Fortunate Disillusionment

Anne Hartman

I’m looking back at a journal entry from the end of my year as a Fellow here at the Academy. I remember writing it: sitting under the trellis at the back of the house after midnight, watching the moon on the water and listening to the trees shrug off the June breeze. I remember the feeling of urgency that for me often accompanies the end of something—the need to look intently, to take in the scene around me, knowing that I will not quite see it in the same way again, from the same vantage point of belonging. Perhaps some of that urgency grew out of the understanding that, while the view from the back porch would remain essentially the same, my perspective would shift with my leaving, and shift even again in coming back. I knew that I would be able to revisit, but never recreate.

And I have found that to be true in my returning to this place. Many of my journal entries over the past several months as an Academy staff member have started with something along the lines of “well, here I am again.” I’ve had to relearn how to see this place, to set aside the somewhat misty lenses of memory, to keep my vision from being clouded by familiarity, to avoid prefacing all of my sentences with “when I was here as Fellow . . .” Holding the past in tension with the present, trying to bring my recollections appropriately into conversation with what is going on here now, I have sometimes felt disoriented. More often, though, I have been encouraged in the process of realizing that although my vantage point has shifted, I am still looking at—and participating in—the same scene.

I started that June journal entry by recopying a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. It comes from a longer passage in which Bonhoeffer emphasizes that Christian community is not an ideal but a divine reality. He reminds us that it takes a certain amount of disillusionment for us to realize that community is not sustained by our ideas of what it should be, but by God’s grace. As I have learned and relearned in my time here, it takes the discomforting recognition of my own shortcomings and selfishness to get me into a posture that enables me to receive that grace. In Bonhoeffer’s words, “Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

This is an interesting and yet apt use of the word “fortunate,” because while the process of becoming disillusioned with regards to ourselves is one of the most valuable aspects of living in community, it is also one of the most difficult. I don’t quite know how to describe the jarring moment of realization, but I can still recall the near-physical sensation of it. I remember the feelings of rising resentment towards the end of my first year here as I thought about how the people I was living with were not quite turning out to be what I wanted them to be, how my relationships here hadn’t lived up to my expectations for them. And then I remember the deflation: the sinking feeling in my stomach as it dawned on me that perhaps the problem was not with these relationships but with my expectations of them, my desires for the community to be as I wanted it to be and feel as I wanted it to feel.

My first response to a realization like this is, predictably, a feeling of failure and disqualification. As I am confronted with my own selfishness, I feel as though it makes me unfit for community, undeserving of relationship. And in one sense, it does. But it is only as I realize this that I can begin to receive the true grace of Christian community—the continued presence of other people in my life, in the face of my sin and neediness. This is a grace that is ‘always already’ there, before I even know I need it. This is what I came to living here as a Fellow; this is what I have come to living here, again, now.

And this is why I have returned, over and over, to the Bonhoeffer quote that I copied into my journal that night under the trellis. Here it is in its entirety:

“Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?”

If I had to distill what living here has taught me, I would say that my experiences both past and present have worked in me the conviction that the gift of Christian community is nothing less than this—brothers and sisters, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace—and that this is enough.

Anne Hartman is Assistant Director for Residential Life at the Trinity Forum Academy.

1 Responses • Staff, Wed 13 Dec 2006