Cultivating Creative Community
All by Meredith Schultz
The violin has forced me out of my cubicle into a world without muscle memory or transferable skills. Everything is a battle. My hand cramps holding the bow. C sharp never sounds quite the same in the second measure as in the first. I can’t tune without my teacher’s trained ear. It is humbling to arrive on Irene’s doorstep having made no progress from the previous Tuesday. The opportunities for me to fail on the violin are daily and infinite.
When I was young, it struck me as strange that my father enjoyed giving so much, but years later, I am finally beginning to understand. He has become so accustomed to the thrill of working alongside his heavenly father to care for the needs of others that temporal goods have lost hold on his affections. As the earthly tent wears thin, he sees with ever increasing clarity the bountiful riches of God’s economy. One day, I hope that I will see it too.
Troughs are crucial seasons in the life of faith, revealing the rotting, lesser crutches on which we depend, conditioning our spiritual muscles, and nurturing our hope in heaven. Sorrow and suffering produce immense spiritual momentum. Grasping their hands as traveling companions, like Much Afraid in Hannah Hurnard’s time-honored allegory Hinds’ Feet on High Places, strengthens our stride over time. Rejecting them produces bitterness and strain, because the troughs will find us, whether or not we look for them.
The mechanical clock, first introduced in Benedictine monasteries to regulate the hours of prayer, was perhaps the true starting point of the industrial age. Timekeeping exchanged the imprecise rhythms of an agrarian world, sunrise and sunset, feeding and milking, planting and harvest, for autonomous, mathematical regularity. It was a boon for business, enabling one to promise and deliver products at an exact time.
But the invention of the clock also had unintended consequences. Time became a currency: trafficked, not received. We make time, save time, spend time, waste time.
Abstract humanity has no draining friendships, annoying relatives, or untidy neighbors. We are never responsible for, or adversely affected by, humanity in the abstract. Facebook statuses, sound bites, and shots across the bow ought not be confused with the real and costly love that underwrites transformation. Bliss without righteousness is vacant, but righteousness without bliss is cruel.
Hospitality from the margins is a widow’s mite welcome, made abundant by its sacrifice. Perhaps it means simple spaces. Tuna sandwiches around an undressed card table. Popcorn and cocoa by candlelight. Makeshift beds on the floor of your dorm room. Family holidays open to those who are far from family. Hospitality that is “real and costly,”5 not because it required a $300 grocery bill, but because it came out of your poverty. Extravagant generosity with financial, physical, and emotional resources, regardless of the social standing of the guest.
Extravagant meals are neither possible nor advisable every single day. But there is a way to weave an everyday extravagance into our spaces; it depends not on expensive food and furniture but on sacrificial care. In a culture of perpetual indulgence and breakneck busyness, the less tangible resources, like time spent, convey the most meaning. A loaf of homemade bread. A simple centerpiece cut from local flora. A guest bed with turned-down sheets and freshly washed towels.
