Encounters #5: "Breaking Point"
Breaking Point
I stood outside the back of the manor near the old school house, my boots slowly sinking into the soggy ground. Kari, Sue, and Jana stood next to me as we listened to Jim Paul, one of the workers, explain our job for the day.
“The vegetable garden needs a bit of restructuring,” he told us. “Um, I need you girls to move these plots of grass inside this square into the row of dirt over there.” We turned our heads to look at the long rectangle made of the present dirt, noting the four stakes and string that ran parallel to the ground marking the new, condensed shape of a slight square. I tilted my head; my eyes squinted and lips pursed as a look of perplexion altered my face. I saw this same look reflected in the faces of the other girls.
“So you’re telling us that you want us to move that grass to that dirt?” Jana asked, pointing from one to the other. “The grass that we just moved a week ago you want us to move back?” She asked variations of the same question several times as the rest of us stood there, unwilling to move until we realized that Jim wasn’t joking. We shook our heads and set to work. I finished a few other tasks Jim had asked me to do before joining the rest of the girls in a series of grunts and sighs as we cut into the earth with shovels. Looking back, I probably should have paid more attention during Jim’s lecture, the one he gave a few weeks before about all things being spiritual—even jobs like moving grass. But all I could think of was the utter pointlessness of having made a vegetable garden one week only to have to spend another week redoing all that hard work.
I can see how people could look at L’Abri in the same way, wondering what is the point? People have asked me several times over: What classes are you taking? None. Isn’t it a Bible school? Nope. So you don’t get college credit? No. What is it that you’re studying then? At this, I force my lips into a smile, a small crescent of pink, if only to appease their ignorance while still evading the question. Not because I don’t want to answer it, but because I can’t. Every day, for everyone, is different. We read books and listen to lectures, yes, but we also clean bathrooms and prepare meals. We live in a community, one that exists outside “the box.” In a world filled with boxes, L’Abri defies this form. L’Abri exists within boundaries, but it is also willing and able to conform, to fill any shape those who come here may need it to fill. There is a point to this community, yet one that isn’t easy to define.
Perhaps I can best describe L’Abri in the following way. I was at a lunch discussion Jim was leading one Saturday a few weeks after the vegetable garden incident. We were discussing aspects of modernity, a topic that Andrew Fellows had addressed in his lecture the night before. I won’t go into detail as most lunch discussions feel as though one has pulled the top off a can of confetti, streams of consciousness flying everywhere. But one statement Jim made did strike me. “The purpose of L’Abri,” he said, “is to provide space.” Space to breathe, to think, to be. Space to thrive, but space, I believe, to break.
If L’Abri can conform, can act like water that we pour into shapes, then we must be willing to conform as well, to allow the community, the lectures, the work, to change us: either breaking us into pieces, or magnifying the pieces we have already become—the ones that cause us so much pain. L’Abri is a place where our brokenness rises to the surface of our living, where it lays scattered across the ground like bits of glass. It may not happen right away, but over time we all come to a point where, as Sue has said, “The poop hits the fan.” And when it does, because it should, we need space to sort it all out, to examine the poop, to acknowledge that the only way to find wholeness is to admit that we are broken in the first place. L’Abri may be a shelter, but it is by no means an escape. If anything it forces us to face our pain, to ask questions related to a number of issues: mainly about God, culture, philosophy, or the arts, but other topics as well. And when we finally accept our brokenness we can, as Andrew once told me, accept that life is messy.
L’Abri is messy. There are a million things going on at once: people running to and fro, many coming in and going out so quickly I can hardly catch their names before their luggage lies in a heap at the bottom of the stairs and they are ready to leave. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes just plain itchy as if I’ve spent the last two-and-a-half months wrapped in a wool blanket of not only my brokenness and pain but that of thirty others as well. But then these little things happen: someone runs her fingers across my back during a rather tense lunch discussion, several people offer hugs during one of those mornings where tears are more present than a smile, and still others, in a gesture of spontaneity, sing happy birthday over the phone to my sister who tells me later that it’s the best gift I’ve ever given her. We may all be in pieces, but here, in this manor house, those pieces start to come together like a mosaic, the grout connecting them a mix of love and acceptance, appreciation and sacrifice. Together, we are whole.
I recently walked out to that vegetable garden. The grass has grown around the four sides, and I could hardly tell that it was once a different quadrilateral. I still shake my head at the absurdity of that Wednesday afternoon, yet I can’t help imagining how beautiful it will look after Lois gets her hands on it, after students this summer start to cultivate the soil, planting vegetables with greens and reds and yellows that will shine in the muted English landscape. I couldn’t see the point of that work then, but I see it now: I gave up only a few hours filled with irritation to a place that has given me months of space, a wide expanse in which to understand the beauty of this community.
----- Liz DeKlavon
I stood outside the back of the manor near the old school house, my boots slowly sinking into the soggy ground. Kari, Sue, and Jana stood next to me as we listened to Jim Paul, one of the workers, explain our job for the day.
“The vegetable garden needs a bit of restructuring,” he told us. “Um, I need you girls to move these plots of grass inside this square into the row of dirt over there.” We turned our heads to look at the long rectangle made of the present dirt, noting the four stakes and string that ran parallel to the ground marking the new, condensed shape of a slight square. I tilted my head; my eyes squinted and lips pursed as a look of perplexion altered my face. I saw this same look reflected in the faces of the other girls.
“So you’re telling us that you want us to move that grass to that dirt?” Jana asked, pointing from one to the other. “The grass that we just moved a week ago you want us to move back?” She asked variations of the same question several times as the rest of us stood there, unwilling to move until we realized that Jim wasn’t joking. We shook our heads and set to work. I finished a few other tasks Jim had asked me to do before joining the rest of the girls in a series of grunts and sighs as we cut into the earth with shovels. Looking back, I probably should have paid more attention during Jim’s lecture, the one he gave a few weeks before about all things being spiritual—even jobs like moving grass. But all I could think of was the utter pointlessness of having made a vegetable garden one week only to have to spend another week redoing all that hard work.
I can see how people could look at L’Abri in the same way, wondering what is the point? People have asked me several times over: What classes are you taking? None. Isn’t it a Bible school? Nope. So you don’t get college credit? No. What is it that you’re studying then? At this, I force my lips into a smile, a small crescent of pink, if only to appease their ignorance while still evading the question. Not because I don’t want to answer it, but because I can’t. Every day, for everyone, is different. We read books and listen to lectures, yes, but we also clean bathrooms and prepare meals. We live in a community, one that exists outside “the box.” In a world filled with boxes, L’Abri defies this form. L’Abri exists within boundaries, but it is also willing and able to conform, to fill any shape those who come here may need it to fill. There is a point to this community, yet one that isn’t easy to define.
Perhaps I can best describe L’Abri in the following way. I was at a lunch discussion Jim was leading one Saturday a few weeks after the vegetable garden incident. We were discussing aspects of modernity, a topic that Andrew Fellows had addressed in his lecture the night before. I won’t go into detail as most lunch discussions feel as though one has pulled the top off a can of confetti, streams of consciousness flying everywhere. But one statement Jim made did strike me. “The purpose of L’Abri,” he said, “is to provide space.” Space to breathe, to think, to be. Space to thrive, but space, I believe, to break.
If L’Abri can conform, can act like water that we pour into shapes, then we must be willing to conform as well, to allow the community, the lectures, the work, to change us: either breaking us into pieces, or magnifying the pieces we have already become—the ones that cause us so much pain. L’Abri is a place where our brokenness rises to the surface of our living, where it lays scattered across the ground like bits of glass. It may not happen right away, but over time we all come to a point where, as Sue has said, “The poop hits the fan.” And when it does, because it should, we need space to sort it all out, to examine the poop, to acknowledge that the only way to find wholeness is to admit that we are broken in the first place. L’Abri may be a shelter, but it is by no means an escape. If anything it forces us to face our pain, to ask questions related to a number of issues: mainly about God, culture, philosophy, or the arts, but other topics as well. And when we finally accept our brokenness we can, as Andrew once told me, accept that life is messy.
L’Abri is messy. There are a million things going on at once: people running to and fro, many coming in and going out so quickly I can hardly catch their names before their luggage lies in a heap at the bottom of the stairs and they are ready to leave. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes just plain itchy as if I’ve spent the last two-and-a-half months wrapped in a wool blanket of not only my brokenness and pain but that of thirty others as well. But then these little things happen: someone runs her fingers across my back during a rather tense lunch discussion, several people offer hugs during one of those mornings where tears are more present than a smile, and still others, in a gesture of spontaneity, sing happy birthday over the phone to my sister who tells me later that it’s the best gift I’ve ever given her. We may all be in pieces, but here, in this manor house, those pieces start to come together like a mosaic, the grout connecting them a mix of love and acceptance, appreciation and sacrifice. Together, we are whole.
I recently walked out to that vegetable garden. The grass has grown around the four sides, and I could hardly tell that it was once a different quadrilateral. I still shake my head at the absurdity of that Wednesday afternoon, yet I can’t help imagining how beautiful it will look after Lois gets her hands on it, after students this summer start to cultivate the soil, planting vegetables with greens and reds and yellows that will shine in the muted English landscape. I couldn’t see the point of that work then, but I see it now: I gave up only a few hours filled with irritation to a place that has given me months of space, a wide expanse in which to understand the beauty of this community.
----- Liz DeKlavon