wfn.org | Finding community in the city

[BethAH@mbm.org]

January 3, 2001
Beth Hawn
Communications Coordinator
Mennonite Board of Missions
phone (219) 294-7523
fax (219) 294-8669
<www.MBM.org>
January 3, 2001

MVS in New York: finding community in the city

NEW YORK CITY (CHM/MBM) – MVS has a ways of teaching lessons
unsought.

I moved to the Manhattan Mennonite Voluntary Service unit and the
community of Menno House a year ago.  I was full of optimism
about my yearlong assignment as an MVS intern at the Mennonite
Central Committee United Nations office, and intent on learning
about the complexities of the United Nations.  I came for the
position.  I would be serving a greater good, but I was there for
my own reasons.

A year later, the greatest lesson I’ve learned is not about the
balance of power in the UN Security Council (decidedly in favor
of the United States), or the fastest walking route to Union
Square (you save a dozen meters by cutting through Stuyvesant
Park).  It is this:  a strong continuing community is a rare
treasure.

After four years of college and growing older with the same
people in northern Indiana, New York was full of people that were
tough to know.  As the months passed, I discovered, as well, that
once you did know them, they were tough to hold on to.  My
journal from Jan. 30:

So, a month after I get here, I’m losing two housemates.
Standing on the stoop tonight, huddled against the red, locked
double doors, the rain making a falling sparkle shower from
above, you could feel the sense of loss anticipated, almost see
it exhaled with the moist breath and cigarette smoke.  Catherine
said, “I’m going to miss you.”  Micha looked at her and they
gazed at each other for the space of four shimmering drops from
the lintel overhead, and I thought they would hug, but they
didn’t.  And soon Micha’s cell phone jangled and the group broke
up and we headed back inside.

In a city that routinely demands 60-hour work weeks, plus the 10
hours of commute, community doesn’t just happen.  Here, where in
one neighborhood in Flushing more than 180 languages are spoken,
a common ethnicity or faith is a rarity as well, even in
marriages.  In Manhattan, where everyone grew up somewhere else
and most people move on after a couple years, transience is a
constant companion, though the people around you aren’t.

Despite the transience, in Menno House, a community of a dozen
residents in a four-story brownstone with a bright red door on
East 19th Street, I learned to grow community amidst a hurried
life.  Most of the residents aren’t part of the MVS unit, but the
emphasis on community and simple living runs through the house.
It’s the small things that create it, like eating pancakes
together on Saturday mornings while the rest of the city seems to
go out for brunch.  Or being able to borrow each other’s milk,
knowing it’s OK before we ask.

March 5, 2000 – But this life, is it home?  Yeah.  Yeah, because
when I walk in the door after a long day, people ask me how I
am.  Because each morning I sit with two or three others, in song
or in silence, in praise or in prayer.  Because most nights, we
cook together, eat together, laugh together.  This is a
community.  This is home.

Community in Menno House is relatively easy.  We see each other
each day.  Manhattan Mennonite Fellowship, the sponsoring
congregation for the MVS unit, lives an even more transient
miracle of community from week-to-week.  Church members drive
more than an hour from New Jersey, or ride the rocking A train
the same amount of time in from upper Manhattan.  Others make the
difficult weekly decision of whether to come to the worship
service, or spend rare time with their children because the whole
family doesn’t come to church.  It’s not easy, but I’ve learned
valuable lessons from them about building community.  Newcomers
are warmly welcomed, and new MVSers quickly become integral parts
of the family, leading worship, managing potlucks, because at
MMF, giving time and energy to the community isn’t a monthly
tithe.  It’s a daily necessity.

^From MMF I also learned about maintaining community even in the
absence of continuing contact, of letting go with joy, even if it
means changing the community.  During my year here, a number of
Menno House residents and church members have said their
goodbyes, sent out by the congregation with the same warmth with
which they were welcomed originally.  In a couple of days, I’ll
say mine, too.

I’m leaving my home here to carry out another MVS assignment, one
of gathering the stories of the other MVSers across North
America.  MMF will continue as my support community, though I
won’t be here physically.  That support makes the leaving more
bearable.

This New Year’s Eve, I returned to Manhattan from my parents’
home in Virginia to celebrate the new year with MMF and Menno
House.  It was a homecoming and a farewell, two faces of the
community of faith: that we are always welcome, and that we can
let go knowing we will meet again, in God’s time.

* * *

Grant E. Rissler       PHOTO AVAILABLE

Grant Rissler is an MVS volunteer writer and photographer.  After
spending a year as intern at the Mennonite Central Committee
United Nations office in Manhattan, he is traveling over five
months by bus to 20 other MVS and shor- term mission sites in
Canada and the United States, gathering the stories and
experiences of other volunteers and communities.  A weekly web
column by Grant can be found on the web at www.MBM.org.

MVS is a program of the Commission on Home Ministries and MBM.
MVS maintains an official web site at www.mennonitevs.org.