6 months ago, 6 months from now....

This is the half-way point. I have been Home Life Coordinator of the Highland House now for 6 months, and in 6 months time, I'll be finishing up here at l'Arche. Also, Dave and I just celebrated 6 months together yesterday. We decided to sign up for another 6 months. Interesting to think that two major life changes occurred around the same time. In fact, the night Dave came for dinner, May 1st, was my first day as HLC (Diane had moved out the day before).

It's wild to think about l'Arche no longer being a central part of my life. When I first start, one month after graduating from Gordon, everything felt so foreign and I felt so inadequate. In school, I was valued for my intellect, my ability to think "big thoughts," to theorize and conceptualize. Moving into l'Arche Nehalem in Portland prompted me to confront a part of my self that I had rarely, if ever, encountered. In l'Arche my theories and big thoughts, my writing skills and verbal fluency mattered little. Instead, my ability to tangibly care for others, to be patient and listen well, to enjoy the small details of life have been primary. The transition was disconcerting. Interacting with bodies was more difficult than interacting with ideas. In some ways, this still remains true for me, but I recognize now how important it is for people like myself, so easily caught up in their heads or their future plans, to be pulled down to earth.

I remember being so angry and reactionary my final year or two at Gordon, and I felt myself slipping into disillusionment and bitterness. There is a passionate anger that can drive us to do justice and love mercy, but there is also a destructive anger that burns like wildfire and can consume us if we aren't careful. Passionate anger yearns for righteousness. But the anger I was beginning to feel sought to destroy. I've seen this anger in a lot of disillusioned Gordon grads - this is the process of dying to Self. But what of rebirth? Most of us are living in limbo now, not dead but not reborn.

There are many ways we can climb out of our graves and receive new life. I think living in l'Arche, or any other community centered around the Beatitudes, helps people to be reborn. The Eucharist allows us to participate in our own death and resurrection every Sunday. Relationships, whether romantic or platonic, help us experience the newness of life. Confessing our sins and receiving forgiveness, confronting our weaknesses and accepting them, caring for others and being cared for in return are all ways in which we can be reborn.

I feel I was reborn in l'Arche -- the burn of my cynicism has no place here. I am instead called to peace, to patience, to yearn for justice and mercy, to convey great love with small actions. This does not mean that rebirth is easy or even pleasant. It calls us to let go of our certainty, our egos, to let the seed die in order for new life to take root. It sometimes calls for humiliation and always calls for surrender.

If all goes according to plan, I will be at Duke Divinity School in Durham next year. I can only imagine, of course, how different my perspective of school, and the Academy, will be when I return. Will I feel alienated? Invigorated? Will my time in the classroom feel irrelevant or life-giving? Will l'Arche be a distant memory or a vivid recollection? Will I enjoy my new-found freedom or feel smothered by it? I am interested to discover how my time in l'Arche and impending time in the Academy can coexist, maybe even reconciled.