Lauren - The Challenge of Community

For some reason, over the summer before I started JVC, I had convinced myself that all my roommates were going to be closed minded, belligerently conservative Catholics. So when I first met my community and everyone turned out to be kind, open-minded, and easy-going, and I was relieved. I came to love them even more throughout orientation as we bounced around all kinds of ideas about composting, farmers markets, prayer before meals, chore wheels, even a social justice movie club. I was ecstatic. To me, we seemed like the perfect community. But of course, no community is perfect, and my first struggle in community was accepting that. My second great challenge was and is, accepting that I was not placed in this community to bring us to perfection.

The first challenge hit pretty quickly after orientation. Going into the year, I had very high expectations for us. I really believed that we were going to be able to implement all the ideas we talked about at orientation. So when we wouldn’t make a point of doing spirituality night, or we’d buy something I didn’t deem very simple, or there was tension over chores, I’d feel anxious and disappointed. How were we ever going to grow into a strong community if we couldn’t even meet some of the basic goals we’d set for ourselves? But as I came to see all the good that was coming out of our community, that anxiety started to disappear. Things like everyone coming together to cook even when there wasn’t a scheduled family dinner, or coming home at night to see everyone in the living-room knitting and watching baseball, or all the ridiculous but affectionate nicknames that emerged, all showed me that even though we may not be living up to all the specific expectations we had established, we were still building a great community.

But even after establishing we could be a good community even if we weren’t perfect, I was left with a second personal challenge: getting out of the mindset that I was in this community to push us closer to perfection. I didn’t even realize I was thinking this way until our Area Coordinator was giving us his suggestions after a week long visit and said, “In our individual conversations, each of you expressed your desire to go deeper into this experience as a community.” Hearing him say that woke me up to the reality that we’re all equally invested in our community. It has helped me re-orient the way I spend my energy thinking about community. Instead of thinking, “I know what we need to do to best live as a community, how can I share this?” I am trying to set aside my pride and think, “We all want to build community, how can we use all our different perspectives to build it collectively?” It’s a challenge I’ll probably work on all year, but luckily, together we’ve already laid the base for a warm, supportive, and trusting community, where we can all work together overcoming the many individual and community challenges of a year in JVC!