One is the world of details and deadlines, of traffic and trivialities, of small talk and sleeping patterns. The other is unseen, deeper, the realm of the soul, of our thoughts and dreams and fears and hopes. Both are real, both are vital, and both are incessant. Every day we interact in the in-betweeness of these two worlds, hoping to merge them into a coherent whole life, a life real and tangible, of beauty and truth.
I sometimes don't know how to do this.
1 Thessalonians 4: 10-12 says "But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live a quiet life, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one." There's something about this that deeply resonates with me. To live a quiet life, to work with my hands, to dwell in simplicity. To harvest righteousness in season, to commune with creation, to go into the wild, into the great silence.
But then Hebrews 10: 21-25 reads, "And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Because we are justified unto God and united in one Body through the sacrifice of Christ, we are instructed to gather together for encouragement and edification, that we might indeed call one another to live in the light. We are to meet with one another, bear each others' burdens and share each others' joys. We are to be intimately involved with the details of our friends' lives.
I still don't really know what these two passages mean.
There are, however, two examples that have impacted me recently and may begin to help decipher that age-old question--'how then shall we live?'
The first is the story of Gwen Roland.
In 1970, Gwen had just turned 24 and finished up a master's degree in art or art history or something and was all set to begin her PhD. (Ahem, sound familiar?). But she couldn't take it. She just wanted wonder and delight and to do something real. So she left school and, with maybe the great love of her life (more on that later), Calvin, she went to the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana. As a young child, Gwen had heard her grandmother tell stories about people who lived in the basin, connected with one another only by waterways. These swamp residents lived in a naturally insulated community, only reaching the outside world by taking ferries through the swamp. At the age of 24, Gwen remembered these stories and went to the Basin, looking for that mystic community she'd envisioned. But it had been largely abandoned. So she and Calvin went by themselves. They built a house, kept a garden, lived off the land, explored the wilderness, and lived together in this amazing hippie home. No running water, no heat or AC, no need for money, no need for anything except adventure and love. Though the basin was predominately empty, there were two old single men and one elderly couple whom they befriended. In the evenings, Gwen and Calvin would paddle down and cook and share stories at a big kitchen table with them. It was so simple and joyous. The only reason we really even know about it is a national geographic photographer went down there and took this one really iconic photograph of their ideal hippie life and it gained national attention.
But, time is relentless and refuses to let us remain.
After a few years, one of Calvin and Gwen's dogs got sick. Seeing as being cool doesn't exactly pay well (don't we all wish it did!), Gwen had to take a job on a tugboat to get money for the dog's treatment. While working on the tugboat, she fell in love with another man. After this affair, she went back to Calvin and the swamp for a year, but it wasn't the same, she said, and eventually they left and she married the other guy from the boat. At first, this part of the story really bothered me. 'But Calvin was her great love!' I opined, 'The one who shared her adventure!' But life is unpredictable and they weren't married and the romance had its season. Obviously, this is not what I want. This is where Gwen's story breaks down for me. I'm a Christian and that's honestly the only really important thing about me. And as a follower of Christ, there are certain differences about my life. Covenants being one. The Church being another. I need to walk with others, to share life together to enter into rich and abiding church community.
That's where I get to the second story.
In his book A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken describes his and his wife's life in Oxford, a bustling city of great intellectual and cultural importance, during the early 1950s. They were both recent converts to Christianity and were beginning to understand the role of the Church and of community in the Christian life. They had a small studio apartment in the middle of the city and "in one week, taken at random, twenty-four people came, six of them twice, so that there were thirty times the brass knocker sounded and one of us leapt down the narrow stairway. For nearly two years," he continues, "there was hardly a day or night that people did not come, both Christians and non-Christians...and there were literally hundreds of absorbing conversations." Vanauken describes a beautiful community of both evangelism and common edification, saying, "All our friends and acquaintances, Christian or otherwise, came by, sometimes bringing others--sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for hours. There were conversations on every imaginable subject, yet sooner or later, it seemed, the talk would drift round to ultimate things and Christianity."
That is something so precious, to be able to commune together, to talk about poetry and music and the bible and hope and struggle and heaven, all of us driftless fellow pilgrims, to rest with one another and meet God. I want to cultivate that in my life as they did and welcome awkward, lonely, lively people that I would and wouldn't ever be friends with in as brothers and sisters.
So how are we to live?
Do we do life together? Praying for the welfare of the city? Engaging the culture and living in the world? Or do we go into nature? Rest in God's creation? Live a quiet life where we are dependent on no one? Both?
My friend McKenzie wisely says, "I believe that we are always called to be in community with one another-whether it's in the urban slums of Jakarta, Indonesia or the Kentrucky countryside, God always calls us to be in community wherever we are; we cannot do life without it... I know God places us in different places for different seasons of our lives and I think it's a question of asking God where he wants us so that we can carry out his kingdom work..." I know she's right, so I suppose that wherever we find ourselves is where we are. He Himself has placed us there in divine and sovereign grace. And anywhere we are, we must be kingdom-builders and Spirit bearers.
Maybe we should live a quiet life where the doorbell rings a lot.
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