Everyday Boy

Gifts Of Simplicity?

Chittister's commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict last week had me thinking about the upcoming Christmas season, and how to approach gift giving this year.  In reading the chapter on ownership and simplicity, and her words about not us(ing) things - not even the simplest things - to restrict the life of another by giving gifts that tie another person down, I'm wondering how best to approach this consumer driven time of the year.  I enjoy giving gifts, but I wonder now if I am just weighing folks down with more stuff.

Lisa reminded me of the gift of goats earlier this month.  It's something I've heard through World Vision, and that I stumbled upon again through Action Without Border's Idealist.  They highlight an article from The Guardian, but I like the thoughtful comment left by Eliza Penick, highlighting Heifer International, which sounds like a wonderful organization:

While it's true that goats are changing the world, Heifer works with thirty different types of animals (varying from cows & goats, to agoutis & silk worms), dependent upon the region, culture & needs of the people.  With the gift of animals, Heifer provides extensive training to prepare for the animals' arrival: food, vet & reproductive needs & how to utilize the by-products of the animal. The training & education that Heifer provides is as important as the animal itself.  At the base of each of Heifer's projects & included in the training, is Heifer's cornerstones, many of which address concerns raised in this article such as accountability, animal management, sustainability, & gender equity.

As Chittister goes on, beyond as she says, the ideas of personal freedom, I am confronted with the crux of community living of which I am trying to live, but have found difficulty with these first few weeks of November.  She writes:

Simplicity is also the basis of human community.  Common ownership and personal dependence are the foundations of mutual respect.  If I know that I literally cannot exist without you, without your work, without your support, without your efforts in our behalf, without your help, as is true in any community life, then I can not bury myself away where you and your life are unimportant to me.  I cannot fail to meet your needs, as you have met my needs, when the dearth in you appeals for the gifts in me.  It is my ability to respond to your needs, in fact, that is my claim, my guarantee, of your presence in my own life.  In community life, we genuinely need one another.  We rely on one another.  Community life is based on mutual giving.

I find myself enjoying solitude more these days than spending time with others.  A balance I know I need to keep attention on.  I find that even after such a short time of living by myself, I'm having to rediscover the rhythms of living with others, of having doors open, and of pouring myself out for others on a daily basis, which I've been reminded is essentially all of our duties - of living out gospel love wherever we find ourselves.  It is so easy for me to become wrapped up in my own worlds of film, books and writing that I can isolate myself very quickly and fail to be present to the needs of others, and to the community around me.  How does one nurture ones own fire in solitude, while welcoming others to the fire?

Time In Between

Well, I am sitting here in our beautiful 5 bedroom community house, almost completely empty now except for some food and dishes, my clothes, bedroom furnishings and some other possessions.  I find myself alone with the spiders now, who have begun to spin their webs in the airy door-frames of the house, rooms now echoing with every sound.  I find myself physically tired.  Between work, packing up and cleaning the house, and looking for a new home, I've been trying to find snippets of sleep in the daytime.  I also find myself both sad and happy.  Sad to be leaving this house and neighborhood which has been my home for the past 11 months, but happy for the memories that linger and the chance now to move on to another community house.

A reader asked me in the comments awhile ago what has come of my searching for an intentional community.  It's been a lot of searching and questioning on my part, wondering if I should look for another community to live with, or look for my own personal space to call my own.  I've had to weigh financial concerns, with my need for solitude, with a sense that living with others is an important aspect of my own spirituality at the moment.  It's been a long and tiring 2 month search where I seem to have come full circle.

I first looked at an intentional community in East Vancouver which has a wonderfully broad scope in it's practice of hospitality - offering affordable housing to a wide spectrum of folks.  A youth from our homeless shelter has even gone on to stay with them for a period of time in the past - which is great, but that unfortunately presented a bit of a conflict of interest for me if we ever referred one of our clients to them again.  Plus, I felt I needed more of a sanctuary away from work-related issues, so this first community raised some questions for me.  I really admire what this community is doing in embracing diversity in their intentional communities, much like the Catholic Worker communities I suppose, however it didn't seem to be the best fit for me.  I also appreciated the way they are working in their immediate community to build up social programs for low-income earners and refugees, while stressing the importance of gathering around the table for community meals.

So at that point I began looking at 1 bedroom and bachelor suites, up around Commercial Drive, Kitsilano, Strathcona (where I am now) and the West End of Vancouver.  One of the more interesting places I saw was a basement suite North of Hastings (NoHa), which is a lower-income part of town known for it's homeless and drug users, but also for it's flourishing arts community.  The house is part of a little neighborhood of music folk, some apparently associated with the New Pornographers.  However, the rent was a bit much, and the place was again a bit too close to work-related issues.

Gratefully, I've ended up serendipitously meeting a group of community-minded graduate students and professionals to move in with at the end of the month, who seem to share a similar attitude towards faith, the arts, and social justice.  There was some anxious waiting, but it ended up to be perfect timing.  The house also makes it a point to have community dinners at least once a week, there's a guest room for folks who may drop by, and it's on a beautiful large-tree-lined street with a bike path of amazing views into the city.  So all in all, I'm quite happy with how events have turned out.

I've definitely been having some second thoughts, wondering if I should be living more directly in solidarity with the poor, but this community seems like the best fit for me at the moment.  There seems to be a growing interest for folks to move to the poorer parts of town, but then you seem to see the poor just being pushed to other margins.  I could be wrong but here in greater Vancouver I see Surrey as the next Downtown East Side, with it's gang violence and crime and the public's apprehension to even set foot there.  But I think I've come to recognize that all neighborhoods, whether rich or poor or anywhere in between, need transforming communities within them.  I just feel lucky to have the luxury to decide where I want to grow up.

What Have I Learned?

As our house has emptied out of people, and now furniture, I've begun to wonder what exactly I've learned from living in community the past year and a half.  I've had fourteen different housemates in that time, with quite distinct personalities and backgrounds.  That diversity has been the one aspect of community living that I've enjoyed the most - in being able to learn from such a wide spectrum of wisdom and experiences.  Of course with so many different temperaments and personalities there's bound to be some friction - and I tend to shy away from conflicts.  Worse, I've found that in providing a peaceful presence in conflict, I sometimes hold tensions about those conflicts inside me, instead of talking those feelings through.  It's something I'm still working on, especially with so much drama happening at work on a consistent basis.

I've had the dubious nickname of Switzerland in community - because I tend to not take sides in disagreements - and certainly I do like to think I can see both sides of an issue.  The difficulty becomes in how to mediate some sort of collaboration between the two sides,  and of course that's usually easier said than done.  Arguments would arise over everything from degrees of cleanliness the house needed to be kept in, to the isolation someone might feel in community.  I like to think that our communities kept a good dialog going around such issues, which in hindsight is such a basic and important part of community.  I came across the following on a poster titled Peaceful Conflict Resolution, written by Robert E. Vallet.  It encapsulates some important things to keep in mind if you find yourself in disagreement with another - plus it has some of my favorite words, like listen and imagine.  As Switzerland it would have been a good reminder.

Respect the right to disagree.
Express your real concerns.
Share common goals and interests.
Open yourself to different points of view.
Listen carefully to all proposals.
Understand the major issues involved.
Think about probable consequences.
Imagine several possible alternative solutions.
Offer some reasonable compromises.
Negotiate mutually fair cooperative agreements.

So in experiencing both joyful togetherness and also the reality that living under the same roof doesn't necessarily translate into community, I've come to appreciate the dynamics and tensions that pull you together and pull you apart.  Of course you have the ups and downs, excitement and boredom, good times and bad times  - but one of the things that I've come to appreciate and be more mindful of is the little everyday things - like the basic upkeep of the house.  I love cleaning up after a meal or a party, where you can pray thanks over the dirty dishes for friends and family.  Jean Vanier writes about it well:

One of the signs that a community is alive can be found in material things.  Cleanliness, furnishings, the way flowers are arranged and meals prepared, are among the things which reflect the quality of people's hearts.  Some people may find material chores irksome: they would prefer to use their time to talk and be with others.  They haven't yet realized that the thousand and one small things that have to be done each day, the cycle of dirtying and cleaning, were given to God to enable us to communicate through matter.  Cooking and washing floors can become a way of showing our love for others.  If we see the humbles task in this light, everything can become communion and so celebration - because it is celebration to be able to give...

Our lives in L'Arche are disarmingly simple.  We often say that half the day is taken up with dirtying things and the other half with cleaning up!  That is not entirely true because work, celebration, meals and prayer.  But that does say something about the littleness and ordinariness of our lives.

Community & Growth (297, 298).

People As Plants & Trees

We went to a greasy spoon diner for breakfast this morning, and ended up having lunch with a young Montrealer trying his best to make ends meet out here on the West coast.  He slept on the beach last night, and is hoping to land a job and a home on a forty-foot boat this summer.  It was a good cheap breakfast, with a little banter back and forth.  I can't remember the exact words he said to us, but in his thoughtful rough simplicity he spoke volumes to me of humility - of knowing his place in the world.  It was just one of those experiences where you see Christ in the face of what society deems the least.  Considering where he's at in life I think we all agreed that he's living it up better than most of us.

The rest of the day we played the part of tourists and explored Gastown a bit, and we ended up going to Storyeum - a live theater production of sorts with an interesting mix of acting, music and audience participation.  We walked through different underground sets and saw local British Columbia history unfold before us - with old film clips, photography and text shown on backdrops and screens integrated into the theatrical parts.  It was fun and educational (I think all you teaching types would enjoy it). And I think we came away with both a sense of pride and fortune - feeling lucky to live in such a beautiful country, where although there have been and still are injustices and differences, we haven't been destroyed by our multi-cultural heritage.

The metaphor they used in the performance came from a Native story, viewing our society as a forest of many different plants and trees: some tall, some small, some needing sunlight, some needing shade, the taller ones providing the smaller ones shade - all of us needing to reach down and grow our roots and stretch up towards the sun and stars.  It was a simple metaphor and a good reminder of what community is about.

The last part of the show they gathered us in a large cylindrical room with high walls, where they had live video and pictures projected 360 degrees around us and high above us - of people and landscapes.   And as we stood there in silence waiting for the video show to begin, and then watching the stories and pictures flash by, I couldn't help but smile and see a forest of folks standing in the blue light - a typical diverse bunch you'd find in Canada.  And so, after such feelings of national pride, and with Canada winning against Russia in the semi-finals of international ice hockey too - it was good to end the afternoon with a pint and a round pool.

Community Wounds

The past little while I've been wondering what the word community means for me.  Last month my housemate Leroy wrote the following, which reflects important aspects of community for me both at home and at work:

Licking Our Wounds

Before going on a hunt a wolf pack performs an opening ritual.  The ritual consists of a little play fighting and gentle nuzzling.  The pace of the ritual gradually intensifies over the course of about an hour.  Towards the end of the hour the Alpha male begins to howl.  Gradually all the wolves join the chorus.  This ritual serves two important functions.  At the bio-chemical level, the main function of the ritual is to increase the flow of adrenaline through the body.  This in turn serves several important functions, the most important of which are heightened muscle and lung capacity and sharpened senses.

At a psychological level, the ritual serves to unify the group mind.  The wolves are able to sense each others rhythms as well as their own.  Most importantly, though, a new collective rhythm is being born.

Once their victim has been brought down, a fierce and savage feeding frenzy begins.  Wolves do not eat every day, and are usually famished by the time they finally bring down a kill. Remember too that each one is brimming with adrenaline and a primal ferocity.

In this state of mind, it is common for wolves to injure one another.  Sometimes this is done intentionally while defending their share of the kill, sometimes unintentionally since everyone and everything is covered in blood it is quite common for a brother to mistake another brother’s paw for the paw of the kill for example.

About an hour after the kill, once every last scrap of meat has been devoured, another important ritual takes place.  Now that adrenaline levels have dropped, and all bellies are full, the wolves come together even though they are now totally exhausted. The wolves now begin to lick the blood off each other.

To witness this intimate ritual is a rare honor. This ritual helps to ensure that any insult given or received is forgotten.  On a practical level it also helps to identify wounds that may need closer attention.  During the thrill of the hunt and frenzy of the feeding, it is easy to become injured and not even notice.  It is often quite helpful to have another brother check you over to make sure everything is as it should be.

I was reminded of all this during our shift change last week.  Sometimes work in a youth crisis center can get a little stressful.  Emotions run high and it is easy to become thoroughly exhausted with hours left in your shift.  Breaks are difficult to take because we are nearly always short staffed.

With all this in mind, it’s easy to see how easy it is to lash out at a brother, and why despite having great love and respect for each other a fight may ensue during the course of a shift.  This is also why check out is so important.  It offers us a chance to lick our wounds and the wounds of our brothers, check for injuries and make necessary amends.  So yeah. That’s why I love wolves.  They help to remind us of some pretty important stuff. - LVR

A Traditional Chinese Meal

Josh prepared a wonderfully colorful and tasty Chinese meal for us tonight, consisting of crisp green baby bok choy and pea sprouts, thin slices of red beef, chicken, and pork, white fish balls, meatballs, tofu and noodles - all cooked in a steaming shallow pot of chicken broth, ginger, and water boiling gently in the center of the table.  We each prepared a bowl of sauce made of a Chinese barbecue paste, a raw egg, and soy sauce, to happily dip the food in.  I enjoyed the communal aspect of the meal - much like fondu; arms stretched out and stomachs full... 

We all need to eat and drink to stay alive. But having a meal is more than eating and drinking.  It is celebrating the gifts of life we share.  A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events.  Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one anothers' plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body. - Henri Nouwen, Bread For The Journey, February 15

Friends & Solitude

Jesus, too needed friends; close friends
and solitude.  The companionable meal,
laughter and talk - then he, the one who spends
himself in desert emptiness to be
by Father filled.  and then poured strength upon
all the emptiest, the most in need.  And he,
being human for us, needed me.  Peter and John.
So taught he did us.  So did we learn
this lovely rhythm - needing, needed - then
the deepest of all needs, the heartward turn
to Love's own source, the spring which fill all men,
Son-lit, Father-filled, Spirit-blown,
By yourself, Lord, to us our self is shown.

Andrew, Madeline L'Engle, A Cry Like A Bell (68).

I caught a bit of the Superbowl yesterday.  A former faith community member came over for dinner, and we had New England clam chowder to start with... and the New England Patriots ended up winning!  Coincidence?  Well, no - Josh deliberately served the chowder in honor of the game.  I'm glad that he didn't serve up eagle.  Sadly, it was in the local news that half a dozen eagles had been found mutilated in the woods.  Kind of spooky.

Anyway, I've been struggling with this whole balance between solitude and hospitality.  Do I need the solitude I think I do when I come home from a long day at work, or do I need to open myself more to relationships outside of work?  I'm finally feeling settled, once again coming to another new city, house, and workplace - but it feels like it's taken such a long time to come to a place energy-wise to invest myself in building relationships again.

I've been in such a reflective mood the past couple of months that I've been caught not being present to the here and now, and the people I am surrounded by.  Not knowing what to do as my volunteer commitment draws to a close has also kept my mind preoccupied, and my heart a bit apprehensive about putting roots down again when I'm not sure if I'll be staying long term.  I guess in the end I may be confusing myself between being social and being hospitable.

The whole person is on the one side open to God, and on the other side open to other people. The isolated individual is not a real person, for a real person lives in and for others. This idea... could be summed up under the word love. We become truly personal by loving God and by loving other humans. By love, I don’t mean merely an emotional feeling, but a fundamental attitude. In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of the Creator in us. We are not truly human as long as we are turned in on ourselves. We become whole only insofar as we face others, and relate to them. - Kallistos Ware, via Bruderhof's Daily Dig

In The Company of Family & Friends

The street our house is on here in Calgary is a lot quieter than where I've stayed in Toronto, New York and Vancouver, so it's easier to look up from the sidewalk and take a moment to breathe in the sky.  It's been a cold weekend, but the sky has been unbeleivably clear at night - a shiny polished blue with the star-light being a lot brighter than I remember.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were once again spent in the good company of family and friends.  Friday afternoon I caught up with my friend Nick and talked about books, music and life in general.  Then that evening we had folks over to our house for a potluck dinner, and a casual evening of talking, playing games (Sony Playstation for the younger crowd and rummy for the older crowd), and a few of us watching the movie The Bourne Supremacy into the wee hours of the night.

Saturday morning I caught up with my friend Merlette who kindly treated me to a light breakfast, and gave me some wise counsel and few good laughs.  Then in the evening I was happy to have supper at a Vietnamese restaraunt along 17th Avenue with my wonderfully music and socially justice minded friend Candace, before heading off to the annual Amnesty International Arts Jam for Human Rights at the Pumphouse Theatre.  After that we headed to our friend Maija's where she was putting on a Ukranina Christmas party, complete with perogies and vodka.

Why must I write down these brief fleeting moments of togetherness?  Because at the end of the day, I hope to not become so preoccupied with work and my life's pursuits that the people in my life fade into the background.  Being an introvert it can be difficult at times trying to balnce time with others, with time by myself to refuel, but I try to keep in mind this excerpt from Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones:

Every Monday last winter my dear friend Kate and I wrote together.  We met at nine in the morning and wrote until about two or three in the afternoon.  Sometimes she showed up with an idea: "Let's write about divisions.  Okay?  Go for an hour."  Because there were only the two of us, when the writing sessions were over, we read aloud to each other the whole of what we wrote.  It was a lot, with hands moving the whole time.

We tried out writing in different cafes, once even driving an hour south to Owatonna, Minnesota, so I could show her the bank designed by Louis Sullivan that I was in love with.  We wrote in the coffee shop across the street.  I was unemployed then, looking for a job.  She was on a writing grant.

I tell you this because it is important.  We were willing to commit ourselves to a whole day of writing each week because writing, sharing, and friendship are important.  And it happened on a Monday, the beginning of the work week.  Remember this.  Remember Kate and me on Mondays when nothing in your life seems worthwhile but earning a living and you find yourself worried about it.

When I was in Jerusalem for three months I had an Israeli landlady in her fifties.  Her TV was broken and she called the repairman.  It took him four visits to fix the screen.  "But you knew even before he came the first time what was wrong.  He could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately."  She looked at me in astonishment.  "Yes, but then we couldn't have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs.  Of course, the goal is not to fix a machine but to have relationships.

This is good to remember.  What is important is not just what you do - " I am writing a book" - but how you do it, how you approach it, and what you come to value

Annual Christmas Gift Exchange

The past three days have been full of catching up with family and friends: late mornings with my parents over the sunny kitchen table, lunch and a lazy Sunday afternoon with friends, and gabbing over European engagement pictures with my sister and her fiance - who both got me hooked on their new Sony PlayStation, keeping me up into the wee hours of the morning playing Lord of the Rings.

Sunday night we had our annual cousin's Christmas gift exchange, which usaully happens beyond the wake of holiday busyness.  It's become a larger affair each year, with thirty-five of us mingling over good food and drink, and watching with eager eyes as we played the proverbial steal-a-gift, in what was supposed to be the most creative gift under $5, but proved to have a few gag gifts in it as well.  It was a night of fun and laughs, and I hope to post some blackmail pictures sometime - specifically the one of my cousin Nathan all decked out in a hula costume.

In light of the gift exchange, I thought I'd post another excerpt from Edward Hays' book A Pilgrim's Almanac, titled Hobbit Gifts - also in honor of J. R. R. Tolkien whose birthday was yesterday (January 3rd).

Among the customs of the hobbits was to give new gifts only to new friends.  Old friends were given old gifts such as family heirlooms.  The older the friendship, the more ancient the gift.  What happened naturally was a sort of perpetual gift exchange.  Prized possessions, rare and beautiful things, simply flowed back and forth among them.   This custom of giving away a gift that you yourself had once received might strike us as being impolite.  But if the gift is a symbol of love, would not the love be share - passed around? ...

Just because a gift is old, well-worn and perhaps out of style does not take away from its symbolic value: perhaps it adds to it!  For the longer we have a valued possession, the more affection we will have had a chance to invest in it and the more of our loving energy it will have absorbed.  Our friends the hobbits could remind us that all gifts are really symbolic.  They are magic reminders that we ourselves are the real gifts that are exchanged with others. (191)

Something Worth The Wear of Winning

From  A Pilgrim's Almanac by Edward Hays:

From quiet hours and first beginning,
out to the undiscovered ends,
there's nothing worth the war of winning,
but laughter and the love of friends.

True friendship is a rare gift to win in our all-too-busy world, our lives overloaded with obligations and work.  For friendship takes time and effort, requires creativity as well as that mortal sin of the assembly line, the ability to "waste time."  Unless we are willing to waste our precious hours being in the company of a good friend, seeking nothing but the pleasure of another's company, we shall miss one of life's rarest gifts.

In olden days friendship was easier, for people spent most of their lives in the same village or neighborhood.  Today our work causes us to frequently move from place to place, and with so much greater ease in mobility, it is commonplace to have a large number of acquaintances but few friends.  While we often use the word "friend" even for people we have known for only a short time, it should imply a deep and profound sort of communion.  Among certain tribes in Africa, when two friends ended a relationship, it required a formal ritual of divorce by the whole tribe. As in so many other matters, primitive peoples often had a deeper understanding of the realities of life than do we...

In these first new days of a new year, what better resolution could we make than to deepen our existing friendships into relationships of communion that are truly holy.  (12, 13)