Monday, October 26, 2015

On Grieving Community


Tonight wisdom was spoken to me where a woman said that our bodies can travel by plane, but our soul travels by foot. In it she was speaking to the reality that your body can leave a place, but your soul can linger there for much longer.


In many ways my body has been in Akron since leaving Philadelphia, but my soul has been elsewhere. It has been traveling by foot, trying to make sense of an intense year of life and love. What an intense pilgrimage—what an intense journey.



Walking in this has been an incredibly lonely process. Even as people in Akron pursued me in support and I surrounded myself with people I have still felt incredibly alone. In many ways, it came down to the reality that the six people who knew the journey (my journey) best were no longer around me—my teammates.



I was relaying to a dear friend who has journeyed with me awhile about how I’m doing lately and three fourths of the way through something struck me, “I think I’m grieving the loss of my team,” I stated, tears streaming down my face and my voice cracking. “This feels like a break up and I’ve never even had a break up!” I was frustrated and exasperated at the incredible sadness I was experiencing at the loss of my team, even three months after Mission Year's end.


If there is anything I can say for certain about what I’ve processed it’s that living among a group of committed people (community) changed me. There is much I learned about commitment and love this past year that I’ve only ever talked about but have never lived out. The “isms” became real. Like “You choose to be for each other even when you don’t feel like it” and “Stick it out because you’re committed.” I’ve usually heard these phrases used in regards to romantic relationships, yet our team spent a year cultivating non-romantic committed relationships. There were days when I didn’t want to do life with my teammates. There were days where his quirk was too much for me, or her quirk irritated the crap out of me, or weeks where I could no longer meet someone’s brokenness with grace and chose instead judgment.



It was real, raw, earthy life in community—and we were in it together.



In many ways this living experience was redemptive and I haven’t quite been able to put that into words (the Body of Christ does not have to be just a metaphor). But there was something about breakfasts made with love in the mornings and water ice in the evenings. There was something about trying to make sense out of a common experience and spurring one another on in our growth. There was also something about the painful loneliness of feeling misunderstood and wanting so desperately for everyone to get along but reconciliation having its own timetable. (Distance has not negated the reality of what went down last year in community—it was freaking hard and a lot of work.)



But then again, I’ve heard many people say that about relationship in general.


Tonight I was at a Bible study in Akron with eight other incredible women and I was noticing the hardness of my soul. It is a cynicism and bitterness and anger that has increased in recent weeks that I haven’t been able to name. I sat in the corner of the couch, aware that I was shutting everyone out. Here were eight incredible women, a community right in front of me, and I was unable to open up to being loved and loving because the grief from my last community dispersing has been incredibly hard to walk through.



There is a quote I cling to by Anais Nin. I find it applicable in many transitions and seasons of change. She says, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”



I stared at the carpet, no one knowing the internal struggle within me. Tears began streaming down my face as I once again found myself in the cyclical grief and deep pain. Within me I heard a whisper “It’s time.” At once I found myself resistant to those words and the tears increased.



The war within was not about the women in front of me, but with my past experience with my last community. The pain of leaving after growing so close. The pain of watching everyone go their separate ways, knowing you will all probably never be together in the same physical space again. The pain of isolation and loneliness after a deep sense of belonging and intimacy and knowing of one another.



The pain is great, but the pain of holding onto the pain is even greater.



“What if I choose to open myself up to love again?” I whispered internally to myself, tears streaming down my cheeks.



My soul, resistant, reminds me of the pain. "I can't." It reminds me that the pain and heartache is hard and not worth love in the first place. Yet there is a knowing in my soul that recognizes that this is not true, and that at the end of the day that I will choose love because it is what I have found to be lasting in a world that is meaningless.

And so I open my teary eyes and look at the women around me, allowing myself for one moment to open myself up to the idea that my community is not scattered across the United States, but that it is right here in front of me, and that I can love here. 

And though I cried because there was still pain, my soul no longer seemed bitter, but at peace.


(Oh grief, though you are painful and full of heartache, you contain a beauty beyond words.) 



 

1 comment:

  1. I love you and your heart. And your willingness to step into hard places to resist the bitterness and hardening of heart.

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