"Live the questions now."

So BJ (our pastor) is always trying to mix things up, especially at communion. Sometimes it's at a table, where we sit and serve one another, sometimes it's traditional in a line (like the Catholics do), sometimes we serve ourselves when we're ready. Today was the most beautiful way I've seen us celebrate: each person took communion from the person standing before them, and then, as they had taken the bread and wine, they took the bread and wine (grape juice?) and served the person standing before them (who had just been standing behind them.) So you saw wife serving husband, child serving mother, friend serving friend, mothers passing their babies off. It was a moment of true something. One of those moments when you truly feel that you have reached heaven on earth.

Now don't get me wrong. We are by NO MEANS a perfect church, and BJ would be the first to say that. I humbly sat as a couple was prayed for as they go back to Philadelphia, to live with parents while one spouse returns to school and the other returns to work. The wife talked about how the community of mothers helped her at the end of her difficult pregnancy and helped her as she started her journey as a mom. And I thought, wow, I don't think I've ever seen this woman before in my life. (And we are a church of about 75.) I thought, wow. There is a whole culture that I miss by being a single woman with no children. And I didn't exactly know what to do with that, because I don't crave to be a part of the "mom club" except that wow, the love these women share for one another really is so deep and lavish that I would love to be a part of THAT.

I'm in the midst of a huge decision right now. I'm discerning whether I should join an intentional community that is starting up in Pittsburgh this fall. After ten years (at least) of living on my own, I would have my own room and shared common space, eat meals together, pray together. My finances would not be completely my own. I am, to put it bluntly, scared to pieces. I have cold feet. I am in the bargaining stage. I have been reading about the New Monastics on and off for about 5 years, and Shane Claiborne's book "The Irresistible Revolution" sits in my reading room. I'm intrigued, and as a single woman trying to find her place in this world which seems made up of couples and baby makes three, this seems like another possibility. But did I mention that I am scared?

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet, 1903)