It turns out that you can build a house a bit like build-a-bear: one piece at a time. The stuff comes over time and eventually, if one persists, good things happen. Yet a home requires people and here is an important truth: people are not pieces. People are people and using them to do anything is bad.
So here is the bad news: that includes looking to people to “save” you.
When we got married, I was twenty-two and safe to say got married for the wrong reason: looking for salvation. Hope, the woman not the virtue, I hoped, hoping against hope, the virtue not the woman, would save me from myself. I did not much like me, for good reason, and I very much admired Hope. Maybe we, hopefulness in we not me, could build a house like that in the CS Lewis great novel, the one that was my vision of good living when combined with my childhood home: Saint Anne’s on the Hill. In our imagination, this home would be open to college students, faculty, and we would learn (read, garden, think, discuss) free from red tape and the evils of accreditation.
It was a good dream and we have lived it best we could.
I have learned a few things and the first was that you could not use anybody for your own good, even for good ends. People exist for God and themselves and not for me at all. God forgive me. People are the people for whom community exists. The community is not the “thing,” the individuals are. The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many . . .
Second, stuff has nothing to do with having Saint Anne’s or any other home. We have yet to have a mansion on a hill for our community and eventually it occurred to us that this would be false in any case. We are urban people: we like cities. We are not very grand and our taste is downright American. This may not be good, but so it goes.
We have found a good community by just being ourselves and periodically moving, letting everything go.
Third, children are good, especially when they become adults. All people are awesome, but the wonderful thing about children in a home is we had no control over them. They have grown up to be themselves. This has enriched our community and us!
Fourth, we have a weird American habit of isolating generations. Older men and women should teach the younger, but the younglings have much to give as well. We are jarred by their ideas and if we listen, then we learn. A community with critics, open ended doubts, but centered on love and jollification will endure. The community centered on fear or on isolation will fail.
We need to listen.
Slowly, Hope built a home. We ended up with a place much like Saint Anne’s, if Saint Anne’s had been in America with middle class folk. We did lack a bear, but this year a new member of our community gave us one.*
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*Thank you Emily K!
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