Community & Love

Living in community is never easy. "As long as we are on the earth the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because love is the resetting of a body of broken bones" (Merton). Chinatown is the current residency of my heart and energy, but I am also part of this interfaith community and wondering what that means in our daily living together. What practices can bind us together while strengthening our personal traditions? Lately, I have been doing zazen (seated meditation) and for now it is the most natural and nurturing ritual for my faith.

The other day Kate said to me, "People are always saying Jesus loves you. Why don't they just say I love you?" and in that way begin to embody the radical love of Jesus, instead of projecting the difficulty of loving away from the self? Love as a word has lost nearly all its meaning in our language. Love isn't simply pleasant, love is a crown of thorns. It requires the work of opening up to vulnerability (including negative emotions) and learning to face our shadow sides, to sit with the deep, deep still, to speak honestly and bravely, to remain humble. As David Foster Wallace said, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” 


We are all unskilled, messy lovers and I am finding that living in this community is bringing to surface my own lack of understanding of what it means to love others and challenging me to struggle, to live by my own small-deaths. I am asking myself again and again, "what does it mean to love?" (to love my community on Soledad street, to love the people I live with, to love my scattered-lovers, to love God, myself, my environment.) Mm. 

(Reflections on Love: "Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition.")

Contrast / Sight.

Most days when the earth begins to spin my horizon away from the sun, I sit drinking tea or debriefing the day with Jimmy and Roy at our table beneath the cherry and palm trees. Our neighbors have a lemon tree (that always makes me think of Palestine and the MRI gang) they often sit outside too, music and Spanish spilling across the street. Yesterday I  played tag with the neighbor kids until dark when we stumbled through a spanglish game of charades and another neighbor leaned on the fence watching in amusement till their mothers called them home. I like my neighborhood. 


And these piercing moments of beauty and life sustain me because my heart is blurred by the vastness of evils and goods. Sometimes the news (our posturing towards Iran, Syria..., SOPA) or memory, or stories (of migrants dying in the desert- and even there, women raped, of isolation, betrayals, of relapses into drugs)-- it can ache so deeply I feel like abandoning all faith. Darkness rushing in (with all the agonies and personal tragedies and brokenness of Soledad Street that seem to seep into the tiniest cracks of light and absorb them, the reminders of all the seeds of monstrosity I carry inside myself, the complexity of how we don't set out to hurt each other and yet we so often do, over and over-- in obscure and infinitesimal, obvious and subtle ways-- and heal each other the same way.)  


There are so many people in my community that I admire and am surprised by. Yesterday, I sat next to Sandra outside La Perla and she told me about how her favorite job was running a body shop, particularly the process of stripping down a car all the way to its bare metal frame (the death of it, its skeleton laying in the lot) then rebuilding it piece by piece, bringing it back to life. I was struck by how redemptive-toned the language she used was, perhaps there is something inside us that it drawn by those metaphors. Remy taught Tony and I some watercolors today and he played us a harmonica song. Later we took a walk down to the community garden and Javier gave us a tour. Watching people on the street take care of each gives me hope.


But the situation is still complex, there are politics and fights and scuffles and rudeness and exasperation and failures. Beauty. Terror. These things don't balance each other, they merely provide contrast. Perhaps that is how life shapes a landscape inside us-- chiseling through a million winds, storms, floods, flashes of light. Perhaps that is the feeling of being alive, to constantly hold the tension of the sorrow and the beating, strength of joy, of our desire to live.


One of Larisa's friends commented on her most recent post (which is something I want to reflect on and relate to my own work-Read Her Thoughts): The most important person I am with is the person I am with now. And the most important task for me in this moment is to do good to this person."  This is the philosophy of personalism that the Catholic Worker encourages.  I am trying to challenge myself to be reflective in my practice, to see both the individual person and the long haul. It's difficult... the complexity of the street, the slowness of change, the excitement of seeing the women organize. I feel overwhelmed by all I have to learn (by all that is leftover or could be done), but then there are simple interactions: I remembered someone's name, sought her out to let her know she had mail (a small thing), yet twice later she brought up how I had remembered, how I'd even remembered her last name, how she'd told her boyfriend how I remembered. -- so often, the deepest desire is just to be seen. 


Sipaj.