The Revolution
By Harold Vance
When you think of a community, what image comes to mind? Do you see an inner city? A small town in rural America? Green Mountain College? The Simple Way in Philly? The Twelve Tribes–in Rutland or wherever else you may find them? Hippies from the sixties? Your dormitory? Your apartment? Or something else entirely?
Community is more than just one of the specifics listed above. As the word demands, it is a state of common-unity. There is a spirit that unites us all; however, not only human beings, but the greater Us, as small constituents of a much greater whole. Yet, how far do we take this definition? Or rather, how far do we let this definition take us?
The places that I have seen the truest forms of community within the human heart have been the places most people would never even think to look.
When I was in Chicago a couple of months ago, I met a man named Don. Don had been recently laid off after working in a factory for 28 years. Without much or any warning, the company packed up and shipped overseas. I offered Don a sandwich, and he gave back half of it. He told me to find someone else who could use the other half, because the small bit that he now held in his hands would sustain him for awhile. This man had nothing but the thin layers of clothing surrounding his body, shielding him from the frigid cold, and still he would not take more than half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because he knew there was someone else out there who needed the other half even more than he.
I met a man named Ricky this past weekend, who was living on the streets of Albany, playing guitar as a street musician. Now, this is a man who, like Don, doesn’t have a whole lot to his name either, just the clothes on his body and the cold guitar strapped to his back, yet when I mentioned that I played bass guitar, and told him of my feeling plateaued in my skills lately, he immediately pulled out some scales and improvisations that he had copied from a book in the library at 10 or 20 cents a page, and gave them to me. I’ve never practiced so much as I have in these last few days.
Shane Claiborne writes in his book, “The Irresistible Revolution,” about his time well spent in some very impoverished areas. One day, he bought a young child an ice cream cone, an almost unheard of treat among the children he was hanging out with. The child took one lick, and as soon as he tasted how sweet it was, he quickly passed it along to his nearest friend, absolutely raptured with the joy of the gift, who then passed it in turn to the next nearest child, and so on, with the cone finally making its way around the entire circle of children, and back to Shane, with the children begging him to enjoy a few licks himself.
These are acts of pure community. How can we humble ourselves enough to be able to experience the truth of community? And these examples are only looking at the human aspect of community. When we look at the term in its fullest aspect, we can grow to realize that we’re a part of a community far greater than our own human minds can conceptualize.
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect,” Aldo Leopold wrote. When we can finally realize how small our part is in the full scope of the world, and then, the universe, we can begin to grasp the freedom that only Love can bring—to ourselves, to our neighbors, to all of creation.
Without responses from you, in this community, I can only give my own experiences in these words.
P.X.
Harold.
Short URL: http://www.themountaineer.org/?p=56
Posted by GMC Voices
on Mar 15, 2008 Filed under News.
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