O, Community

You ground me. You clarify me. You break me apart, and gleefully build beautiful things of the shards. The search for Community is gonna be the death of me - or else the Life....

Words won't really describe this moment. But some words, most likely, will have to make the effort. Spent last night with my old catholicworker community, here in Albuquerque. I've come to rely on the landing space that they offer, when I'm in this town between migrations. I've come to expect energizing, boundary-stretching, unpredictable conversation, whether it journeys into the politics of peace, the integration of spiritualities, or the humanizing of social service efforts. But I will never be prepared for the experience of being knocked off my feet by the sudden, chaotic, and root-deep healing that co-conspirators in community can work on each other. And which they do, at times, with deep awareness and intention. And sometimes, without beginning to imagine what they do.

I was just sitting on the edge of a conversation. An unattached observer, an unagendaed participant. And then suddenly I was in, and going under. Caught in the whirlpool of emotions and associations that a just few words released. This was water way too deep for me. There were profound differences in perspective, strong words for strong needs being expressed, with a kind of candor I'm not often in the same room with. Life experience so far, for me, hasn't found the strength to support any of these things very well. Differences. Candor. Needs. I deeply admire them all, and they scare the hell outta me. That lifelong dread of (more) conflict surfaced: ready for flight. The others saw me coming apart. They offered me the chance to leave. But I didn't. I suddenly had to stay for this. This is an open door, and there's light pouring out of it. There's intense, radical honesty going on here. There is also profound listening, receiving, humility, and recognition. There is real-time, flesh-and-blood-and-soul healing. It's painful - and I'm not even on the receiving end. But slowly, I see the simultaneous liberating face of it. And I find I can speak my few words into it, and even my feelings. And I can join in. This is transformation happening - not of ideas, opinions, concepts, but states of being. Ways of relating. Internal programs. Things that many people hold onto for years. For their entire lives. Things that the people in this room may have held for years. And now they - we - are consciously, powerfully letting them go.

It was something like watching a vast river canyon being formed in minutes, instead of the centuries it should take. It was like that on the inside. It was the inner and the outer, at once. Time-lapse: the picture moves unimaginably fast, but we witness it in slow motion. Impossible forces shifting, here in the possible, inarguable present. Unreal becomes reality. Becomes suddenly normal, and okay. There's a crash of boulders, a mass of sliding earth, and now there's a lush deep still river flowing.

That this may sound dramatic might reflect the perspective of where I start from: an early life of, in many aspects, spiritual poverty and emotional abuse. To say that isn't dramatic - it's just what was - but it makes a lot of "normal" things awfully dramatic by comparison. Like healing. Like openness. Like resolution, and acceptance. Or, this might just point out that I'm too damn sensitive to energies and emotions. That's also true. I'm exhausted today. Totally depleted. But I'm deeply grateful to have been there for this. And I'm grateful to my community for another step toward the goal of every day's journey, to be completely human, awake, alive...