Weekly foundations

Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the loss we receive when we don't have a faith community, and this notion has lingered in my head a while longer than I really expected it to, and here's why. Currently, my wife and I do not have a community with strong attachments. We recently moved from our community in Seattle to study at the University of Oregon in Eugene. We left our friends, most of our family, and our church.

We had found a church that had space for just what I was discussing yesterday, it was a safe place, with a strong community in which I could walk in and say "Y'know, I have no idea what the hell is going on here," and I would be met with nods of head, and support. Here in Eugene, we have not yet found a community, church or otherwise, we can call home.

Now every word of encouragement from a professor or classmate, I hang on to and treasure deeply. Another student in my cohort said "It's just all so noisy" referring to the day-to-day juggle of class work, internships, new friends and coworkers. I heard this and fought back tears I know will come gushing once I've found that safe place.

Once a week in Seattle, we knew we could come and see people we cared about, and follow a little bit of ritual that would help us restart our week. Here in the midst of work, classes, studying and internships one day looks vastly different from the next, abandoning any discernable pattern. Weekends come along, and we're more sleep hungry than we are community hungry, and being the introverts we are, surrounded by new faces every single day, we take the sleep. What we lose is the foundation, the stability of something that happens with consistency, something we can depend on.

This is why we build connections, make communities. People need patterns, something they can depend on, and without them we struggle. By myself, I know I could get by doing what I am doing with my life, but it's not something I would ever choose. A friend said to me that his philosophy in life was based on the idea that we're all here to hang out and talk with each other. And with all my introspective naval gazing I've never come up with a reason for us to be here on this planet sounder than that (although I would probably amend it with a few things about being nice to each other and not killing each other). That's what communities offer, and more and more I see how necessary it is and how it stabilizes us.

I'll end with another quote that may say all of this better than I can, this time by Brian Andreas: "There are things you do because they feel right, and they make no sense, and they make no money, and it may be the real reason we are all here: to love each other, and to eat each other's cooking, and say it was good."