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Settling In ˜ 35
of Christ. Community, sharing bread, is an antidote to the despair and isolation
of our time.
As Dorothy said, “It all sounds very wonderful, but life itself is a haphazard,
untidy, messy affair.” We have to disarm our own hearts. In the life of companionship
and community we learn how much in our own hearts has to be disarmed
day after day. That disarmament is as important as the disarming of a nuclear-test
site.
Dorothy Day also spoke often of holy folly. She said, “We are fools for
Christ and wish we were more so.” I think sometimes in community that prayer
is granted more often than any of our petitions.
In 1985, we at the Open Door hit a most difficult and painful period in the
life of our community. We were founded by two families, and one family decided
that it was time to leave. It was painful and wrenching. We came to the
point when Ed suggested that we change the name of the community from the
Open Door to the Open Sore Community. We often remembered the story of
Teresa of Ávila. She was traveling to another convent on a donkey. It was wintertime,
the beast balked in the middle of a river, and Teresa fell into the cold
water. She sat in the water, and is said to have cast her eyes heavenward and said,
“Lord, the way Thou treatest Thine friends, ’tis no wonder Thou hast so few.”
We had gone into community, thinking of it as an endeavor of people who
were like-minded—coming together and making something together. Frankly,
we had in mind people who looked like us, smelled like us, acted like us, came
from the same kind of backgrounds. So when in 1985 all of that fell apart, we
thought very seriously of closing down quietly, sneaking out the back door, and
finding something else to do.
But during that time, God gave us a new vision that was pure grace. We realized
that we did live in community with Willie Dee Wimberly, Ralph Dukes,
Joe Owens, Barbara Schenk, and Harold Wind, who had come out of institutions
and off the streets. We had been community together for some years by
that time. We were living in community, but our limited, narrow vision said,
“The others that came with us have left; it’s over.” We were given such a gift because
God helped us get our narrow, squinty eyes open to see the rich gift that
was there. From community we were able to rebuild, to heal, and to pray for a
strengthening of that new vision.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together offers his own articulation of love as a
harsh and dreadful thing. He says that to be shaped into community with each
other, we have to come to the point that all of our dreams of community are
dashed. They have to die. We bring our dreams into this endeavor and try to
make this thing happen, but it can’t start to happen until those dreams fail and
God can begin to bring life out of the ashes. I think that’s part of what Jesus
meant when he said, “Unless the seed fall to the earth and die . . .” We have to
get past all of our dreams and plans before the real life can begin.