Community requires commitment: a commitment first to Jesus and to the Kingdom of God, as well as a commitment to one another. We each enter community with different levels and understandings of our commitment to each other and ultimately to Jesus. As part of the commitment we make to our communities, we have to understand the importance of forgiveness and repentance. I’m not sure I fully understood the commitment I was making to community in El Alto when I moved to Bolivia.
The more I grow in community, the more willing I am to allow others to confront me. I know I am committed to this community, and part of that commitment means learning new things about others and myself. I don’t always like to be confronted and I grow defensive—but now I understand that when members of my community confront me, they desire to help me grow.
There are times in community where we walk alongside each other, but other times require us to walk towards each other from our different locations. These are the times when our commitment is tested. I have gained a deeper understanding of forgiveness as I have had to leave my comfort zone and walk towards a dear friend in my community in El Alto. We lived together for six months, but things got messy. There were misunderstandings that arose from the very different ways we each communicate. We decided that we both needed space—to heal and process our situation. I was the extrovert who wanted to process everything verbally, but she needed more space to think and reflect as an introvert. Over time, I realized that despite our differences and the arguments we experienced, I needed to make more of an effort, out of my deep love for her, to walk toward her. The love that I realized in my heart was not due to just a feeling, but came from a sense of forgiveness and repentance. Yes, we had gone through seasons of our friendship where we effortlessly walked alongside each other as we shared daily life. But this was a critical season where we both had to be willing to walk towards each other out of our commitment to love each other as part of a community.
Community has helped me come to realize my resistance to forgive or repent. Some days I didn’t want to forgive my roommate, and many times I didn’t want to repent for the ways I might have hurt her. There were days that I readily allowed apathy to fester in my heart. But the daily choice to walk towards her, even when I didn’t want to, created space for me to both extend forgiveness and repent of my sin, as well. Both forgiving and repenting are difficult, and neither happens overnight. But community reminds us and shapes us to make this choice daily.
In community, we come together with everything that we are as human beings. As Jean Vanier states: “As long as we refuse to accept that we are a mixture of light and darkness, of positive qualities and failings, of love and hate, of altruism and egocentricity, of maturity and immaturity, and that we are all children of the same Father, we will continue to divide the world into enemies (the ‘baddies’) and friends (the ‘goodies’). We will go on throwing up barriers around ourselves and our communities, spreading prejudice.”1
The barriers that Vanier mentions are true. We refuse to admit our brokenness, we refuse to walk towards each other or alongside each other. We allow our pride, our desires for our idea of community, and our differences to come between each other. Instead of finding the beauty in each other, we are more inclined to find the weaknesses and highlight those qualities in each other. The more we can recognize the good and the bad in each other, the more we can grow towards greater love in our communities.
I came to El Alto expecting to immediately understand and be understood. I expected to hang out together all the time. But community is much more difficult than this. I’ve learned that sometimes, our schedules and the stories we enter into exhaust all of our energy and all we want to do is go home. And sometimes, I need to make extra effort to create space for community to grow in my heart. The space that allows love to grow in my heart usually happens as I embrace silence. Instead of giving in to the temptation to speak words to each other to understand each other or make ourselves understood, we often just need to be silent, to pray, and to listen to both God and each other. For Henri Nouwen, such contemplative practices “will teach us to stand firm, to speak words of salvation, and to approach the new millennium with hope, courage, and confidence.”2
A couple weeks ago I was processing a situation in our community, one in which I really wanted to defend my view, and I deeply wanted to be right. As I thought about our calling to solitude, silence and prayer, I realized that silence might be the solution to the issue in our community. I didn’t need to fight for my opinion. I didn’t need to defend anything, but I needed to be silent. The truth is that in silence I was able to imagine a redeemed situation where each member of our community, including me, was able to walk towards each other and alongside each other by truly being together. We spend a lot of time together in ministry, but sometimes we forget to laugh together, eat together or play together. We have to work daily to remember that we can be a true witness to hope, courage and confidence through the love that we have for Christ and for the members of our community. It takes courage to come together in community, and thought it is not always easy, learning to walk together is worth the while.