Through the dish-hole: a reflection on community life
/ d i S H ˌ h ō l /
noun
A quirk of the Calcutta house, which operates as a small, Michael-sized window for dishware exchange between the women’s side and the men’s side of the Mercy Missionary duplex.
An opportunity for ridiculous amounts of laughter and ingenious blog-title ideas among the Mercy Missionaries.
Late August, six twenty-somethings moved into a duplex just up the hill from St Michael’s.
As one of these six, I was tentative to come to terms with the fact of just how interconnected our lives would be for the next 10 months. This unseemly bunch would be my coworkers, housemates, prayer warriors, and spiritual influences. I’d kneel with them in prayer, travel with them, visit tents with them, cook with them, and endure staff meetings with them. And they’d be my family.
No doubt, such an all-encompassing form of intentional community is unconventional for our age and era. Worldly ambition for work, lifestyle, and pleasure urges us to compartmentalize. We are warned not to take work home, nor take life to work. We have distinct groups of friends held at varying distances and filtered into ‘neatly’ distinguished arenas of life. We are to disassociate where there is difference, and maintain individual possessions—whether they be property, successes, or talents—where there is same-ness. But the mission year demands we live otherwise, and reflects a more general call from Christ Himself, amidst our small, fleeting efforts to mend the brokenness of humanity.
There are both beauty and discomfort in this call. A life in Christ, after all, is a life of both unity and self-offering: If a foot should say “Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,” it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. Or if an ear should say “Because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body,” it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. (1 Cor 12:15-16). I’d imagine (now that we’re personifying body parts, here) that it is in sharing a body with the eye, the ear comes to know itself distinct from the eye; and, in knowing the purpose and function of their body, they both begin to see the other as mysteriously essential to the life which both seek to enhance and sustain. The role of community life, in drawing nearer to Christ, is two-fold: to know oneself as a part, and to give oneself as a part of the whole.
In our second week of training for the year, we were led through an exercise with 1 Corinthians 13:4-8—a few verses that seem nearly too repeated to feel profound. After some time of reflection and prayer, we reunited in the echo of those words: “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated…” We each went around, identifying the ways we struggle to meet the gentle demands of love and the ways in which our hearts most naturally fall in step with those measures. Looking up at the others, those words suddenly sank deeper in my heart than they ever had before. It was the beginning of a slow realization that, in order to freely love the most impoverished in our society, I’d have to learn to receive love into the poorest places of my soul - those corners of myself where charity, generosity, and warmth tend to run dry. Those verses would echo in my head and follow me all year, through the streets of Portland and in the silent opportunities to serve in my very home.
Since those weeks of training, we’ve swung from eras of mutual admiration to dispositions of hyper-critique and, finally, to a state of rest in moderate, realistic acceptance for one another. We co-exist in an unglamorous reality of human messiness (You’re right, Jack, I’m sorry. I’ve left my laundry in the dryer once again..) juxtaposed with the unfolding reality of Christ’s identity. He teaches through us about Himself and His Ways. In my better moments, I’m most aware of that latter perspective, and acutely aware of it.
In coming to know another’s flaws, I’m compelled to examine my own. And in examining my own, I am stunned by the beauty of He Who is Perfect, and wishes me to be the same, so as to enjoy Him perfectly as He goes on for eternity, perfectly loving me and desiring the day I may perfectly receive such a love.
In coming to know and see Christ present in the other members of our households, I am drawn into that supernatural vision which Christ desires for all of us. As a whimsical Argentinian priest once said, “Community life is an arrow to the divine.” It breeds a friendship which is excellent in its very nature - in its source, direction, and fruition. St. Francis de Sales speaks to this: “It will be excellent because it comes from God, excellent because it tends toward God, excellent because its good is God, excellent because it will endure eternally in God.”
This year is only a glimpse into God’s light, a small revelation of the trinitarian wonder of His perpetual self-giving. The men’s duplex has the definite advantage of receiving literal light, as its windows face the east and absorb the late sunrise of Portland winter. There have been a few times I’ve opened the dish-hole at such an hour, and the golden stream lights up our kitchen, and suddenly illuminates the whole room. Alongside the blessed moments of sharing food after a day on the streets, exchanging stories from tent-visits, and simply praying in one another’s silence and humility, these transient glimpses into Christ’s presence awe me. In the meantime, these small windows of light grace me with a new desire to give of myself and a renewed desire to serve.
If you are interested in intentional Catholic living, check out St. Michael’s Littlemore program.
Isabel Cortens