Finding solidarity in community

By Mia Pohlman

One of the greatest challenges -- and joys -- we get to experience in life is learning how to live in community with others. I think this has to start with our family and extend to our workplace, city, country and global society.

Catholic Worker Movement founder Dorothy Day lived and understood love as a gritty business. She insisted on seeing and loving Christ in everyone, especially people who seemed to be a "problem" to mainstream society, those in negative situations who didn't want to change their lives.

Her writings speak of allowing ourselves, our ideas and excess to be stripped away in order to live in solidarity with these poor. It is always about becoming less selfish to benefit others and work for our salvation here on earth, which is accomplished through living in community.

Day writes, "The daily, hourly, minutely, giving up of one's own will and possessions, which means poverty, is a hard, hard thing, and I don't think it ever gets any easier ... you are still going to reach out like an octopus and seek your own. Your comfort, your ease, your refreshment, and it may mean books and music, the interior senses being gratified, or it may mean food and drink. One giving up is not easier than the other. Cups of coffee, cigarettes, jealousy of time, etc. ... The only way to live in any security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose."

I've been thinking lately about this "daily, hourly, minutely" sacrifice. There are lots of opportunities to live this out within my family, at my jobs -- really, any time I'm around other people. For me, it's giving up my time and will that is hardest. But, good. There is value in obedience, and I need to be taught this.

I think one thing we are going to have to sacrifice for peace in our families, workplaces, country and world, is first and foremost, our ideas; we have to be willing to put people before our own ideas. To be a third way in a situation that seems binary, to be the conciliator, crossing lines of allegiance to meet the person who stands across those lines from us.

We have to hold personhood, its sacredness and dignity, at the foreground of each thought, and be willing to suspend our judgments so as to think and speak not in labels, but rather in seeing the essence of the other, their soul, what makes them theirself, what makes them an image of God.

I don't think this means abandoning what we know to be true, but rather pressing more deeply into God as our foundation, anchor and being, because love is an unchartered thing and we need God leading us. There is no clear-cut path love takes and we don't know at each moment how we might be asked to give up ourselves for another. It's moment-by-moment living in, with and through God, and letting God live in, with and through us.