To people schooled in a religion that has often seemed to define sin as a grocery list of dos and don'ts, these monks [the desert dwellers of the 3rd century] can seem, as the Dominican Simon Tugwell explains in Ways of Imperfection, "rather casual about morality." They were not all concerned, he writes, "that people should behave correctly according to the rules, but rather that people should be able to see their situation clearly for what it is, and so become free from the distorting perspective which underlies all our sins."
Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me
I've got this idea in my head about intentional community for Christian creatives. It is a scary idea, to be sure, but compelling also. I do not have the least bit of an idea how to go about finding people who would be interested in such an enterprise and so I put these words on my blog to see if anyone bites. I'm thinking of a shared house of Christian creatives with a hat-tip to thoughtful, mindful monastic living. I suppose if there was an aroma about the idea, it would have the freedom flavour of those monks above and their idea of sin. I am a pretty honest person, and I swear and I sin and I cannot bear to attend a church building and have it all be about hoop jumping and right doctrine abiding, but I love Jesus, I love the Father and the Spirit and a life living loved, although I fail often at such a life.
When I think about what a shared house looks like, I imagine a big place with a bedroom and a studio for each person. Ideally there would be a separate self-contained unit on the block that could be rotated when solitude calls (this is my daydream, right? I can put whatever I want in here, along with a good stereo system that pipes through the house and people who all have my taste in music. Actually, if I was to continue daydreaming and blow it out to perfection, it would be a group of houses on a rural block, but as I haven't seen one of those on realestate.com.au just yet, I'll just harbour the dream in my head, along with the organic vegetable garden).
What else? I am 38 years old. I write and I mess with clay. There is more than you could wish to know about me if you want to read my blog. I am quite honest. I have an inside dog who has spent far too many years inside on all the furniture to ever change his ways (I did, however, teach him to turn left at the age of eight, so the old adage is not always true). He is with me half the time. I am amicably separated and we share amicable joint custody and so he obviously would be part of the deal. As far as I am concerned, the more animals the merrier.
I don't know what else to say, really. I don't even know if anyone will read this or if there would be enough people smattered about town who would be interested in such an enterprise but what's the harm of throwing this out there, huh? If you are interested in chatting about the idea, drop me a line.
When I think about what a shared house looks like, I imagine a big place with a bedroom and a studio for each person. Ideally there would be a separate self-contained unit on the block that could be rotated when solitude calls (this is my daydream, right? I can put whatever I want in here, along with a good stereo system that pipes through the house and people who all have my taste in music. Actually, if I was to continue daydreaming and blow it out to perfection, it would be a group of houses on a rural block, but as I haven't seen one of those on realestate.com.au just yet, I'll just harbour the dream in my head, along with the organic vegetable garden).
What else? I am 38 years old. I write and I mess with clay. There is more than you could wish to know about me if you want to read my blog. I am quite honest. I have an inside dog who has spent far too many years inside on all the furniture to ever change his ways (I did, however, teach him to turn left at the age of eight, so the old adage is not always true). He is with me half the time. I am amicably separated and we share amicable joint custody and so he obviously would be part of the deal. As far as I am concerned, the more animals the merrier.
I don't know what else to say, really. I don't even know if anyone will read this or if there would be enough people smattered about town who would be interested in such an enterprise but what's the harm of throwing this out there, huh? If you are interested in chatting about the idea, drop me a line.
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