forehead pressed against the glass

I'm taking a week's vacation from work, composed almost entirely of flex time from the long weeks I worked before the auction. The first two days I spent lying in bed wrapped in afghans, overcome with some mildly disgusting bout of the flu (mildly disgusting mostly because of the degeneration of my clean apartment -- you just can't wash things when you're sick), but on the whole it's been wonderful to relax and know that they're even listening to my voicemails and checking my email at work, so I don't have an endless string of backlogged communication to pick through when I get back.

I've been thinking about community. At church, and in one of the few decent albums by a Christian artist that I own, I've been hearing things like "my journey is my own" and "It doesn't matter if nobody loves me but Jesus." And in some respects, of course, that's true: We are fully responsible for our own lives, and if we find ourselves utterly friendless, we can count on the love of Christ. But statements like these disregard what I think is an essential principle in the Christian faith, and in human life across the board: community.

We weren't meant to live alone. The human being is a social creature, in constant need of contact with his/her own kind. And for each metaphor of individual race-running and watching oneself that appears in the New Testament, there are two metaphors for community, of coming alongside one another and of being a body (one unit, many parts). When Christ left his legacy to the apostles at his ascension, he founded, not a scattered group of individual mystics who went off by themselves into the wilderness to ponder great things, but a church.

When you look at the "secular" world (if you believe in a secular world; I don't, actually), it's the same: People need other people. Most have some kind of family to fall back on, which they often take for granted. (I've met a lot of people who go back home after college, or never left their hometown, so that they are continually surrounded by family; I think they fail to realize what a hole not having nearby family leaves in the lives of complete transplants like me.) Even some of my coworkers, who don't live close to their families, graduated from Notre Dame and so keep to their old, preformulated communities from college while they live in South Bend.

A dash of the closedness to strangers for which I have criticized the church at large (because the church should be the first place where barriers break down -- it was when it first began, or was challenged to be by recognizing the radical truth that "in Christ there is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Gentile"), is present everywhere. People who already have fulfilled their need for a place among others generally aren't looking to include newcomers -- not, perhaps, out of an overt desire to ostracize or exclude, but out of a kind of tunnel vision that results from personal satisfaction: All of my needs are met, so why look further?

I hope that didn't sound at all nasty; it was only an observation. One of my saving graces while I try to settle in and work my way into the already-established communities of the worthwhile and interesting people I've met is the grad school. These are worthwhile and interesting people who are used to a flux in their community as new students enroll and old students leave, so they tend to have a mindset open to incorporating outsiders, newcomers, and loose affiliates.

My other, more permanent saving grace is Meg and Phillip. While rooted among family and longtime friends in their own community, they accepted me with a casual, firm familiarity that reminds me oftentimes of home. I invite myself over; they put me to work, feed me, and take me fun places around the area that I'm still getting to know. They helped me pick out, cut down, transport, and set up my Christmas tree. For several months, although I never actually used it, I had my own toothbrush at their house. We all call me "the second wife." We laugh and horse around and work and bicker like good friends and family do. And the beauty of it is, they're not going anywhere (at least anytime soon, that they've told me). They don't leave for the summer. They're not moving out of town. So they're a kind of above-ground root that I get to lean against.

Not to be all mushy or anything; but a single girl with no family in the area certainly appreciates the niches of belonging that she lands in. Building, or shouldering your way into, a community takes time, and I've only been here twenty months. But it's nice, while I try to put down some roots (this is scary, this roots thing -- I have no particular plans to settle permanently in South Bend, but I also don't have plans to go anywhere else for awhile -- and this weekend I'm signing a two-year lease, which is weird), to have two open places to go where I'm not standing on the outside looking in like a little lost soul.

And I'm off to try to forge some cleanliness out of the disorganized mess that has become my apartment.