Matt - Life in LA

When I learned I was moving to Los Angeles, I didn’t expect glamour and celebrities at every corner. I didn’t picture fancy dinners on the Sunset Strip or sipping $13 cocktails by the beach in Orange Country. I certainly didn’t imagine making a lot of money – after all, the word “volunteer” isn’t in so fine a print in the job description. The day I made my decision and signed that contract, I thought I had a pretty good idea of the things I would be giving up and saying “no” to by accepting a year a Jesuit Volunteer.

What I didn’t expect was just how much I would be given or how much would be expected of me. [I find the things I miss most about Boston and love about L.A. are different than what I thought they’d be.]

In many ways, my life includes your typical 9-5 workday and time at home with my roommates. On the surface, it appears to be only that: paperwork, meetings, and commuter traffic, chores, waiting for the bathroom, and watching TV. But my work is so much more than a job and my roommates aren’t just people I share a roof with. Together, my placement and my community breathe life into my experience.

At work, I am challenged on a daily basis to reexamine my faith and it how it shapes the way I see the world around me. My clients are former gang members, convicted criminals, and people who I would have grown silent as I passed three months ago. Today, I am asked to get to know them, listen to their stories, and work with them without judgment. You see, I work with the robber and the robbed, the victim and the victimizer. Almost all of my clients have been shot or shot at, and several more have used a gun themselves.

Sometimes the stories are difficult to hear and I almost wish I didn’t know what my clients have been through, witnessed, or done. But then I remember that for many of my clients, this is the first time they’re telling anyone not wearing a badge, suit, or robe such events of their life.

It’s been a lesson in listening, and humility.

Coming home from my placement isn’t the end of my day, but the beginning of an equally important part of life as a JV: community living. Living in community is different than living with roommates. You share a living space with roommates, but in intentional community your living space becomes a living space. Its very function is to breathe life into a place that for too many of us is a place of only seclusion and sleep. We eat together, pray together, share struggles with work and relationships, and, perhaps most importantly, keep one another from getting too comfortable.

The weather and the schedule are adjustments, for sure, but it’s the demand of my placement and community that I’m most challenged by – and most grateful for. Though I’m worn our by the time my head finally hits the pillow, I go to sleep grateful that my exhaustion comes from exercising not only my body and mind hard at work but my heart and soul when I’m at home.

These are the early goings of one Jesuit Volunteer. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Paz,
Matty

Matt Carroll is a blogger for Jesuit Volunteer Corps. He welcomes questions and comments at Matthew.carroll.86@gmail.com.

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!

Daniel - Life in Community

February 18, 2008 “That’s a lot of estrogen”

Saturday, February 16: I sit in my living room, wrapped in a blanket, eating chocolate and watching a romantic comedy with four green-faced women. No, they have not all come down with the flu or a bad case of food poisoning, but rather, all have decided to indulge their skin with avocado-based face masks.

The wait is over—I have decided to spill the beans on my life living with five women. With a female to male ratio in the East this year of nearly four to one, it was bound to happen. In fact, it’s occurred twice this year, with Boston sporting a house of five girls to one guy. You’re my boy, Chris.

Monday, February 18: Jim Carey is appearing on Oprah today as I write this blog. He scans the audience and declares, “That’s a lot of estrogen.” His reaction takes me to last summer when I received the Newark community bios in the mail, which read: Alison, Francesca, Jacqueline, Jenna, Claire and Daniel. –You said it Jim, “That’s a lot of estrogen.”

When I inform people that I live with five women - it doesn’t matter if they’re family or friends, male or female - the reaction is always the same. “Ooohhh, man!?!? How is that? That’s got to be rough.” This is accompanied with a look of sympathy, disbelief and a little bit of horror. It’s as if I just told people that I was living with a pack of wild, ravenous wolves.

I can tell you right now that the women I live with are---brace yourself---normal people. Five women living under one roof do not turn into a vicious monster. Actually they turn into five—kidding. I honestly thought that I was in for a rude awakening. I grew up with four brothers and two sisters. The television was dominated by Oakland A’s baseball, Notre Dame football and ESPN. Testosterone prevailed. When I received the roommate list, I pictured God snickering. I felt as though I was entering the female version of “How the Other Half Lives.”

When I think about living in community with five women, the image that comes into my head is of us talking. I know it sounds common, but that’s it. We talk during breakfast, at work through emails, g-chat and phone calls. After work, during rides home, in the living room before dinner, for well over an hour during and after dinner we are talking. Ohh—and how could I ever forget pillow talk?

If you find yourself in a similar situation, get ready for a marathon of talking and listening. A helpful hint: don’t just listen with a blank stare and nod of the head…it doesn’t count. Be ready to offer advice, insight and your feelings on an endless list of topics, including: news, weather, celebrities, men, male and female stereotypes, feminism, books, men, bras, clothing, movies, doing dishes, not doing dishes, men, music, siblings, relationships, families, parents, ex-boyfriends, boys that happen to be friends and of course, the boys we want to be more than friends.

But—isn’t that what people do? We talk about issues in our lives, things on our mind, people we like, we don’t like, what happened during our day, insecurities we battle and compliments we try our best to believe. We are people; communication is our tool---male, female, it doesn’t matter.

So—when I tell people that it is going well, this is the image I have. I like the talking and I am learning to appreciate the level of description that goes into stories. Now, I know I might be walking the dangerous line of gender stereotypes, but what I am learning is that women are all about detail. A story’s minute aspects are dissected, prodded, rolled over, turned upside down and inside out over and over again.

I’m learning. They have been patient with me and I with them. We are people. We are a community.

Learn more about Daniel here.

Kate - Life in Community

What do you get when you put a native Bostonian, a Cuban-American Miami girl, a Texas Christian graduate, a New Orleans Frat boy, a Northwest tree-loving chica and a son of Vietnamese immigrants in a four-bedroom apartment for a year? Your first guess may be “Real World: Volunteer,” but this is actually Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Welcome to my community.

I am having trouble articulating what it actually means to live in community. And I think every community is very unique (for example, we happen to have six very strong personalities; the advantage being a lack of passive-aggressiveness and no one being walked all over, the disadvantage being sometimes we are just, well, aggressive). I have tried New Orleans Crawdaddy delight and Cuban Rice and Beans, sat through many an agenda meeting, argued about levels of cleanliness and about who actually knows how to clean. We have our share of fun too – impromptu dance parties, lots of laughing, a Sunday spent taking a Christmas photo (Alana made us wear matching clothes) and making an Advent wreath, good discussions and girls’ nights, and jokes about our Tapestry-covered TV.

It is far easier to talk about community superficially. I think I entered this program being very excited about the community aspect of JVC; I was going to have an opportunity to live with people who must be similar to me; I mean, we all are probably coming from the same place in that we share these four values. That assumption was my mistake, and the fact that it is not true a blessing in disguise.

My housemates are the people most different from me that I have ever lived with. I have come to realize that while I do believe in the four pillars, the ways those beliefs are manifested is not the same for everyone. I think to fully grow from this experience you have to let go of your own notion of what spirituality or community or simplicity or social justice looks like, and be completely open to somebody else’s interpretation of it. I don’t believe that I have completely done that, but I do think it is the way to get the most out of this experience. Ego has to go, and the fact that I have spent a good portion of my life in community does not make me a better housemate than anyone else.

I feel both challenged and blessed by my community. I am incredibly grateful for these people and the gifts they bring (JT’s generosity and delicious desserts, Eric’s easygoingness and dance moves, Susie’s considerateness and outfits that only she could pull off, Alana’s friendliness and endless labeling/color-coding of our lives and Joe’s listening skills and Latin music). We have had our ups and downs, but at the end of the day I come home to a home where I feel safe, supported, and loved.

Learn more about Kate here.