To What Community Do We Belong?

To what community do we fundamentally belong? For followers of Jesus, the Church is that community. Our identity and allegiance root in and stem from our being in the Church. Certainly other communities to which we belong – nation, race, clan, gender, language, party, occupation, affinity, and more – shape and even "claim" us to greater or lesser degrees. Yet we must understand and pursue our essential belonging, our paramount and therefore focal identity and allegiance, in and through the community of the Church. We must subordinate, and in some ways and instances even refuse, claims from those other communities on our identity and allegiance, on our very life. To the extent we seek and experience the true commonweal of this world and of our individual life in it – trust and hope and love, and truth and beauty and goodness – we must do so fundamentally within and from the community, the society, which is the Church, which is ultimately the kingdom of God.

Home Site

We have no special site for our home. We live in a modest townhouse complex amid comfortable single family homes in a suburban neighborhood in northern Virginia, the neighborhood being part of a growing county, and the county being part of the expanding metropolitan area around Washington, D.C. There seems no end of people, buildings, vehicles, and roads. Our home itself is at one end of a set of several townhouses, with other sets of townhouses close by, making up our little community within a larger, then that within a larger. The back of our home faces east; the front faces west; and the side which is the end of the unit faces south. Toward these three exposures we have ample windows. Just beyond our back doors and windows is a screen about five yards deep of trees and shrubs between us and the grounds of a day school for young children. There tulip poplars, beech, big tooth aspen, and hollies provide all manner of greens, yellows, and bare gray trunks and branches through the months. Then just beyond our front door and windows, along the townhouse complex's streets and parking areas and here and there in the little yards, is a scattering of maples, cherries, and oaks; and so more greens, yellows, and grays, as well as pinks and reds and browns, through the year. In all seasons, during the course of the days, especially when more sun and blue than clouds in the sky, both outside and inside we enjoy much light rising early in the back, moving in fullness around the side, and setting late in the front. We have no special site. Yet we do have these quanta of filtered light, exterior and interior, texturing with splendor the hours and days, the ordinary, if only we see.

Rock Hill Cemetery, Loudoun County, Virginia

In observance of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Washington Post has been printing articles on many facets of the war. The Post collected them in an e-book called "Civil War Stories: 150th Anniversary Collection." I have been going through it. I recently read an article on African-Americans from Loudoun County, Virginia, who fought for the Union, some of whom were buried in Loudoun either during the war or afterward. This morning Karen and I drove to the southwestern part of Loudoun to explore a cemetery mentioned in the article: Rock Hill Cemetery. It is one of numerous relatively small African-American cemeteries in Loudoun, indeed in Virginia and throughout the south. Of those in Loudoun, many are terribly neglected. Rock Hill stands out for the quality of its appearance due to the efforts of Vernon Peterson. Karen and I had the great privilege of being there this morning when Vernon Peterson showed up to attend to some chores at the cemetery. We introduced ourselves, and we spent a good half hour or more talking to him and hearing stories of his life, of his family and other people in the cemetery, and of his years of tending the grounds. Now in his 80s, Peterson has been caring for the cemetery since the mid 1950s as a true "labor of love." He has many relatives in the cemetery, as well as a headstone ready for his wife and for him when they pass on. He even has two granddaughters buried there, one who died of cancer when 8 years old, and one who died as a college student in the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007. We also met a friend of his named Thomas who comes to help him from time to time. As part of our time, Mr. Peterson showed us the grave of Dennis C. Weaver, a black Union soldier from Loudoun County. He served in Company D, 1 United States Colored Infantry. Weaver was instrumental in the creation of Rock Hill Cemetery in 1889 as a resting place for blacks when they could not be buried in cemeteries reserved for whites. Vernon Peterson and Thomas, elderly African-American men from small historic communities in this part of Virginia, have lived through interesting times, and they have seen many changes in society. As they talked, it was as if we could sense deep undercurrents of the challenges they faced, as well as the joys they knew, in negotiating life in Loudoun County from the 1930s to the present. Now Vernon Peterson anxiously wonders who will care for Rock Hill Cemetery when he rests in the ground there from his labor. There is no figure on the horizon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-state-of-nova/post/black-loudoun-civil-war-vets-honored-in-new-book-from-loudoun-to-glory-by-kevin-d-grigsby/2013/03/03/624f9db8-847b-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_blog.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/will-a-rural-cemetery-live-on-after-its-longtime-caretaker-is-gone/2011/04/12/AF1Z7xeD_story.html

On a Sense of Place: From Edwin O'Connor's "The Edge of Sadness"

"For this was a moment I had postponed for a long time, and one I had never dreamed would finally take place.... I had come back, not to stay, but only for an hour or so -- long enough to see and savor again...that small and surprisingly unchanged part of the city where I was born and had spent so much of my life, where I knew every building and back alley as well as I knew my own front yard, where I had been a young priest, where I had had my own parish, and where, as in no place else, I had belonged, I had been at home. I suppose it's the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find I have a special and lasting love for this place, which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years. What kind of a man is it who, after almost fifty years, can still spend half his time remembering the cry of the chestnut man, as it came floating down the street on a winter night...?"

This novel is one of the finest I have read. I recommend it to my friends.