Community is Generosity
I've been reading Blue Like Jazz almost every morning. Sometimes a chapter. Sometimes two. Sometimes part of one.
Today's chapter was the one about community. About living with people. Being around people. About our lives not just being some sort of play about us and only us. About treating people like people.
It made me miss the community experiences I've had. I mean, the only time I actually lived alone was in Brooklyn, New York. And then it was only for six months or something. But there's also a difference between having a roommate and having a major community experience.
I've had the latter twice.
The first time, during college, was living with five other girls in a two bedroom dorm suite. I remember being recruited by the first two girls, who were already roommates, and I said I would do it on a condition: if we opened our doors wide.
If we already were squeezing six girls into that space, why not open it up to anyone who needed community or time away from a dorm room or a bad roommate? So we duct-taped our door so it wouldn't lock. We would take the duct-tape off the door last thing before bed and put it back on first thing in the morning. With six girls and six schedules and the fact that this was college, this usually meant that the room was "closed" for business between the hours of 3AM and 6AM.
In part, this whole experience turned out to be about the girls and the time we all spent together, in pairs or all together. It was about Tana, who was very organized and made a chart so that we would all clean the room. She had to, because we were bad at that. She also was almost engaged and uncomfortable with our general need in the suite to get naked in the bedrooms and hang out. So we would plan ways to be naked when she came in. Or partly naked, really. Once we were sitting on her bed in our underwear when she came in from talking to her now-husband on the phone. She stared a moment, dropped her jaw and then turned and walked calmly out of the room.
The other girl who lived in the bedroom with me was Teresa, who is almost married now. She was the one who sat on Tana's bed with me that time. She was generally comfortable with things. And I remember that year she went through a serious heartbreak from a careless boy. But I think community helps us heal. So we all knew she would be okay. Particularly when there were nakedness pranks being played on Tana or road trips taken to Canada with backseats full of international students who slept the whole way, while Teresa and I heard the popular songs of that day 48759 times.
On the other side of the suite there was Laura, who I wouldn't want to take in a fight. She's probably the strongest girl I've ever met and doesn't know her own strength--which is scarier when you are wrestling, which us girls also had a tendency to do.
And Jenna, who I predict will be the third to get married, who was a dancer and very sweet. She was the only one who lived up to Tana's standards of cleanliness that year. And most of the conversations that her and I had were moderately serious and about Jesus or how we should live.
The last of my roommates, and the one I was and am closest to, is Grace. She was the resident hippie and artist and that was the year she went with dreadlocks. Now she goes to interior design school and dates men who wear flannel or leather and builds bikes in her spare time. She was my co-leader for a small cell group composed of girls in one of the freshmen dorms. It was a hard year for us in that group in some ways. Our girls weren't big talkers and we wanted them to be. I still don't know how to solve that problem. I think you just love people whether they talk or not. Grace and I spent a lot of time planning our talks on her bed and talking about life and the hard questions that we had about it. My most vivid memory of Grace that year, though, was her mooning us through the window when we locked her out of the suite. She mooned us right as a cop drove by and we all thought she was going to be arrested, which was an anti-climactic thing to think, as she wasn't.
For a while we also had an unofficial roommate (or several really). People who needed to sleep on our couches for one reason or another. The most prominent and long-staying was Jasmine, who I think lost her apartment that year and just wanted to graduate. She lived on our couch for something like 6 months and after that gave each of us an ivy plant. I kind of wish I had that ivy plant still, to remind me of community and generosity and that year.
The second time I lived in community was very different. I was in Denver and living off and on on Holly's couch. The reason I would consider this a major community experience is because of all the other couchsurfers that made their way through while I was there. Her door was a rotating door, people always over, in and out. She hosted a french couple while I was there, and they made us dinner almost nightly. And I let go of personal space and lent all my energy to loving people. I guess it was the same frame of mind, which is why it feels similar to college to me.
Generous with space and time and love. That's big community. Someday maybe I'll live like that again.
