Fellowship with Lotus House

Yesterday, Alyssa and I had the privilege of spending time with some new friends at Lotus House, an intentional community in St. Louis. The good folks at Lotus opened their home to a gathering of several intentional communities in the area, including a couple Catholic Worker houses. We ate and laughed and got to know one another, and then afterward a few of us stayed behind outside to play some music. It was a beautiful thing. 

Chickens!

A home for bees! (Not honeybees).

Lots. and lots. of food. Alyssa and I had grilled portobello mushrooms.

After we ate, we all gathered (about 20 of us) in the yard and prayed together, with a combination of readings from Common Prayer, a hymn, and a couple poems by Wendell Berry. Since we're in the middle of the planting season, our prayers were mainly agriculture-themed:

You care for the land and water it;
you enrich it abundantly.
The streams are filled with water
to provide the people with grain,
for so you have ordained it.
You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
You crown the year with your bounty,
and your carts overflow with abundance.
The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;
the hills are clothed with gladness.
The meadows are covered with flocks
and the valleys are mantled with grain;
they shout for joy and sing.
(Psalm 65:9-13)

And a Wendell Berry poem:

The Man Born to Farming
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

Spending time with such open and loving people got me to thinking about community again.

Some day, I hope to set up a coalition or advocacy group for intentional living within an institution such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. We would serve as a sort of exploratory committee, doing experiments within community settings to show the benefits of community living. That may be off in the future though. For now, I just need to focus on packing--I move to Liberty a week from today (Sunday). 

Until next time.

Peace be with you.

Joshua