Community
by Theo (OMK)
My 28th birthday came and went uneventfully: a mini celebration – cheesecake topped with a single lanky candle, broken happy birthdays, and a photo or two to remember. Everything was the way I preferred it; of course, not counting the looming global pandemic situation that we are in right now. It was a bit special, as it signified that I have spent longer time away from home by then.
I left home for studies abroad in my early teens, having felt a somewhat premature sense of freedom. I learnt how to budget for lunch and games, how to study and interact with adults, to make bigger decisions with even bigger impacts, usually unknown, down the road. People call it being independent; I am far from it. Most of my friends then were either roommates, or fellow compatriots. In the beginning, most were Christian, or at least nominally. Studying abroad exposed us with a plethora of perspectives: some good, some bad, most we have no idea how to discern. Met my first staunch “communist” friend whom I had great time talking politics, nonsense, and Risk to; another self-proclaimed bohemian with a very Sartre-Derrida-esque attitude (he was and still is an amazing Jazz artist); another extremely bright, full-blown atheist, whose mother is one of the more devout, persevering person I have ever met. I was somewhat stuck in the middle, that one odd kid doing his routine, trying to fit in.
As with any young teenager, I wanted to latch onto a community. Obvious first step was with my fellow Indonesians, and then with my fellow Catholics. It was something of a routine: a small group of us went to church 20 minutes away every Sunday, get to see other Indonesians - those from the girls’ school especially, had lunch afterwards and played arcade games. After a short while the group got smaller; some just fell away from the faith, and no parents were there to tell us otherwise. There were occasions when I was drifting, but somehow, I stuck around.
Soon after it was time to move again, even further across the globe. Now I had my own room, in a student housing filled with everyone from everywhere. I wanted to go out of my shell a little bit, explore new extracurriculars, yet I found myself signing up for the university’s Catholic society. At first, I thought of it like a routine, going to church on Sunday, talking a bit with other churchgoers. I noticed how much fewer the attendees were compared to Indonesia especially: mostly older people – white hair, hunched backs, and some were veiled. There were no compatriots with me at that time. Yet, what was a routine had slowly morphed into a ritual. It became a source of stability in a strange land.
Even stranger when I stepped foot into a non-English speaking Mass in the old churches of Europe filled with history and grandeur. I found myself there understanding almost nothing, and yet I felt familiar – as if it was home. Even when words dissolved into a cacophony of noises, melodies, and ringing of the bells, there was stability: “…Das ist mein Leib, der für euch hingegeben wird”; “…detta är min kropp som offras för er.”; “Hoc est enim Corpus meum.”; “…for this is my body which will be given up for you.” From a routine, to a ritual, to a fascination of something deeper, something I did not appreciate.
Eucharist is also called Holy Communion, which in Greek (Κοινωνία) also refers to community – participation. It echoes 1 Corinthians 10:16, where the bread and wine that are blessed enable us to participate in the body and blood of Christ, the paschal sacrifice. Eucharist is at the core of our Faith, and in it there is shared community with one another in Christ Jesus. Such community was something I often take for granted: a given. Yet, it is none other than through God’s grace that I am still tethered to this community.
My younger self went through the motion, trying to break new grounds. I saw self-discovery as a romantic journey into the unknown grounds, to find something distinctive about our own self, or so that was what I thought. University is the marketplace of ideas, and its best-seller involves self-actualization: the me-centeredness, discovery of the real you, and defining your own meaning in life. Look at where those ideas took them: the great progress of the Western society! Equality and liberty! Lifting of human dignity! In retrospect, I understood better about how it was on the ivory tower. There is good in those ideas; if not, from where does the appeal come from? Maybe there is too much good; paraphrasing Chesterton: “modern world is not evil, instead it’s far too good, full of wild and wasted virtues.” Breaking new grounds are great, but sometimes we forget about the foundation.
Here I am now in the US. Somewhere along the way I should be called an adult by now. Sometimes I forgot how incapable I truly am, and in turn forgot about the community I am tethered to. Oftentimes I forgot about such reality, building my castle of dreams, ornate walls, towers, neglecting the base that supports it all. This community in one body of Christ, is the foundation on which we start building up our lives. Chesterton mentioned in Orthodoxy that he wanted to write about: “an English yachtsman who miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas”. He went further: “he looked like a fool, but his mistake was an enviable one: what could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?” I hope that I can always remember, coming home is a good thing.