Muddling Through Together
The seemingly-relentless cycle of discerning with potential housemates has at last relented: my house is now full. The first emotion was relief. It felt like the house had arrived, finally, to a time of settling into stability. We each are here, if not for the long haul, at least for the medium-term. Life in the living it, though, always seems to collapse or expand the scope of my concern to the scope where there are problems. And so it has become clear that embedding two strangers into the intimate rhythms of my domestic life is distinctly a beginning. We have arrived only to some new incline.
The first weeks of this iteration of the house have been more exhausting than I was expecting. During the discernment process, my house isn’t looking for people we like, or who we want to be friends with, or even who seem easy to live with. The criteria are more impersonal than that: we want housemates who are aiming at the same sorts of ideals of intentional community as we are, with whom we can engage in this project in a wholehearted and energized way. New housemates don’t have to be a natural fit. Instead, we hope and trust that, in living together, we will come to grow in love and care for one another.
I love this sentiment, that we can care for each other not because we are particularly compatible but because we are children of God. And I love how distinct and rich that love-thy-neighbor love becomes in community, when we come to know each other well. But it takes work and time to get there. I don’t know my new housemates very well yet. I have not cultivated such rich love and care for them yet. Try as I may to greet them with curiosity and an open heart, it still feels like some people with whom I have no particular affinity have barged into my house and started changing our beloved and familiar patterns. The disruption isn’t bad, but it is tiring, and it takes up time and brainspace.
Sometimes I wonder if living in a community like this is worth it. Participating in house life seems to trade off against doing other things – like building community with people I am more naturally drawn to – and the tradeoff isn’t clear. There’s so much else I want. Even as I live in this community, I yearn for community. I want to be in a group of people who are thinking-things-through with one another, who are intellectually engaged and holding each other toward agency and ambition. Of course this house is not that. This house is about love, and God who is love. Sometimes it is hard to say that this house isn’t meaningful enough; and sometimes, this house doesn’t feel meaningful enough.
Yesterday, my housemates and I sat down together for what was perhaps our first serious conversation with each other. We talked, haltingly at first, and then more fluidly. We made explicit the implicit. “You are responsible only for what you do not say,” our facilitator kept repeating: any concern we bring to the group becomes a concern of the whole group, rather than your concern to hold alone - so speak up. After our conversation, I feel softer. Whatever disengagement I have been feeling, whatever lack of curiosity, whatever tiredness or tension: these are concerns of the whole house, now. I wish I had been more forward in the process of getting to know my housemates, but I am relieved, now, that my housemates are getting to know me.
Disengaging from house life, doubting the value of the house, being angry at or annoyed by my housemates: these are all vital parts of community life, for me. Sitting in the living room yesterday, taciturn and staring at the carpet – that, too, is part of community life. Angst is something I bring to the house. It is part of my commitment to the house, not something outside of it. Whatever tangle of thoughts I have about this house, still I am glad to forge ahead. Still I am showing up for the journey.
When describing intentional community, we talk about cultivating Christian love, or trying to live more fully into our baptismal promises. Those statements aren’t wrong, but they are misleading – or, at least, sometimes they mislead me. The sweetness or crispness of religious language can obscure its meaning, and I’m left feeling like there’s something pure and Godly that I’m missing. Sure, maybe. But I don’t think reverence and irreverence class so smoothly. In the end, what we’re doing in this house is muddling through together. What I’m here to do is to muddle through. And that’s enough. That’s more than enough. Muddling through – that’s the whole world, right there. I could ask for nothing more.
If I am some kaleidoscope, turned, may the light of my spot shine through me, resounding, technicolor and bright.
May we be all confusing and splendid.
Grant us the patience to keep looking, even when we do not know what we are seeing. Remind us that the peering out is itself the fun. Let those slivers of what we know and love speak through us transformed. And turn us, turn us, turn us: glittering and changing, moving through this world.
