Community and (the) Society
The Gospel message, as I see it, is that we are loved without us having to earn or deserve it, and that this makes us free to love in the same way. And community life is, for me, a great school for learning to love this way.
For one thing, it’s easy to love my neighbor gratuitously from 9 to 5 at work, but it’s a lot harder to exercise patience and generosity with those little-things-that-drive-you-crazy before having my two cups of coffee in the morning (my cup of justice, and then my cup of mercy), or when I get home exhausted at night. The fact of living in the same house, with shared kitchen, bathrooms, cats and guests, means that there is always an opportunity to choose between (a) getting annoyed and (b) getting annoyed and then accepting the other as-is, warts and all.
The real challenge, though, is allowing the others to accept me as I am, warts and all. Jesuits are trained to be suspicious (in the discernment of the Second Week) and critical, even of what we like (no matter how good something is, we don’t settle for anything but the magis). And anybody who knows Jesuits knows that we can be pretty competitive sometimes. So sometimes we walk into breakfast a little defensive, ready to duck, dodge and counterattack with sly comments. The safety zone is talking about other people or moving to what a friend calls “lowest common denominator” conversations, avoiding deep conversations about ourselves for fear of being caught: “people at work might think you’re a holy superstar (a friend once referred to Jesuits as ‘Catholic ninjas’), but we know better, you are nothing but a regular human who struggles!” We think we can love gratuitously, but that for us to be loved, we have to earn or deserve it. It’s hard to trust the Gospel message. The trap is that our fear of becoming vulnerable to the other leads us to become defensively aggressive or else banal and superficial, and the effect is that when we act that way, we confirm the others’ same fear that makes them act that way too, which in turn confirms our fear… it’s a vicious cycle.
How to break the cycle? It goes back to the Gospel — what frees us to drop our guard is the message that we are loved and accepted a priori. So, my challenge (made possible by accepting God’s a priori gratuitous love for me, i.e., grace) is to avoid adding to the fire when my community starts criticizing beyond what’s healthy, and to avoid those little verbal darts that can seem playful but that in our high-tension environment, can feel more like “friendly fire.” Rather, I need to try more to make it a point to ask my Jesuit brothers how their day went, or how their projects are going. At least, this way of proclaiming the Gospel message lets the other know that I can be a different sort of safety zone, and that opens the door to real one-on-one conversations (this is the point of the 22nd Annotation as “Presupposition”). Insofar as we make an effort with these little-things-that-save-us, I can see beyond my brothers’ faults and see instead the beauty in the particular way each one is being called, and I can walk with each one in his struggle to be faithful to that call. And I can let them do the same for me.
Community is a Gospel school, and so community is mission. The world needs, maybe more than anything else we can offer, to know that it’s possible to live together more than superficially. When our communities — made up of people from different backgrounds, and who didn’t necessarily choose to live together — are able to love one another, encourage one another, and see the best in one another, we become incarnate good news for the world.
Photo: “warts and all” by jenny downing from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)
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