.  Thus, I became a part of the community.  

We're all different, come from different pasts, have different strengths and weaknesses, but we are a community.  And in a community, we are here to celebrate each other's gifts and through that celebration we are accepting one another's full humanity as a reflection of God (thanks, Nouwen, for that genius thought!)

 

"Community develops where we experience that something significant is happening where we are.  It is the fruit of the intimate knowledge that we are together, not because of a common need such as to learn a language, but because we are called together to help make God's presence visible in the world." - Nouwen, Gracias

 I am so grateful for my YAV community, as well as Team Xela, this year.  These friends have become so close to me and supported me through so much this year.  The ongoing question throughout my journals is, "how can I do this during my stateside life?  How can I find community?"  I think I go back to solitude... only through solitude can true community exist.

One of the greatest oxymoron's of life - but oxymoron's do make sense... at least on some level.