Community

Not giving up on it, even though its tough and we’ve all been wounded, and sometimes its a hot mess.

I love community. I’ve been married for 17 years and for at least 10 of those years we lived with people or had people live with us. I think living in community is great.  I love working on a team. And I love creating community in cohorts. 

But…

And we all know this. 

Community can break your heart. 

Over the last twenty years I’ve watched countless painful community explosions as leaders fail, as church’s split, as folks leave over race, politics, and abuse. I’ve seen queer and trans kin ousted by faith communities. Families going no contact.  

And closer to home I’ve had hard conversations with dear friends where we’ve wounded each other. I’ve watched cohorts screech to a halt over group dynamics, difficult conversations, mismatched personalities, and as disappointments surface in painful ways.

A delicate part of building community in Liberated Together is the reality that everyone has very recently been wounded and disillusioned by community. We trigger each other, we touch on unhealed wounds. Yes, we also heal each other, and laugh, and learn, and carry each other gently. But the nature of all good things is that whatever amount of good they can do, they have the power to do the same amount of harm. 

 Christian community is often discussed in very idealized terms. I’ve lost count of the number of sermons I’ve heard on Acts 2 community. And I speak often on my favorite snapshot of community, which is the time Mary spends at Elizabeth’s house at the start of the book of Luke.  The season of Advent is about the hope that something new can be birthed in the midst of darkness and violence. And I believe that deeply.

But I also know that that the new thing will be birthed by a bunch of wounded people, who never learned to do conflict well in their families, and who have rarely seen leaders respond well to feedback. Folks who got into justice work because of experiencing some sort of trauma. A community of wounded and traumatized folks, who are brilliant and caring, and have never seen the thing they are hoping for. 

It’s complicated. 

Idealized visions are motivating. Idealized versions of people, of movements, and of community are appealing. But they won’t get us where we need to go. Learning to do conflict, learning to communicate in the midst of this dumpster fire country, learning to own when our own trauma is steering the ship, saying sorry, talking to folks directly instead of talking about them to others- these are all social justice skills. These are all part of movement work. We have to learn to treat each other in the ways of the world we are trying to build. 

And I knowwwwww, believe me I know. That we would all love to rally around a glorious vision of liberation more than we would like to learn to resolve conflict with this person we are getting to know, who low key annoys us and triggers the shit out of us. But figuring out how to stay in community with a bunch of wounded people with a dream, might be the most radical politic of all. 

And this loops back to the reflection of week one, holding on to our humanity. Holding on to our humanity means that we make time and space for the unglamorous and seemingly unproductive work of figuring out how to stay in community with each other. We fight the tendency to treat people and relationships as disposable.

There is no version of building a new world where we don’t break each other's hearts again and again. And the courage to keep going and hoping in the midst of that reality is what I ponder in this season, as I look into the sky for a star to guide me.