I read another chapter of
Blue Like Jazz. It was entitled
Alone--53 Years in Space.
As I read the chapter, I thought of many people I know who seem to be natural at being in community. That doesn't describe me. Reading this chapter got me thinking about how I need to work on that.
One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story, the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. The astronaut is working on a space station when an accident casts him into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe.
I kept seeing this story in my mind. I imagined myself in that spot, looking out my helmet at earth, wondering if my friends were still there. I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years, my hair would grow long in my helmet; my view of earth over the first two years would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.
As I lay in bed thinking about this, I thought that something like that might happen to me. Stacy had delivered as accurate a picture of hell as could be calculated, a place where a person is completely alone. What is very sad is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.
Stacy's story frightened me badly, so I called Penny. Penny is who I call when I am thinking too much. She knows about this sort of thing. It was late, but I asked her if I could come over. She said yes. I took the bus. When I got to Reed, Penny greeted me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. We hung out in her room for a while and made small talk. She told me about her father. She told me about how she and her sister spent a year sailing. I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my sould, letting me know I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.
Loneliness is something that happens to us, but I think it is something we can move ourselves out of. I think a person who is lonely should dig into a community, give himself to a community, humble himself before his friends, initiate community, teach people to care for each other, love each other.
Rick told me, a little later, I should be living in community. He said I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow--I could not grown in God and I could not grow as a human. We are born into families, he said, and we are needy at first as children because God wants us together, living among on another, not hiding ourselves under logs like fungus. You are not a fungus, he told me, you are a human, and you need other people in your life in order to be healthy.
(The title of the next chapter cracks me up. Can't wait to read it. "Community--Living with Freaks".)
[Addendum: I read it. Man. That was a powerful chapter.]
