Cultivating Community on Infertile Ground
Attending a Christian university and being particularly involved in residence life, it seems that the buzz word of the year has become community. The campus pastors are saying it, student activities are geared towards creating it, and every now and then the word peeps out of a dorm room window from a Walmart decoration that decided to put the “Live, Laugh, Love” mantra to rest for a bit.
But what happens when building community is actually a responsibility? As a resident assistant (RA) this year, the main description of my role is to create community. What I was not told is where one finds the materials to do so.
My sophomore year of college, I was chosen as a RA for a freshman residence hall. When you enter a hall of 20 women who don’t know each other, there is an utter lack of cohesive community. Essentially, its like walking across a bare field. The seeds of relationship have not been planted.
However, the all out blessing of bare ground is if you plant a few seeds next to each other, they’re likely to grow together. And that’s exactly what my first floor did. By providing them with a few opportunities to get together and mostly just fostering conversation with people, my floor was soon a functioning community.
But this year is vastly different, and to be honest, a much closer reflection of the real world. As the new RA for upperclassman apartments, I’ve entered a field that is not bare, but broken up in carefully designed sections, one crop unable to spill over into the one next to it. The walls of aging apartments seem innocent enough, yet as is the function of a wall, they keep communities separated. Friends stick with friends and don’t need to reach out to the people “over there.” The field becomes a patchwork conglomeration only a viewer from an airplane could find beautiful.
So I’m starting this year with a question: What does it mean to cultivate community, especially between people who already have their own?
If you were to walk up to the ground my apartments sit on, you would indeed see barren ground, metaphorically and in reality. Due to heavy construction the grass between the one story, paint-chipped buildings feels like the too solid grass the narrator of The Great Divorce attempts to walk on. It pierces with every step.
In addition, deep grooves that were carved into the grass have been filled with characterless dirt, the kind that has absolutely no color, but seems to accent the dead grass well. In short, the “field of death,” as I affectionately call the area, has done little to merge fields.
In RA training, you are not actually given tools. Yes, there are rules that are discussed and policies that must be addressed. But they don’t tell you what to do when you’re given five different fields and asked to make them a whole.
So maybe cultivation starts without tools. Maybe, it first starts with hands reaching into the soil, the dirt, the prickly grass, and being willing to find the richness there. Maybe in reality, cultivation looks like hands leaving the boundaries of one field and just knocking on the door of another.
So what’s the risk of a knock?
