Communities aren’t static
By Wes Goertzen
Why, after all the costly grace that we continually receive and occasionally dole out to build a community, do its members (now our friends) have to leave with such frequency? Should community be thought of in the same way as the fraternity of the United States Marines? Once a “Fleshie” (insert your community here) always a “Fleshie”? I don’t know. But God keeps saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and by their unity the world may know that we are one (Matt. 22:39 and John 17:20,21).
Truth be told, I think of “community” as a sort of paradox — a divine brain teaser or something.
Still, it was that elusive yet hope-filled word that fueled my desire to enter full-time service with WMF. Maybe I was after the ever-popular gnosis, the secret, exclusive knowledge that would bring me to some sort of contentment or fullness — a knowledge that would strengthen me where I am weak and give me a place. At any rate, I had something a bit more static in mind. My limited observation was that other communities were all somewhat static — people who lived there stayed there. My own hometown was, at one time, almost completely made up of low-German-speaking Mennonite immigrants. Our religious cousins the Amish certainly have rather static communities. The short time I spent in Colorado at the Brotherhood of St. George’s monastery also reinforced my thinking. I thought of community in a very Hotel California-like way: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” Dysfunctional they may be, yet they stick together. But then, communities are not cults.
My first problem was my cosaficacion (literally objectification) of community. Community is relationship, or much more honestly, many relationships.
The best and simplest (though nowhere near simple) example of community I can think of is marriage. Our pastor told my wife Heather and me during our premarital counseling that your spouse is not your medio naranja (your other half, literally “half of an orange”). We’re apples and oranges, he said. It’s not really a natural or comfortable process. Really makes you wonder what Adam was thinking when he said, “I’ll call her ‘woman’ ’cause she’s kinda like me, but not” (my paraphrase, obviously). The individual is not supposed to be lost in a community or a marriage. When we get together for a meeting or some other purpose, we have a hard enough time getting along, but when we get together to care for one another, to be cared for and to be vulnerable with one another, we start to have real problems.
One non-answer to my endless stream of questions about community is Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity. I was first introduced to the icon by a former “Fleshie” just after coming on staff. Now, because of the generosity of friends or God’s providence, I have at least four copies of the icon. Somehow our God is manifest in the Godhead in three indissoluble persons who share perfect unity of love and purpose. At the same time, God remains open to us. Jesus, the Word without beginning, came to us and invites us into communion with God.
Heather wrote in a recent Cry article, “Our communities must be: intimate, bounded and still penetrable.”1 She wrote that about our human communities, but it seems God gave us the model.
Many of us here in Bolivia have lamented the departure of many community members. We’ve been seriously tempted to stop accepting new people because of the hurt their “inevitable” departure will “surely” cause. We’ve felt abandoned and left behind by friends and by God (manifest in those friends, I’d say). We’re called, however, to remain open to others as our God has remained open to us. No matter how many times we stray, God remains graciously open to us.
ENDNOTES
1 Heather Goertzen, “That’s How We Are,” The Cry 13, no. 2, p. 19.
Wes Goertzen is tall and blond and sits on the bus to work with his knees hugged tightly to his chest, rather unlike everyone else on the bus. He hopes to “beat the earth with a picote” until he gets blisters and, Lord willing, with Heather’s help raise herbs and vegetables.