Posted 96 days ago

Intentional Community: Living Our Dreams or Discovering God's Possibilities?

By Eliacin Rosario-Cruz

My family and I are part of an intentional residential community, Mustard Seed House. Our community is grounded in a physical space (a house) where we welcome people, garden, cook, play, pray and conspire for a new reality. Our young community has gone through several expressions and seasons. We’ve had friends travel with us for awhile, and then move on in their own life journies. In this space – relational and physical – we try to be present to each other. We have great memories and stories of our time together.

Each of us, in our community and in our larger networks of relationships (communities), have strong ideas and opinions about the reasons why community is important. However community, like shoes, comes in many forms, sizes and colors. There is no one-size-fits-all kind of community. The concept of community is as diverse as how each one experiences it.

The word community comes to us in the West loaded with meaning, meaning we give to it according to our past experiences and our personal expectations. Some think of it as something with deep, transformative powers like those inspired by the writings of Jean Vanier and Wendell Berry. For others it brings bad memories of life-smothering experiences in fundamentalist and legalistic groups. Like shoes, some communities will provide good support over a long journey, while other communities keep a tight grip on you, causing excruciating pain. In my experience with communities, I’ve noticed that most of them live in a constant struggle to balance the free form with the structured form. This struggle is one that each community should whole-heatedly embrace as they seek to provide a space for hopeful and transformational life together.

Some communities, like individuals, can lose sense of purpose, falling prey to the circular reasoning that they are community because they must be a community. Communities that find they exist for themselves (as noble and lofty as their goals may be) exist in a spirit-consuming vortex that prevents them from engaging life outside themselves. Others get sidetracked in developing strategies, plans and outward activities that smother the relational oxygen needed to thrive healthily as community.

One of the main reasons I am interested in intentional community, be it residential or not, is because it provides a safe space in which to start exploring and practicing in an incarnate manner the way of Jesus. I’m of the strong opinion that we need physical spaces in which to practice what we believe because, after all, the way one lives is the ultimate manifestation of what one believes. This is one of the reasons I speak of communities as liberated spaces (more on that at a later time).

That said, our strong ideas and opinions of what community should be sometimes get in the way of actually living it. As children of the ideology of historical progress, we are constantly trapped in the idea that we are working toward some goal or outcome that will give meaning to our present. The language often used in community circles expresses the idea of building, creating, making, cultivating – language that is focused on later outcomes.

This way of thinking about community forms the idea that people live in community in the present only as a way to accomplish something future – be it a sustainable planet, a just society, or a liberated world. In order to accomplish our goals and outcomes, many communities develop plans, procedures and guidelines. Others glance back at the romanticized elements of monastic Christianity looking for models and ideas for rules of life.

In this constant “working toward something” we run the risk of being blinded to the present expression of community, what we have in the here and now. In the laudable enterprise of building the road to a different future we lose touch with the gift of the present community, not the one we are building, but the one we have at this very moment. It is in this being present (what others call awareness) that we find the spirit of the future in our midst.

Communities that engage in the typical act of dreaming new possibilities function either from the perspective of having some grasp on how the future should look or, for those who are counter-culturally aware of the present, discovering the emergence of the hopeful future as it breaks in to their present reality. One approaches life as description and prescription of how things should be, the other approaches life as the sprout of new possibilities never before thought or dreamed of.

It is in this move into a space of awareness and exploration that a community is called to put into practice its faith as it engages into the unknown, or what the mystics would refer to as “the eternal unfolding of the now.” Once we take the leap into allowing the spirit to be the guide, we allow space for something transcendent to happen – the becoming of community.

As for the Mustard Seed House, keep us in your prayers as we try to move into this space of becoming.

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