Our Big Step into Community

Community is a trendy word these days, but not all versions of community are created equal. In the monastic world, entering into a shared life, into community, is a relatively straightforward if utterly demanding process: you sense God's leading, give away all your stuff, enter the cloister, and then after a set period of discernment along with the community members there, you make your vows and become an official member of that monastery or convent.

Things are a little harder to define outside the cloister.

Some people think community is about having your name on a membership list. Once you've signed up, you're basically in. It works this way at a country club (though you have to pay the annual dues, of course). But belonging to an organization that I have to pay to join doesn't really seem to fit with the idea of a spiritual practice.

I'm not ready or able to jump into the cloister, but I'm not interested in joining a country club either.

I'm searching for a formative, shaping community.

This is how it happens.

Danae pauses the movie we're watching and turns to face me, a sure sign I'm about to get hit with something significant. "I think we should move to East Vancouver," she says. "And become a part of the neighborhood and community around that church." She stops for a second, but then continues before I even have time to respond. "Maybe we can even live in one of the community houses."

I blink a few times.

Then a few more.

"That's a long way away," I say at last. We've been living a ten-minute bus ride from our graduate school. The idea she's just blindsided me with would mean living on the opposite side of the city, effectively quadrupling our daily commute.

"If we are serious about really becoming rooted in a community, proximity plays a role," Danae says.

"Yeah," I respond, trying to get my brain out of the movie and into gear for an argument. "Proximity does play a role, but I'm not sure I'm ready to move across the city just because we're intrigued by a particular church."

"I feel like we're sort of stuck in the middle here," Danae explains, "between two potential communities: between our school where we spend our days, and the life people seem to share together within that church community in East Vancouver. This apartment just feels like an in-between, like we're splitting the difference but missing the point. With so much distance between the core of each group, we don't even have to see other people unless we intentionally plan to. We aren't really experiencing life together with anybody by living here."

"What do you mean?" I say. "We live in a great apartment complex. People here are really nice."

"They're nice," Danae agrees. "But do you know anybody's name?"

"Sure," I say. "There's Don and Jane, and … " But my voice trails off.

"Do you mean Doug and Julia?" "R—Right," I stammer. "That's what I meant."

"Do you know Doug and Julia's last name?" Danae asks. "Or anybody else's name? Do you know anything about anybody? Because I don't. And I don't feel known here either. This apartment complex feels like a transit bus, and we're all passengers who just happen to be on it together. That's not a community.

"We're living completely autonomous lives," Danae says. "All we do is work at school and eat and sleep here. I don't feel connected at all. I don't know anything about anybody's life. I want to try living in a more connected way. Less independently, more interdependently."

"Are you sure about that?" I ask. "Although I like the idea of trying to live more interdependently, there are parts of it that would be really difficult. There are plusses and minuses on both sides, don't you think?"

"I know," Danae says, nodding. "And we've lived most of our adult lives independently. What if we gave living interdependently a chance? See what it's like?"

I am slowly starting to come around to the idea. "How will we know if we never put ourselves in situations that force us to learn more about it?"

"We won't," Danae says definitively. "We have to dive in and see."

For the rest of the week, I'm pondering this idea of intentionally moving toward a shared life with a group of people, a way of doing life together that would be categorically different from the total anonymity and autonomy with which we currently live. Because despite living in that "great" apartment complex and despite my gym membership and being a graduate student and even my previous "commuter" church experiences, there is still an aching sense of loneliness. A felt need to become more thoroughly rooted and interconnected with a particular community of people.

I want to know and be known in a network of relationships that go beyond mere nicety. I want to enter into the kind of interwoven relationships that begin to emerge when people in a particular place intentionally decide to lower their facades and stop masquerading long enough so that they might actually get to know one another. I want to live into the kind of collective rhythms and habits that grow slowly out of a shared vision and set of values. I want to do life together.

"Let's try it," I say a few nights later. "I have no idea what this will mean, what it will require of us, but I want to give this life together thing a try."

"Are you sure?" Danae asks.

"No," I admit with a laugh. "Of course I'm not sure. But I don't think you really can be sure ahead of time about something like this. I think we'll have to grow into it, you know? Find out what our capacities are, learn a bit more about where our blind spots are, what ways we need to grow. But like you said … we'll never find out if we don't dive in and see."

Thus begins one of the most challenging and illuminating seasons of my entire life.

Within the month we move out of our apartment in West Vancouver and across the city into the neighborhood of Grandview Calvary Baptist Church—"Grandview" for short. Neither of us has ever lived within walking distance of our church before, much less just two doors down, but that's where a room in a community house opens up. After two phone calls and a long meeting over coffee, we decide to move in with a group of people we don't even know.

Upon making that decision, we go from feeling like two anonymous passengers on a transit bus to marveling at how thin walls and floors could actually be.

After spending most of the weekend unpacking our boxes and learning a bit about the people who are now our new housemates, we head next door for the Sunday afternoon church service at Grandview.

As I walk into the church I can't help but smile at what a ragtag bunch of people we've moved to do "community" with. Amid a very post-Christian Vancouver, Grandview is a medium-sized church, even though there are only a hundred or so people sitting in the pews this afternoon. For Danae and me this feels small and intimate enough to suggest that we might actually get to know and be known by the others in this place, instead of just swimming weekly through another anonymous crowd.

"We're living completely autonomous lives. I don't feel connected at all. I want to try living less independently, more interdependently."

"Hey you two!" a jovial Iranian man cries as we begin making our way down the main aisle. Though we've only met this man a couple of times, he nonetheless runs up to us with a big smile stretched across his stubbly face and throws his arms around both of us. "I heard you've just moved next door. Welcome to this place. I am so happy, for you are now close to all of us."

Before we even have a chance to respond, he steps past us to embrace another person as they enter the church. This place cuts through most of the "normal" societal boundaries like a scythe: education levels, age groups, race, language, and socioeconomic class all cease to have their "normal" effect here. On any given Sunday homeless people sit next to millionaires. People who haven't completed high school pass the peace of Christ with people who've earned PhDs. People whose first language is Spanish, French, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Amharic, Arabic (just to name a few), all worship by singing hymns and songs in a multiplicity of languages and reading the Scriptures aloud in their own language. People of First Nations origin, of European origin, of African origin, of Asian origin all walk down the center aisle together to receive Eucharist. People who are employed and people who aren't are all welcome here, as are people who are clean and sober and people who smell strongly of cheap vodka or keep nervously patting their pockets.

We walk down the main aisle, slide into one of the rows of pews, and take a deep breath.

Here we are.

Despite all the differences that exist between members of Grandview, several things help knit us all together into a formative community.

I was shocked to discover after moving into the neighborhood that about half the members of Grandview live within a 10- to 15-block radius of the church building. Although it isn't a "parish church" in any formal sense, living among such a large number of people who share Sunday pews reveals the lost wisdom of such a model: living so close to many of the people I worship with weaves our lives together in ten thousand strong yet subtle ways. We keep seeing one another everywhere. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I see my pastor sweating on the elliptical machine at the local gym. At the coffee shop I order my double shot from the woman I sat two rows behind just a few days ago. I round a corner in the grocery store and practically knock over the person who baked the Eucharistic bread. As I'm biking home one afternoon a whole crew of fellow members are hanging out on a front porch, so I stop and sit awhile. When I almost get hit by a car on the way home, my anger is cooled by the realization that I "passed the peace of Christ" to the driver not even 24 hours ago …

… Of course I'd be lying if I made it seem like life together is easy and simple and beautiful. Nothing but lovely litanies and shared meals and no bumps along the road.

Make no mistake, life together is messy.

How could it be otherwise, when we are all messy and in-process beings?

None of us has yet become all that we should be, and not everything that is awry within us has been healed. Living in such close proximity to people means others come to see our blind spots and foibles, up close and personally, even as we get to know theirs.

Conflict becomes inevitable.

Some conflict is rather humorous, like when one of our housemates keeps frying up pounds of discount-aisle kidney and making the whole house reek like baked urine for days thereafter.

Other conflicts, however, are deep and wounding on every level, for all involved.

Up until now we've never really had to walk those tumultuous paths of conflict before. Without the million little alchemic moments weaving us into the warp and woof of a formative community, it has been relatively easy to keep people at arm's length. To never get close enough for either intimacy or friction to emerge. Or when friction did emerge, to just back away a little so that there was enough space and distance separating us so that we didn't need to actually address the grievances. We could just let space heal the wounds.

But when you are committed to doing life together, you see one another all the time—in the morning making coffee, and then again in the afternoon while coming or going, and in the evening around the dinner table, and then again in the middle of the night while coming out of the bathroom. Or in the coffee shop and at the grocer, in the gym as well as in the pews. And then it becomes a lot harder to just let grievances lie.

Left unattended in such close proximity, wounds will fester and boil.

That's when Danae and I find ourselves caught up in the long and fragile process of acknowledgment, apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Such a long and fragile process is the only balm, the only salve that can heal the wounds we inevitably inflict on one another as we seek to participate in life together.

Some of these conflicts have run their course, and the old wounds have healed.

Others—I must confess—are still ongoing. And though the sharpness of the pain we have inflicted and had inflicted in us may have dissipated some, there is still the dull ache of resolution not yet fully achieved.

Like I said: life together is messy.

An older woman and her daughter—both First Nations women—are setting off on a long and challenging endeavor within our city to work for reconciliation and peace between First Nations communities and the European settlers whose ancestors rapaciously acquired the land on which we now all live. Theirs is a long road, an important road, working against many aspects of human frailty, oppression, and unhealth that are mixed viciously into our society. These women know the challenges that lie ahead of them and are all the more determined to work for peace and reconciliation.

But they need a community behind them in order to do so.

So they ask all of us at Grandview to support them, to walk with them, to encourage them to keep on when they become weary.

Midway through the Sunday service our pastor asks the two women to come into the center aisle of the church. "Please stand and come toward these two women," our pastor instructs. "Let them feel your presence surrounding them, standing with them, empowering them to do the good work they feel God calling them to do."

And we do. All of us. Rich, poor, uneducated and educated, housed and homeless, North American, First Nations, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, Oceanic. We lay aside our differences in order to come together around these two whom we love and care for, these two we support, these two whom we long to see succeed.

As we surround them the pastor prays and invites us all to speak words of affirmation over them, words of prayer on their behalf.

When we conclude, the older woman in the center of the group looks around at us with tears in her eyes. "My ancestors had a practice," she says in a strong, emotion-filled voice. "A practice where—if there was a danger drawing near, they would put all the children in the center and then form a tight circle about and around to protect them. This was to enable the children to grow strong and to live the life that was ahead of them, to do the good work Creator had for them to do."

Tears are streaming down her face now.

"You have done this for us here today, standing around and with us. Helping us grow strong and do the good work Creator has for us to do. Thank you for being our people."

A fellow community member named Shadrach and I meet soon after the service. It doesn't take long for our conversation to land on the deeply empowering encircling we've both just witnessed and participated in.

"It's astonishing what's happening on multiple levels, isn't it?" I ask. "Not just that the community is metaphorically standing with them, but that we are actually, physically standing beside and around them as well. That we speak words of wisdom and power and goodwill and affirmation over them, that despite all our differences we come together to bless and encourage and support one another for the good work Creator has for us to do."

Shadrach nods. "Who doesn't need that? To know that you have a whole community of people around you, supporting you, standing with you and alongside you?"

"To know that whether you succeed or fail," I add, "you are welcomed in by a group that seeks to hold you up, and to do that with goodwill and great hope."

"I know that place isn't perfect," Shadrach says. "But we all need to feel like we belong to something, to keep the gnawing sense of loneliness at bay. Outside of my family, this is the best place I've belonged in a long time. One of the most hopeful, one of the most formative communities I've ever been a part of."

"Me too," I agree, feeling a potent gratitude grip my gut. "Like you said: Who doesn't need that? Who doesn't want that? A formative life together with a particular group of people, in a particular place, for a particular time. No, it isn't perfect. But it is very, very good."

Michael Yankoski is the author of The Sacred Year (Nelson, 2014) from which this article is excerpted. It details his journey to experience parish with Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, whose pastor, Tim Dickau, is interviewed in this issue. This article was reprinted with permission of W Publishing Group, an imprint of Thomas Nelson.