Thursday, September 15, 2011

Our House


“You are an ecumenical family.”

This is what my professors keep telling throughout orientation.   We are in fact becoming a little family.  Just this morning my neighbors Duni, from Nigeria, and Perpetua, from Kenya, joined me for my morning dance party; being willing to white-girl dance with my African sisters makes one family fast! 

We’re discovering how to care for one another as we continue to reach over oceans and mountains to skype, text, chat, call and email with our families back home.   Home is stretching from those many places so we might find family in one another, as well as a place of home.  Deriving from the Greek word oikos, for home, ecumenism is a house for all Christians to dwell and live – that also includes fist pumping, booty shaking dance parties (sorry, no pictures of that J)



#82 my room
Home is about finding yourself welcomed, so you might welcome another.  Home is about relaxing and resting so you can be rejuvenated and refreshed.  And home is about finding people and things that resonate in your spirit like a resounding bell, singing out a piece of you, ringing out a piece of this place so others might also feel welcome.  As my classmates become family, and Bossey becomes a home, we’re also learning to find a home within the ecumenical movement.  

This is a movement that is home for all people.  As my home now has expanded to include Bossey, D.C. & Nebraska, ecumenism has an even greater reach!  Oikumene, the Greek bell that rings out the ecumenical movement is the care for all creation.    All people then become family, and all places become home.  Yes, this means family “fights” over the Eucharistic dinners and how to share the showers at Bossey; but it also the means the blessings of being welcomed as family, too. 

While I do not have the dance moves of Duni and Perpetua, nor does Bossey look like my apartment back home, I am gratefully finding pieces of home with these people and in these places.  I’m finding the familial acceptance of myself (awkward dances moves and all), and a landscape that captures pieces of home but in a devastatingly beautiful Swiss way.  I arrived at petit Bossey this afternoon to see a farmer tending a field of sunflowers, and last night with Gergu (Hungary) and Mihael (Romania) I captured a bit of the Switzerland sky through my Nebraska lens. 


Sunset over a cornfield and Alps
This time, this place, this movement is about being welcomed home; so you might rest and be renewed by the people around you; so you can go out into other places of our home and do God’s work.  I’m just so grateful my work is here, for now.  Perhaps tomorrow morning's dance party will include "Our house, is a very, very, very fine house!"

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful! Reminds me of Audio Adrenaline's song: "It's a big, big house with lots and lots of room; a big, big table with lots and lots of food; a big, big yard where we can play football (soccer?); it's a big, big house, it's our Father's house."

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