I can see Mt. Hood from my window.

August 8th, 2010

Welcome to my JVC Northwest blog! For those of you who were kept abreast of my Chilean adventures via my online chronicles, you should know that this will be a similar sort of situation, though I’m making a deliberate effort—in the spirit of living simply—to make my entries more concise. I won’t make any promises, but I’ll work on it! Anyway, I’m grateful that you’re going to be cyber-walking with me throughout this crazy year; just in case you’re not entirely sure what you’re in for (and what I’m doing), let me give you the basics…

I am doing a year of service with a Catholic nonprofit organization called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest. I discerned a call to serve with this particular organization because of the many parallels between its four pillars—social justice, simple living, spirituality, and community—and my own priorities at this point in my life. After an interview and a few other steps, I was offered a position in Gresham, OR, a city of about 100,000 people located just east of Portland. JVC NW provides a place to live, which in our case happens to be a HUGE place (our house was a convent in a former life), so I have seven housemates, all of whom you’ll get to know a little bit from my entries. We all work at different agencies and organizations in Gresham or in Portland. I am thankful that I do not have a 45 minute commute in the morning; in fact, I’ll be spending my year working at El Programa Hispano, a nonprofit under the Catholic Charities umbrella located a mere seven minutes (walking!) from our house in Gresham. Work starts Wednesday!

Home. I told you it was massive. My room faces the street.

Celebrating with champagne (thanks, former Gresham JVs).

 JVC NW gives us community money each month, which we are to use frugally to purchase food and transportation necessities (bus passes, gas, bike repairs and accessories, etc.) and to pay our utilities bill. We get enough money to live simply, which is one major goal of this year, as we’re seeking to live in something CLOSE to (for we will never actually achieve it) solidarity with the people we’ll be serving. We’ll have to work together to make our money stretch as far as possible, something we’ve already been working on. Lights get turned off and things get unplugged whenever they’re not in use. We shop at farmers’ markets to try to do our share to buy locally and organically, but we also have to go to places like Winco and Costco (which contradicts our social justice intentions in more ways than we’re comfortable with) to buy food in bulk because we go through it so quickly. We are trying to save some money so that we can go places as a community, like camping or to Seattle to visit some other JV houses.

In addition to our community money, we each get a modest monthly stipend of $80, which we can use on whatever we want. It doesn’t buy much, but that’s the point—to be extremely intentional about each purchase. I’m already learning so much from this… I’m passing up good “deals” because $5 no longer seems cheap for anything, and I’m thinking twice about pretty much every purchase, from a chai tea to a loofah, because the difference between “need” and “want” has become extremely important. On the one hand, this is already a liberating experience because I have no choice but to opt out of the consumerism that keeps our society constantly trying to keep up with the Joneses. I walk past cute restaurants and stores because making purchases in these establishments just isn’t relevant to me at this point. On the other hand, thoughts about money are ever-present in our minds right now because we haven’t figured out just how far our dollar can go so we’re all being extra-cautious this first month. We’ll see how that changes.

The final night of Orientation was a banquet and Mass.

My housemates include six other women and one lucky man. In brief, they are: Daniel from Washington (Santa Clara ’10), Erin from Washington (Seattle U ’10), Linds from Oregon (Oregon State ’10), Lindsay from California (Gonzaga ’10), Jenna from Pennsylvania (Boston College ’10), Jillian from New York (Boston College ’10), and Colleen from California (Santa Clara ’10). You’ll hear a ton more about them as the year goes on.

Highlight of Orientation: a sunrise hike. How gorgeous is this?!

Orientation was, on the whole, an extremely overwhelming week (we were at Camp Adams, about forty minutes from here, with all of the other Northwest JV’s, for five days); however, it was an important time to get to know some of my housemates and have a few of our first important conversations. I also got to spend some time with Beth, my dear friend from Marquette who’s doing her JV year in Washington, and Lizzie, my best friend from my time in Chile, a BC alum who has been placed in Portland (which means I’ll definitely be seeing her throughout the year!). My flights to Portland went really well, but going straight to Orientation was a tough transition. I felt like I was still half at home, and yet we all had trouble being present throughout the week because we were also half in Gresham already. It was an emotional week and a major information overload, so we were pretty glad to depart when Saturday morning came and make our way to our new home, which we found, much to our surprise, to be extremely nice. We all have our own rooms, we have an amazing “support person” named Crunchy who literally lives in our backyard, and there were delicious, chocolately bars on the table from another support person named Mary Ann. Not a bad “welcome” to Gresham.

Since we moved in (and chose rooms!), we’ve visited the farmers’ market, the library (our Internet source), Crunchy’s house (for dinner tonight—and beers!!), and St. Henry’s (for Mass this morning). I’ve run a bit around the neighborhood and a few of my housemates went to Winco to get us some food with our “starter money.” Settling in is both fun and stressful, and being a part of a community—in this sense—means a constant commitment to love, to “assume goodwill” (our favorite Orientation phrase), to engage (even when you feel like withdrawing), and to work through conflict respectfully. This community setting is unlike anything else. With roommates, if you get in a tense situation or just don’t feel like sharing something, it’s not a big deal; you can live “civilly” with someone but not share deeply with them. You can be passive aggressive and get away with it. You can be annoyed and just avoid them. You can decide that you don’t like them and then decide that you won’t love them.

What we’ve signed up for is sort of counter-cultural (in many ways, really… $80/month isn’t really the “cool thing” to do in most places, although “hippie chic” is sort of in around here!); in particular, this notion of choosing to love people, in spite of and maybe even because of the things they do that drive you nuts or test your patience, is not normal. Deciding to “sit in the tension” (another Orientation phrase) and do the hard stuff rather than just skipping the challenging stuff in relationships with people is sort of a bizarre idea. I asked myself, during a few particularly homesick moments at Orientation, why anyone would choose to leave a family and a network of friends that they love dearly and go live with seven people they’re not even guaranteed to like. But the thing is, just like learning Spanish in Chile (for sure one of the hardest places to learn it) means that it’s a lot easier to speak Spanish in other places, choosing to be in relationship with people no matter what will enrich the rest of the relationships in our lives. Community might be one of the most challenging things about this year, but I have no doubt that it will teach me a whole lot about life and love. It’s already started to!

This entry isn’t really short at all, is it? Darn. I swear I’ll get better at this. I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands the general idea of this year, although I don’t expect everyone to understand why I’ve chosen to do this. Still, I truly appreciate your support along the way, and please keep me updated on the lessons that life is teaching you in your context right now and the growth that you’re experiencing. I miss everyone dearly already, but I am most grateful that I can pick up a phone and call people and that people can come visit me in beautiful Oregon. These are big changes from my six and a half months abroad, and I am happy to be within reach this year.

One final note about the title of this blog, which may have thrown you off a bit. You might wonder what my volunteer year has to do with “broken vessels,” and to be honest, I think it’s something I’ll be working to comprehend all year. Here’s where I’m at with it now, though, and where it came from: once, on a retreat I was leading, I told a priest that I wasn’t sure I was making much of a difference or impacting many people because I was not in the best of places in my own heart that weekend. I was struggling with certain relationships in my life and trying to discern way too many things at once, and I didn’t see how I could possibly be getting through to anybody when I was in that sort of state. While I normally understand that taking care of yourself is a prerequisite for helping others (the “put on your air mask before someone else’s” philosophy), I didn’t have much of a choice that weekend but to be present to the people I was walking with and to lead in and through my own feelings of hurt, confusion, and inadequacy; I was supposed to be a leader, after all. I’ll never forget what that priest said to me: “You have no idea the good you are doing and the lives you are impacting. The Holy Spirit is working through you more than you know.” And then, and this is what really hit me, “You’d be amazed at the work God can do with broken vessels.”

I’m a broken vessel. Nowhere near perfect but still meant for some purpose.
The people I live with are broken vessels, and as a community we are a broken vessel too. Flawed but important.
The men, women, and families I’ll meet at work are broken vessels, as are my staff members.
Relationships are broken vessels.
Stressful, bad, long, seemingly unredeemable days are broken vessels.
The crucifixion of our Lord was a broken, broken vessel. But an important one!!
And God can redeem it all and do something with it—with me. Something that is good. Something that touches others. Something that turns things around. Something that starts a chain reaction. Something that surpasses our expectations.

I think this year is going to be hard, but I think I need to stay in the hard parts and sit in the tension and look for the growth that comes from that. I am blessed to have the support that I do have—both at home and here—so that those hard moments are not necessarily lonely moments. And I think that this year will be another lesson in asking God not for what I want but for what I need (and then trusting that need that I sometimes do not even recognize). I know that there will be times when I need to remind myself why I’m here, and you might see ramblings about that as we go. I also know there are times when I’ll wonder why I’m doing the job I’m doing when I’m sure someone else could do it better. At those points, I’ll probably pep talk myself about being present. And I know that I’ll struggle to live with social justice in mind, to live simply (not only fiscally but with my time, energy, and consumption) and to be a good community member. I think the spirituality component is so key, though, and it is for me the foundation of this whole experience and the way that I get to all those other things… which is why I need, more than ever, to trust that God does great things with broken, tired, incomplete, still-learning vessels.

Look closely over that street sign. That is indeed Mt. Hood!

Love from the Northwest and blessings to you all!

Amanda