Those of us who care deeply about our neighborhood can have a special kind of guilt when it comes to place. Do we matter to our neighbors? Are we the difference we'd like to see on our street? Mandy Smith reminds us that often—even for leaders—community is invisible. -Paul
It's my day of rest—so instead of gulping down my tea and diving headlong into the day, I'm sipping it slowly, taking time by the window as my neighbors dive into their days.
Cindy has driven from her house two doors down to pick up her adult son. He has cerebral palsy and can live alone but needs her nearby. I wonder where she's driving him today. I wonder how they'll manage when she moves out of town in June.
They zip past Rachel and her children emerging reluctantly from their house, on their way to the bus stop. It saddens me whenever I notice this morning ritual because it's a good 90 minutes after I've taken my high school kids to school and I remember the slower pace of the days when my kids rode the bus with these two. I remember when I walked them all to the bus stop every morning because their youngest was then a baby. Her oldest are now about the age mine were then, and they still have a little pink in their hair from the dressing up session my daughter hosted when she babysat this weekend.
They're still dawdling off to the bus stop when my eye turns to Sharon, in her usual turquoise house coat, tending the flowers on her porch. Next she'll put out scraps of bread and stale cereal for the squirrels on her front walkway. The same bread and cereal (and squirrels) that will tempt my dog in a little while, when I walk him by her house.
The older I get and the more places I've lived, the more I define home as a lack of self-awareness about where I am. Home is no longer a place—it's a getting on with life.
Sharon and I bumped into each other in the supermarket last week. We laughed because we live beside each other but hadn't seen each other all winter and yet, here we were—running into one another at the store. She told me she had just been looking at a house on a different street because she feels isolated on our little street. I told her I understood and reflected on the emails I get every week, updating me on the newest real estate listings in a quieter, safer part of town.
I've been in the market to move ever since I moved here temporarily . . . 16 years ago. Wow. I've been here that long? But it doesn't feel like home used to feel. When I just was, without always thinking of where I was. The older I get and the more places I've lived, the more I define home as a lack of self-awareness about where I am. Home is no longer a place—it's a getting on with life.
I often feel a kind of pastor-guilt that I'm not the center of this community, that I'm not hosting street parties or baking cookies for every new arrival. But maybe it's okay.
These moments I've privately shared with my neighbors this morning make me more conscious than ever of how our lives are interwoven. I often feel a kind of pastor-guilt that I'm not the center of this community, that I'm not hosting street parties or baking cookies for every new arrival. But maybe it's okay. Maybe, if home is a lack of self-awareness, a "getting on with life," maybe that's what we're doing. The things we know about each other and the ways we need each other are invisible to us. Community is invisible to us because it no longer remains outside of us. It becomes a part of who we are and how we live. We can stop holding it at arm's length and scrutinizing it. Instead of being a critic of the movie, we've become actors in it again. Maybe that's okay.
Maybe that's how home should feel.
Mandy Smith serves as lead pastor at University Christian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is the author of Making a Mess and Meeting God: Unruly Ideas and Everyday Experiments for Worship
